My iPhone Review

Three weeks ago I got one of those fan dangled new iPhones that everyone’s talking about. In my job I need to stay ahead of the technology curve so I need to acquire the latest gadgets to understand what new developments are occurring in IT and technology in general – well that’s what the press release says. However, the reality is that my Palm Treo 750v was a great little phone, nice and small and very reliable and did everything I needed. But I had three main issues with it:

1. I could not easily listen to very long MP3 podcasts on the Palm. There are several podcasts I listen to e.g., the Rugby Round Table, the Corbett Report, Democracy Now, The World Next Week and Alex Jones. Sometimes I want to skip several minutes because there is a boring bit or to skip an advertisement break. Unfortunately the Palm uses a sort of standard Windows Media Player which has a slider to control the position in the podcast. This slider is designed for three minute songs – not three hour radio shows. Therefore the precision of the adjustment on the slider means I can barely control skipping 20 minutes let alone 30 seconds! (NOTE: I have an iPod 120GB which I use for the podcasts because it has the wheel which allows you to precisely position even on long tracks.)

2. I was sick of carrying an iPod and a Mobile Phone. Especially when I am travelling and I get a call. In this case I have to pause my iPod, take the headphones out of my ears and answer the mobile phone call. I wanted an integrated iPod and phone.

3. As I get older my eyesight is getting worse and the maximum sized font on the Palm was starting to be too small to read and I do not want to have to carry my glasses with me just so I can read my mobile phone screen. I needed a bigger brighter screen.

So those were my reasons. And with the Apple’s marketing hype firmly entrenched in my psyche, Brother Gordon raving about his, and mostly great experiences with owning a few iPods over the years I got my new iPhone. These are my experiences with it.

First Meeting

As with any Apple product the packaging was absolutely superb and the first touch experience excellent. A lot of products are starting to emulate Apple with their packaging but Apple still leads by some amount mostly I guess because their margins can support it. Within 10 minutes I had my iPhone operational and was enjoying fiddling with the interface. I was quickly able to make a call and receive a call.

The Good Stuff

Here’s a few of the lovely features to offset the nasties below:

· The iPhone has fantastic integration with iTunes and stellar integration with the AppStore. The AppStore is a place where you can buy small application – mostly for less than $10 and many for as little as $1.50. These applications in some cases provide added functionality and in others plug some pretty large holes in Apple’s software. But the beauty of AppStore is the ease with which you can purchase one of these applications and get it running on your phone.

· The auto correction of misspelled word is awesome. It remembers words you intentionally misspell (e.g., lol) and it can figure out really poorly typed words. Now it is very lucky they got this right because the main reason this feature is required is that the on-screen keyboard is very hard to use without pressing the wrong letters! This feature compensates for the substandard on-screen keyboard.

· The iPod functionality is excellent BUT the wheel is still not present so the same problem exists in the iPhone as it did in the Palm – the inability to precisely position in long podcasts. Not willing to give up my iPhone I have written a program that extracts the adverts from podcasts which I might describe in another posting.

· You can use this device with one had quite well (better than Palm but not as good as a plain old Nokia).

The Big Holes

There are a large number of big holes with the iPhone. Actually many more big nasty holes than I expected. Here’s a few of the bad ones:

· If you are a serious business user with email, contacts and calendar then watch out because this hole is bad. If an email contains a meeting reminder then there is no way to accept or decline it and no way to have it update your calendar. You have to wait until you are at your PC next to accept the appointment.

· Outlook Notes are not synchronised. I purchase a $3.49 application from AppStore to do this and it works great but why should I have to buy basic functionality like this?

· Blue tooth is practically useless – it’s only for headphones, you know, the type that you only ever would use in a car because you look like a complete knobber in public (viz “beam me up scotty”). Why they didn’t use Bluetooth for syncing to iTunes is beyond me. My palm used Bluetooth for syncing and it worked perfectly. (Tech: And don’t tell me it’s too slow to sync larger files because that’s just a BS excuse. iTunes should have been modified to handle slower comms and put up progress bars and allow cleaner cancelling etc to compensate).

· iPhone does not support Adobe Flash. What does this mean in English? It means that a lot of web pages that contain moving graphics will not display. It means that most non-YouTube videos will not play. This is right up there as a jaw-dropping hole.

· Syncing with iTunes is pretty slow. Much slower than my Palm.

· You can’t forward an SMS! So when your mate sends a great joke forget passing it on unless you want to re-type it (and you have to re-type it from memory because there’s no Copy and Paste….did I forget to tell you that?)

· No MMS. Imagine my surprise when I was playing a round of golf with my good buddy Cameron at the Crowne Plaza in the Hunter Valley and I wanted to send a brag picture to another friend and I found that I could only email it! There was no ability to send a picture to another mobile phone (MMS). That sucked.

· It is very hard to tell when the device is using internet over 3G (which ultimately you pay for) or WiFi (e.g., the “free” home network connection). After playing with it for some time I think I have found that it will always try to use the WiFi if it is connected to a trusted WiFi and only after that fails will it use 3G. It’s doing the right thing but it would be nice to have this clearly indicated somehow.

There are a number of other nasties that are well documented and some are fixed in the new release of the iPhone 3.0 software coming in October. Considering this is a version 2 release its marginal and 3.0 needs to arrive on time and fill a lot of these holes if Apple wants to maintain the momentum of iPhone.

Conclusion

Now normally with a list of holes like the one above I would have given my iPhone back and stuck with the Palm but this gadget is beautiful and so easy to use. The integration of the applications and their general ease of use are light years ahead of any Windows Mobile solution on the market.

Bottom line: I am willing to put up with a long list of flaws because the ease of use and integrated iPod functionality means one less device I need to carry. It’s so easy to use.