Apple iPhone Review
All behold the holy grail that is the iPhone 3G! Your prayers have been answered! It's sleek! It's fast! It has GPS! It's everything you ever wanted in a phone plus a bucket of chicken. And it even has 20 min of battery life! So how come when apple released the new and improved Jesusphone, I went and bought only a "Zeusphone"?
On June 14th, Steve Jobs unveiled the old iPhone and arguably changed the cell phone world. As you might remember, I wasn't too pleased with it. I was upset (as upset as you get over non-essential things) that I didn't get my 12" intel powerbook, and that the iphone wasn't coming until june of 07, and that it was tied to Cingular. So I bought an 80gb 5.5th generation ipod and my Motorola PEBL to replace my old Panasonic x70. The pebl was a great phone and served me well. Now that the iPhone 3G is out, prices on the old one dropped and I finally bought a barely used one off craigslist. Now I know everyone knows about the iphone and all its features already, so I will try to keep to how I came to choosing a 1st generation iPhone as my next phone.
Why even get a new phone? As I said the PEBL is a great phone. It's small, smooth, sleek, chic, and practical. I had a great looking OS X theme hacked onto it with the help of Jo, and it was easy to customize ringtones and alerts. I also liked the way it opened. You had to pull the lid down to release the magnets and it popped open. It provided me with countless hours of enjoyment when sitting around at the airport waiting for delinquent students to show up. But it wasn't a jesusphone. The camera was very fuzzy, it didn't have a lot of memory. Some of the buttons were small and hard to use. Not very uncommon complaints about phones. But that's the thing. The iPhone really is a game changing phone. When you fix complaints that people have about every phone, suddenly you stand apart. That's why apple is so innovative. They know what you want even before you know you want it. (Or maybe they gobble up innovative companies that know what we want even before we know they've gobbled them up.)
When the new iphone came out, I decided to get an old one and unlock it onto t-mobile. By this time unlocking iphones was more common and less of a risk than the first days. I like my t-mobile plan and since I've gotten a plan that works better for me I haven't had any issues with them. I sold my ipod touch on craigslist and picked up a lightly used iphone for about $100 more than I got for my touch. Not too bad of a trade in my opinion. I easily unlocked it (with the 1.1.4 firmware) and instantly it worked on T-Mobile. I even get unlimited EDGE data through T-Mobile's T-Zones package for $5.99 a month. ATT wants 30 a month just for 3G speed. Not worth it in my opinion. T-Mobile's 3G will NOT work with the iPhone because it uses a different frequency than ATT.
For the longest time I said "I just want my phone to be a phone". I think a lot of people think this way, but you know what? It's just so darn convenient to keep everything in one device. And I believe that is the iphone's greatest strength. You have to admit, it is not easy to carry around separate phones and mp3 players. I always need my phone, but I found it too easy to forget my ipod at home. Or to just reason that I wouldn't have time that day to listen to it. Not only the ipod, but I'd have to remember headphones and carry those too. Too much to carry around in my pockets and I'm a guy so I can't carry around a purse. Not that I want to....why are you looking at me like that? The iphone solves this problem beautifully! One device and you don't even need the headphones. They finally put a damn speaker on it. Now I'll be the first to admit that it's not the best speaker system in the world, but I'm not carrying headphones anymore.
The iPod interface is good, though the coverflow interface is not a highlight for me. It works differently than iTunes. Say that you're browsing your favorite techno playlist and you want to look for an album via the art (coverflow). So you flip the iphone sideways and...well now it's displaying all music... Flipping it back returns you to the techno playlist, but why can't I browse a playlist in coverflow? The phone also has a tendency to flip into coverflow a lot which I find annoying. I wish I could disable the whole thing. I am also mad that I can't plug in whatever headphones I like. I bought an adaptor but that's just one more thing to carry around. The adapter stays in my car mostly since the Eos has an aux in port but not line-in. Having an iPod touch for a short while previously, I now appreciate the volume control buttons on the side of the iphone. This is a major downfall of the ipod touch. Of course, the screen size is awesome, videos look great, and album art looks great. Despite my coverflow woes, it really is the best ipod ever.
The other apps come in real handy too. Maps is as useful as google maps on the computer. (read: somewhat useful for some things). It will show me if traffic is bad on the way home from work, but also i will search for something and drive there only to find it's not there. Useful for finding large monuments and maybe an address. Searching for starbucks or pizza notsomuch. I find the GPS unnecessary as I usually know where I am on the ground, so wake me up when you can fly a GPS approach into an airport in overcast clouds only 300 feet above the ground. That's all I ever use GPS for :) Stocks, calculator, and weather, yeah ok moving on...ah! Notepad! Even though it looks like it was coded the day before the phone was released, it's probably one of the most useful apps on the phone. I use it to store blog ideas right now, which will lead to more entries since I don't forget as often. I can also store radio frequencies for when Alison and I watch planes at Dallas Love Field, things to buy, etc... Mail is good for being a mobile client. I don't email people much these days. The camera is pretty good, though it lacks zoom and a light. Instead of displaying a bunch of huge pictures, I will link them:
Pic shot with Panasonic x70.
Pic shot with Motorola PEBL.
Pic shot with iPhone.
Getting better with time I suppose. Now Safari....oh boy Safari...It is awesome. So awesome that I don't even carry my laptop around when I'm flying anymore. The laptop is too easily damaged and I get almost the same functionality here. I used to carry my laptop in my flight bag, but I was always fearful of it getting stolen or damaged. I switched aircraft a lot so I was always on the move, it was crammed in the case with all my approach plates and manuals..it was bound to be damaged sooner or later. Luckily it can be safe at home when I work because my phone has safari. Obviously no java. We knew that. Moving on...
Even the phone is great. It's a pain in the butt to add all your contacts into the phone but once they are in it looks great. Easy to use. Favorites, Recents, and the way it picks out phone numbers from websites, texts, and email is useful. I don't have visual voicemail because I'm on T-mobile but since I rarely have more than one voicemail anyways I don't really care. I do get ghost voicemails when my phone loses the network. When it picks it back up, it will chime and indicate that I have voicemail but when I check it there is nothing. At least the indication goes away after that. Alison has a hacked iphone as well and hers is normal. When I upgrade to 2.0.2 the phone will be reflashed and hopefully cured. Doesn't bother me too much. Texting is great too because the texts read like an ichat conversation. The pebl had incoming and outgoing texts seperate and it was hard to follow a conversation. This was one one of the biggest eye-opening "why didnt anyone else think of that" revelations on the phone. I kinda miss the flip phone, and I haven't had a brick phone since my original nokia from sophomore year, but the size is okay and its loud and easy enough to talk on. Bluetooth is slow to activate but works.
Another great feature of the iPhone is actually not a feature at all. Hacking it. Installer.app is awesome. I'm running the old firmware, and of course these days there is the Apple App store. There are still major advantages to jailbreaking your iphone. Jailbraking is not unlocking. A first gen iphone can be software unlocked to work on other GSM carriers. An iPhone 3G cannot! This is a big reason to go with the classic iPhone. However, they can both be jailbroken. Jailbreaking is the hack of the BSD subsystem allowing you to execute code and add applications without going through the app store, and it's great. Installer (or Cydia on the 2.0 firmware) is easy to use to install all sorts of apps. Ones with real usability like themes that apple will never let you do though the app store. My iphone is themed with the Tiger wallpaper and it looks a lot better than just a black screen with icons. It's also nice to have an iPhone so I don't get charged for firmware upgrades like the iPod Touch (they say it's because of Sarbanes-Oxley but who knows).
Not all is perfect in the iphone world though. There are some annoying things. A lot I've already mentioned like the headphones port and coverflow. You can't use it as a hard drive anymore :( It does get a little warm when talking on the phone. Not uncomfortable, but noticeable. And it does get face juice all over it so it looks smeary even to the point where it can't tell where you are touching anymore. One time I tried to call Alison but it thought I touched somewhere else and called my dad. Then I couldn't press "End call" and ended up talking to him for a bit. Not that I don't like talking to my dad or anything, but I was trying to call Alison back after a dropped call. It was...inconvenient. Battery life is decent. It will not go more than two days with normal use. Period. I charge it every night with no problem when I'm at home but when I fly I don't take a charger with me for the overnights. (Just one more thing to forget and leave somewhere.) Turning the brightness down and using it sparingly will give me about two days with an hour or two of calls thrown in. Not too bad considering all it offers.
And, ITS EASY TO LOSE. Oh god this deserves a paragraph of its own. About a week ago I left my iphone sitting on the seat of the hotel van that drives us to the airport in Alexandria, LA. I remember because I was posting about Adam's RSS feeds and then it was gone. All of the above paragraphs were lost to me! I didn't even realize until I got back to Dallas and wanted to check my voicemail and texts. (couldnt while roaming on a,t, and t). I was freaking out because I thought I lost all my contacts (since I wouldn't be able to retrieve my sim card to put back in the PEBL) and of course the monetary value there. Later I remembered that my contacts are synced with my laptop now (actually a good thing once I realized). Anyways I contacted the crew that was staying there the next night and they found it right on the seat where I left it. I used up a lot of good karma there so I have to be good for a while :D
So in conclusion I am really happy I got the iPhone. Losing it made me realize just how much I have come to rely on it in a short amount of time. It may not have features that work for everyone, but if you like the ipod and don't need business tools like a blackberry, I really do believe the iphone is the way to go. Hopefully one day they won't be AT and T specific by the time I want another one. If I do lose this one it will only get harder and harder to find the classic ones. Of course they will probably be able to software unlock the 3G sometime. Hopefully you enjoyed reading this review as much I enjoyed writing it, which is to say, misery loves company...heh :D
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Holy long post Batman! Good review... but you made me read! DAMN YOU!
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lol as rick said: 2:58:43 PM rombusrk: holy wall of text batman :D |