Wednesday, September 03, 2008
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.
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Posted by eclipse on 09/03 at 11:33 AM
