My iPhone review (Long Post)

I bought an iPhone last Saturday and thought I’d write a review about it here. I previously owned a Cingular 8525 (HTC Hermes) which although I liked, I never loved. The 8525 did do what I wanted it to do, although it had a bad habit of hanging and crashing quite often at random. I just want to get it out on the clear that I have never owned any Apple products until now and am defiantly not an Apple fanboy. I don’t intend to go into a detailed review of the phone but instead wanted to post my experience with it and maybe compare it with other phones I’ve owned. This is going to be a very long post so grab a cup of coffee and write off a good amount of your time when reading this post.

I remember reading in some blog that the iPhone must have been made by angels. I can’t agree more. The industrial design on this thing is amazing. The device in itself is pure simplicity, what else can you expect from Apple. No other phone by far in the market matches the look and feel of this phone. The phone feels very natural when holding it, very light weight and the screen is absolutely gorgeous. That’s one thing that I definitely didn’t like about the 8525 and is also a major issue with other PDA or smart phones. Most phones come with such small screens and small fonts that the text on screen is hardly readable.

The phone definitely has an attraction factor. I’ve whipped it out a couple of times when I was out in best buy and a lot of people immediately started staring at it and has the tendency to start conversations about it. It’s also one of the most easily identifiable phones out there and is definitely become a status symbol. Just like the iPod initially iPhone is probably THE gadget to get in the eyes of the mass consumer.

I must say even though it has a glassy surface it’s pretty resistant to fingerprint smudges. Don’t get me wrong, with extended use you are bound to see finger prints and smudges on the screen but it’s doesn’t get bad as the 8528. It’s pretty darn easy to clean too.

Okay here is where I might end up writing a long review. We all knew the device would be good looking and be different from anything out there but with all the hype on it the obvious question is does the software provide a good experience?

My first impression of the phone was OMFG!! This thing rocks! Well after spending a couple of days with it and after the initial euphoria of getting the phone had passed I still feel very good about this device. Now that being said, it’s fairly limited too. The calendar app and the web browser are simply the best out there. Having to be able to read full versions of the web page without having its layout mangled by the browser and still being able to render smooth readable fonts is just simply an amazing experience. I always wanted to internet device that I could carry around and be able to read blogs and visit forums, especially when I’m in front of the TV and just wanted to quickly check the web without having to go to my PC or start my laptop. The iPhone does this amazingly well. When connected to wifi the browsing experience is simply the best.

Before any one mentions DeepFish or Opera Mini… I’ve tried both of them on the 8525 and they don’t even compare. The smoothness of how the Safari browser on the iPhone integrates simply amazing.

The email application definitely could have been better. There’s no simple way to delete multiple email messages from your inbox, or mark emails as being read without opening them (c’mon every other PDA and Smartphone has this capability). The SMS app is fairly decent, but since I don’t do a lot of SMS I haven’t played around with it much. Then there’s the weather and stocks widget that I get the impression were put on there just for the sake of it. They are the same as their desktop widget counterparts but customized to handle gestures. The photo viewer is also standard but it does have nice slideshow functionality. The contacts application is decent but if you have a large list of contacts, you cannot find a contact by simply type a few letters of the contact. You have to scroll through the list which becomes tiring after a little while. Since I don’t have a lot of contacts this doesn’t bother me, but for any serious corporate user this is definitely going to be an issue.

The Google maps app is pretty decent and works very well, but I still like the Live Search application for Windows Mobile phones. Although both of them have a lot of similarities the Live Search seems a lot more complete. Google maps on the iPhone definitely have the nice flashy animations but I found doing a local search for Chinese restaurants around my home was a bit cumbersome. I had to type in "Chinese takeout Macungie PA" to actually list the restaurants. Where as in Live Search you select your home location from you bookmarks (or enter a new one) and then enter what you are searching for in another box.

There is very limited customization allowed on the phone. You can only choose ringtones from a pre-defined list and can’t set your own, which actually doesn’t bother me because I’m not much of a ringtone fanatic and the ring tones included are pretty good. You can select any picture as your wallpaper, but the wallpaper only shows when you wake the phone from sleep state. Other than that you can only configure basic settings of the device and that’s it.

Everyone knows that it’s a closed device and you can’t install any third party application on it. And Mr. Jobs announcement that their SDK for third party apps is HTTP and JavaScript is pure crap. Viewing sites with pure AJAX is a hit and miss thing. Sites may or may not work and the non availability of a flash plugin is a major downside. A lot of sites use Flash for their navigation and without a puglin to render flash it leaves those sites as practically un-usable when viewing it on the iPhone. Viewing WAP formatted pages are well and good but the browser was touted as a fully fledged browser capable of rendering pages in its true form so I shouldn’t have to view a WAP or mobile version of a web page. I just hope they come out with at least a flash plugin (silverlight will never happen in my opionion) soon.

An application like Windows Live Writer on the iPhone would be just a killer app. But since we don’t have the ability to write native applications for it the only thing to do is wait around and hope to god Apple comes out with an application like that. Or build an AJAX web site… honestly which doesn’t even come close to providing the same experience as a native app on the phone.

The visual voice mail thingy is cool and the ability to listen to voice mails in any order and being able to rewind a message to any particular point is also amazing. But it’s not much use to me as I don’t get a lot of voice mails.

The best is the camera app. It’s like somehow the developers of the application went back in time to the 19^{th century and developed the application. There is not even one configuration option, nothing, nada, zilch. Can’t zoom, can’t change resolutions can’t even freaking select what format the photo is taken in. Just one button to take the picture and that’s it. If they had just spent some more time on adding some functionality to the app rather than the pretty effects it might be usable.}

There’s nothing much to be said about the iPod functionality other than its better than a standalone iPod. The regular iPod interface is crap compared to the zune’s interface but the coverflow functionality in iPhone is where it completely trumps the zune. Navigating albums using coverflow is awesome and a much better experience than any mp3 player out there.

In all the software is done well and have good effects and oozes of simplicity. But after using the device for 3 days one gets the feeling that it’s a bit limited. I hope Apple fixes some of the bugs with the browser and at least get the email app at par with others. Time will tell how well they can keep the device updated and come out with new software for it though…

Let me begin by saying that I absolutely hated using the stylus on my 8525 and mostly used the hardware keyboard. There’s something seriously wrong with pulling out the tiny stylus and trying to use the phone. The multi touch gestures in the iPhone work almost flawlessly. I was up to speed in 5 minutes and using just your thumb and fingers to use the phone actually works and is quite pleasurable. That being said the gestures are a bit inconsistent in the various applications. Some allow double tapping to zoom some don’t, and Google maps is the only one that allows two finger one click (putting two fingers at the same time on the screen to represent a single click) for zooming out. I’m pretty happy with the gesture driven functionality of the device and it works a lot better than using a stylus.

As I mentioned before I hate using a stylus and the reason I bought an 8525 was because of its hardware keyboard. A lot of devices come with a hardware keyboard and they do a good job of it, but most of them like the Treo and BlackBerry sacrifice the screen size for the keyboard. 8525 did well by using a sliding keyboard and still maintain at least a decent screen size.

Now after using the iPhone for 3 days, I find myself typing a lot better using its software keyboard than on the 8525. It works very very well if you just type and not worry about the typos. The auto correction is done very well and its predictive functionality is 95% dead on accurate. I miss the tactile keyboard and probably will never be able to type without looking at the keyboard, which was possible on the 8525, but for what it’s worth the keyboard works. That being said it’s definitely not for everyone. Some people may find it counter intuitive and find the auto correction and predictive typing feature gets in their way. For me though I was able to type in a fairly long email to my dad under 1 minute where it would have taken me at least 2 minutes to type in the same email in the 8525. It works if you give it some time and follow the tips from Apple and it works very well.

I went into the AT&T store on Saturday, didn’t have to stand in a line or anything. Tried the demo phone for 5 minutes, transferred my account over to the new phone and walked out the store in under 25 minutes. Went home, downloaded iTunes (YUCK), hooked the phone up and activated it in under 5 minutes. I don’t think it can get any seamless than that. I got the 4GB one since they were out of the 8GB one and I couldn’t honestly validate a $600 device. I would never have bought it if my bro didn’t offer to put in some money in the phone as a gift for helping him move (imaging 3 days of lifting heavy furniture and boxes from 9:00 to 9:00…). When I bought my 8525 I paid in total $540 for the device and a carrying case, although I did get a $50 rebate on it bringing the total cost down to $490. I paid in total $530 for the iPhone and a carrying case for it. The final tipping point in the decision to buy the phone was the plan being offered with iPhone. With my 8525 with a 450 minutes monthly plan and unlimited data I used to pay around $95 per month. Same plan with the iPhone comes to $75. That made my decision. Although the lower cost can be attributed to the iPhone using the EDGE network rather than 3G, paying $20 less was way too attractive.

That’s when the good experience stops. Going for EDGE was probably the worst decision by Apple. It’s slow and I mean caveman slow when compared to HSDPA. When connected to a UMTS connection on my 8525 the speed was blazing fast and I could load heavy web pages (although the pages were mangled by IE mobile) in under 1 sec. iPhone normally takes 3 – 5 seconds to load the same page. But what pisses me off is the fact that if I’m downloading any data, any incoming call will be directed to voicemail directly. Are we in the 19th century again????? I mean even other phones on EDGE drop the data connection allow you to answer the call and after the call finishes resumes or restarts the data download. Is it so hard to do this Apple??? That one negative point is enough to list remove the "Revolutionary" statement from the phone. Having calls directed to voicemail is NOT revolutionary in this day and age. EDGE is a big mistake. If this phone was released on 3G the only prohibiting factor would be its cost, and even with that it would have decimated the competition.

Even with all its flaws, this is probably the first phone where I can say that I love it rather than like it. Software is limited but done well. It’s very simplistic in its design and that works for me. I wanted an internet enabled device that was light weight and had a good screen size for reading and the iPhone does that exceptionally well, when connected to a wifi connection. When on EDGE some features are still usable… Google Maps works decently and using the Google Reader to view and read feeds works well. Beyond that the limitation of the EDGE network comes in play. The iPod functionality of the device is very well done, and if they ever were able to cram a higher capacity hard disk in there without raising costs the iPhone would be the best convergence device out there.

Third party applications are a limiting factor but the out of box software covers at least 80% of smart phone requirements very well. I’m not a big fan of editing documents or spreadsheets on phones so not having Word Mobile or Excel Mobile is fine with me, but for people who are used to that will definitely not want to get the iPhone. I like the design of the phone so I don’t feel the need to customize it, but for users to love to customize the crap out of their devices, like Jamie, would find this phone very frustrating.

The phone due to its connection limitations isn’t revolutionary but it’s one heck of an evolution. I hope other phone manufacturers take a very long and hard look at the UI design of this phone and take some tips. This is how a convergence device should feel and function. I just hope this spurs the competition to do more innovating stuff than just regurgitate the same software again and again with a just a new look (I’m looking at you WM6).