I Phone?

OK, my old Moto Razr though the original battery was still going strong, I finally decided to retire it after subjecting all my friends with its horrible electrical noise issues. I’d been looking at the iPhone for a while and popped into the bastion of oshare computing, the Apple store. Long lost Roy “Krauser” was there so I bugged him about the phone, among other things. Ended up going for it and picking up the 8G model.

It’s been almost 2 weeks now and enough time for me to begin to form an opinion on it. It certainly is oshare/fashionable. The styling is sleek and pretty. There are a few key buttons aside from the touchscreen that dominates the phone, one being the silent mode having a dedicated switch which I love. Previous phone had to navigate through a maze of screen to switch to that, which bugged me. Volume, power and a main menu button are the only other physical controls. So really its all touchscreen. The interface controls work pretty well, but it being saddled with the decision to do everything through the screen also introduces difficulties. A set of physical keypad buttons will blow away the touch in speed and accuracy of input. People with “fat fingers” will have a hard time. I watched CKucky and he has a pretty good two finger technique on the touch keyboard that I have yet to gain. Not having the tactile feedback, it is impossible to use the iPhone without looking at it. This text entry system also limits the phone’s use of its web capability. I’ve tried doing blog entries, but its just too cumbersome for me, and the “intelligent” auto completing of words irks me more often than it works.

The other reason to have one of these is its other functions. As an ipod I suppose it works as it should. I never had an ipod so I’m new to figuring out all these playlist things. I hooked it up to my ipod capable car stereo and can not make heads or tails out of how it determines the order to play songs if I don’t have any playlist. I stuck one video on there and after figuring out what format to make it, it works. This will certainly be nice for traveling, no question about that.

The GPS is nifty, and came in handy on the first day I had it at work. Needed to find a client site and quickly discovered I was heading the wrong direction on the correct street. I played a little with some path recording software and it seems to work ok, but its accuracy can be spotty, and response lags a fair amount in car. Also there’s a limitation with software running on it that it has to run in the foreground and if something like a call comes in, it terminates the path recording program.

Having web access anywhere is nice too, I’ve used that a number of times already on the job. Except when it doesn’t work. That’ll be my final rant at the end of this entry.

Oh, I haven’t messed with the digicam much yet, but the pics taken with good outdoor light look pretty decent for a tiny phone cam. Could be useful for impromptu on the fly images.

There’s lots of nifty additional apps you can install too, I put on the Japanese/English dictionary but have yet to really try it out. Tried messing with the kanji stroke recognition input, but its for Chinese so there may be times when it doesn’t find a Japanese character, and I haven’t figured out if it follows stroke order. I may have to install one of the Japanese learning apps….

All this utility crammed into this one unit comes at a price, this thing sucks battery like mad. If you use it only as a phone, it’ll prob last a decent amount, but what’s the point of having this device if you don’t use the other features as well? So its best to stock up on power adapters and cables so you can power it from an external source as much as possible. Gone are the days when I charge my phone up, use it for however many days until the indicator shows low, then recharge. Makes me wonder how this constant charge treatment affects the longevity of the battery, which of course is built internally into the unit and can’t be changed without cracking open the case.

It may sound like I’m ranting a lot of negatives, but in fact I do like the iphone. I like the multi utility of it. Never having had a PDA thingy, I can now see the possibilities, of which I’ve hardly utilized yet. There are shortcomings, but in all its a pretty cool device. There is however one thing looming that someone has to deal with soon. Be it Apple or ATT, the 3G performance is aggravating. 3G is a touted feature, but somewhere there’s problems. I’ve had numerous problems in varying locations with its performance, everything from lagging to dropped calls and web connections. It wouldn’t be so bad if it would seamlessly drop back down to Edge network, but it doesn’t. Something needs to be done about this, end user doesn’t care if its Apple or ATT, they just see that the phone doesn’t work well and will jump ship. You hear me Apple? I am one of those type of people that it takes a lot for me to give up on something, evidenced by how long I put up with the lousy audio quality problems of my Razr, so for me to be saying this…. I had no qualms about going into the two year contract seeing as I rarely switch, but you have me getting nervous here.

So at this point in time, I’m not sure how to rate my iPhone. I guess it’d be smack in the middle of 2.5 out of five techno monkeys until they fix the 3G network.