A week with the iPhone 3G
I’ve long been a big fan of the iPhone, which I’m sure needs no introduction: this device is a mobile phone at heart but can also browse the web in the same way a desktop does, pinpoint you on a map using GPS and give routes and directions, use instant messenging (MSN, YIM, AIM, Google Talk etc.), act as a scientific calculator and a great deal more all in a neat little device. Last Tuesday it came out on Pay as you Go, and I decided to go for it, the main reason being the Internet access available anywhere with a mobile signal, and secondarily for the phone side. Given that I don’t use my mobile phone much PAYG is ideal for sending the odd text and receiving (but never making) calls. I won’t go into the dull story of actually getting hold of the thing here, *mumble* silly debit cards. Porting my old phone number between networks also wasn’t much fun, but I managed.
Despite the hardened geeks of freenode staff heckling me as an Apple fanboy who was buying a locked down device for a ridiculous amount of money, my experience so far has been extremely positive. The iPhone may be missing a lot of features (its camera is of low quality compared to other phones and has no flash, it can’t forward text messages, it can’t send multimedia messages, it can’t bluetooth files around etc.) but what it does do it does so very well, and software features can be added later. In hardware terms it’s fantastic: a below-par camera doesn’t bother me as if I want to take photos properly I would use, er, an actual camera. So while there are things that I would change, things that can be changed in software updates I do hope Apple will roll out (which is likely given that now Google’s Android platform has arrived there is finally some smartphone competition to force Apple into improvements), I have in my pocket a fantastic little device. It is my web browser, SMSer, e-mail reader, music player, direction finder, IRC and SSH client, emergency torch (we had a power cut tonight so this was handy), Twitter client, notepad (although I still like having my trusty ‘collected notes’ commenplace book), clock/alarm/stopwatch/countdown, ping/whois utility, light distraction (simple games), eBook reader (not yet, I intend to look into this), RSS reader (this is one of the main reasons I got it, to try and keep up with blogs and things, and of course once you have the web a world of opportunity is opened. Having all this with me all the time is great.
I could blah for ages about all of the things I’ve just listed but I’ll try and keep to the more notable pros and cons. Firstly, what stands out? The touch-screen interface is very effective. Only very occasionally do I find the phone not doing what I want it to do and this is usually because I have my other hand touching the phone and pressing buttons without me realising. Everything flows together nicely and I am getting pretty fast with the on-screen keyboard. Even if it takes up half the screen during use, and is very easy to hit the wrong keys on, the auto-correct means I don’t go wrong very often, and it is learning things that I type frequently already, such as ‘fn’ for freenode which it would probably thechange to an actual two letter word for any other users. The IRC client that I have been using turns off auto-correct and the amount I rely on it very quickly becomes apparent: my messages to the SilentFlame channel last night were often extremely garbled. The lack of copy-and-paste abikity is a pain but software problems can be fixed, and with the ability to e-mail URLs and the like it’s not that bad. As shown in the picture attached to this paragraph, texting is done very well. Messages are sorted into a conversation view with whomever you have messaged. For me this is fantastic. Not only does it mean I no longer fail to understand replies to my messages sent after I have forgotten entirely what I wrote, but as a user of Gmail since 2004 I am obsessed with keeping archives of all messages so this makes me happy.
Since I’ve had the phone for over a week I have certainly experienced some less pleasant aspects, but as noted above these are mainly software related. The phone has crashed several times: hard reboots don’t always get all the downloaded applications working again, although they often do. Updating a particular app often fixes all the rest. In general the phone can be quite temperamental and slows down a lot at times for no visible reason. There are no background processes, meaning that I can’t stay connected to, say, Google Talk, and go and do something else as nothing can run unless it is actually on the screen. The built in e-mail client is rubbish (thankfully Google’s iPhone-adapted Gmail web-based app is brilliant (as shown next to this paragraph) so I can use that, but that is of course slower than a local program) as it doesn’t support threading at all so is utterly unusable for me as I have mailing lists clogging up my inbox (which is out of control right now, so sorry if an e-mail of yours still hasn’t been answered). Many people have complained about the e-mail client and it could definitely do with improving. The battery life of the phone is appalling when the web is used over WiFi or 3G as these both drain battery, but this is because battery technology just hasn’t caught up with transmission yet. In terms of off-phone issues, 3G coverage really isn’t fantastic so I am often reduced to dial-up Internet speeds. This is fine in my view for reading e-mail and RSS feeds, but it is a shame O2 don’t have better coverage. Being as the iPhone is Apple, I am forced into using iTunes to both activate, upgrade and backup the phone, and to download music onto it. iTunes is in my view a terrible piece of software that I personally find very hard to use, so I’m annoyed I have to use it, but I know a lot of people love it.
While the iPhone may be a great device, I’m obviously not keen at all on the locked down nature of it. As soon as people heard I was getting it, most of the school seemed to commence shouting me down as a consumerist and a capitalist, with my feeble defence of wanting it for a very specific purpose of web browsing not bearing much weight. Philosophically it is very unsound. It’s using a corporate operating system with Apple vetting all applications that can be installed on it. But while I would never choose this over a free alternative, these is not in this case an alternative. I run my computer on Ubuntu because it’s great both functionally and philosophically, but I have Windows installed because I have to in order to play games. I have the iPhone as it is the best choice if I want a phone that does all of the above. So I think I’m in a reasonable position, given the world I’m in.
Overall then, I think my £350 has been spent wisely as I have a great device that does what I expected and does it well, giving me something very useful to have around. Given that I spend my money on little else, I decided to go for it, and am pleased I did. I heartily recommend this to people who would make use of the web to the extent I do. If not, it’s not worth it, as it’s then just a fancy phone with a nice MP3 player.
So if your current mobile is a 2G (second generation) mobile youa ll need to upgrade to 3G. Hardware
O2 actually has one of the best 3G networks in the country =D. Not like T-Mobile and the G1. Personally, I love iTunes, but that might be because I’ve never used anything else. There is quite a nice jailbreak out for 2.1, but you have to have a Mac. Oh well.
I still don’t get why it can thread texts but not email.
PS Install Askimet – it’s pretty good at getting spammers (ie the first comment)
“A week with the iPhone 3G” – That’s wrong. It should be “A week with iPhone 3G” =D.