Gorillapond Dot Com

I’ve had my iPhone for a few days, and I put together a review of my first impressions. Read more to find out.

Purchase

Shannon and I showed up at the local Apple store at around 5:30pm, and waited in line about an hour before seeing the inside of the store. After that it was very quick and painless. We managed to escape without buying anything else.

Hardware

Included in the box is the iPhone itself, a sync cable, dock (like an iPod), charing brick to be used with the sync cable, and a polishing cloth. The iPhone is like most Apple products, fantastic industrial design. The screen is breathtaking, go see one in person. It does get streaks, but when the screen is on you won’t notice them. I can’t say too much about the battery yet, but so far the battery has had tons left at the end of the day. Shannon hasn’t been so lucky. After watching some videos in the morning and then showing her iPhone off yesterday afternoon, she was down to about 5% battery. Mine was at about 95%, albeit with less usage. There have been some other hints, but I’m beginning to believe her battery might be faulty.

Activation

Activation was relatively quick and easy for me, on first connection with my Macbook. iTunes walked me through creating my AT&T service account and porting my number over. Within a couple of minutes, the iPhone was ready to go. Shannon’s iPhone took about 5 hours to activate, which was a little disappointing for her. The iPhone is completely unusable without being tied to an AT&T account though iTunes.

Setup

After the iPhone is activated, you are able to setup data sync settings. For example, you don’t need to sync your entire address book or all of your calendars (if you use iCal at least). Email setup is as easy as picking an existing account setup from Mail. Other sync options are exactly the same as an iPod. I’ve already got mine setup just as I would want it. I’ve done some reconfiguration work on my email accounts so I get most of my email without the garbage.

Interface

Just awesome. It works exactly like the videos on apple.com. THIS is the reason to get an iPhone. I love unlocking my phone. It blows away any other phone you have used, ever.

Keyboard and User Input

Because of the nature of the iPhone, this section is very dependent on the interface. All of the touch navigation with buttons, sliders, etc are just brilliant. Very easy to work with, and all the controls work just as you would expect. Keyboard input is.. interesting. I’m very undecided so far. The first few times I tried to use the keyboard I was completely frustrated. I’m getting better now, however. While the system does correct your mistypings automatically, there are some fields that it doesn’t check such as a Google Maps search or address input.

Phone

Contacts are good, way better and more complete than any phone you have ever used. The true mobile version of Mac OS X’s Address Book. Visual Voicemail works just as advertised. This is huge for me, I absolutely hate checking voicemail but think I can use this.

Mail

Works well. No major complaints. It does not contain any kind of spam filtering that I can tell, nor does it bring over your rules from the Mac OS X Mail application. Also, as far as I can tell, there is no way to bring any pictures emailed to me directly into the Photos area of the phone to sync into iPhoto later.

Safari

This is the major feature that made me want the iPhone. I really haven’t used it extensively yet, but so far it’s just as advertised. It is a full desktop web browser in your pocket. I don’t like that iTunes synchronizes your entire Safari bookmarks, or not at all. I’d rather it just back them up. My browsing habits on a mobile phone and my habits on my desktop/notebook are different. Plus, I have tons of bookmarks that are a bit uncomfortable to scroll through every time I want to find a site. I plan on just having a few daily bookmarks, and using my del.icio.us account for the rest.

iPod

Just like an iPod, only better. Coverflow is pretty neat, but I can find the music I want faster using the list. I look forward to listening to more podcasts, it seems easier to do it from the iPhone. Enough about music, the real killer app for the iPod is video. I’ve converted a few movies with Handbreak and they look fantastic. I just don’t envision many times I will be sitting around with enough time to watch a movie. The movies I’ve converted are about 1-1.3GB per movie. I am using the iPod settings template, which is 1500kbps, plus 2-pass encoding.

Pictures and Camera

The camera is pretty simple. Open it, press the picture button. It’s a 2 megapixel camera, and looks decent for a phone camera. There’s no movie support. All pictures you take go into the Pictures application. The Picture application sorts everything into albums, and you choose which albums from your system are synchronized. An odd problem I found is that when you sync the iPhone, iPhoto wants to download the photos you’ve taken. If you don’t erase the camera after import, it wants to download the same pictures again on the next sync. If you do erase the pictures, then they won’t be on the iPhone to use. My workaround for this is to create a smart album that looks for the “Camera Model” of “Apple iPhone” and have this album sync with the iPhone. It works well so far. It seems other pictures are scaled down when synchronized with the iPhone, so they don’t look really great zoomed in too far. It would be interesting to see a 10 megapixel picture and how far you can zoom in before it looks pixelated.

YouTube, Stocks, Weather, Clock, Calculator, and Notes

YouTube is okay. There’s only a small fraction of the videos on the site available through the YouTube application so far. I think Shannon has sent me a link to just about all the decent videos available! Stocks and Weather are just like their Mac OS X widget counterparts. The only added feature is that you can ‘flick’ between different locations. Clock lets you compare different timezones, set an alarm, time things with a stopwatch, and set a timer. It’s decent. The cool thing I found is when you are setting an alarm or a timer the way to set the time is like a slot machine. You spin a wheel to set the time you want, a very nice touch. Calculator is almost too basic. It has the normal 4 operations and thats it. Notes does what you would expect, but it doesn’t synchronize with your computer, so the notes just sit there! Rumor is that the notes feature in Mac OS X 10.5’s Mail application will be able to sync with the iPhone when it’s released.

Maps

Full Google maps in your pocket. Another awesome reason for an iPhone. Look at the videos I linked above to see it in action. It works great, no complaints from me.

Complaints I’ve Heard

I’ve heard two large complaints from the major technology writers: Battery and AT&T’s data speeds. To me, so far, both have been a non-issue. The battery has been fantastic so far, and the internet browsing speeds haven’t caused me any trouble or frustration. We’ll see if I change my mind.

The Future

I don’t feel there are too many rough spots, if any. They either polished the heck out of it, or took a feature out altogether. I get the feeling that Apple is going to put tons of work in the future with new features, especially to integrate tightly with Mac OS X 10.5. I can’t wait for a true instant messaging client, and maybe even voice over IP.