3G iPhone: First Thoughts

July 13th, 2008

I picked up a 3G iPhone on Friday night and used it throughout Saturday in various locations. Here are my initial thoughts:

The Good

  • 3G is definitely faster - I don’t know how the EDGE folks survived for this long. Even better is WiFi which I’ll certainly drop back to whenever possible.
  • The App Store is huge. You can install Apps via the iPhone itself or using iTunes. iTunes will pull whatever apps you download onto your computer. There are so many free ones and many more to purchase, but I’m currently using AOL Radio, Pandora Radio, Remote, Truphone, New York Times, Twitterific, Yelp, and have my eye on some games like Scrabble.
  • Sync with a Mac works beautifully. You can take pictures and assign them to contacts, and those will update Address Book. All the options for photo, music, and video syncing in iTunes are familiar to anyone who has an iPod or AppleTV.
  • Using the GPS while driving down 101 was really cool - a blue dot appears on the map that travels as you move.
  • The iPhone has got me back on Twitter and into “mobile micro blogging.” Twitterific allows you to upload a picture taken with the iPhone and post it on Twitter and TwitPic, which of course will end up in FriendFeed. I did this to take a drive by photo of the line outside the Palo Alto Apple Store.

The Bad

  • Battery life. I charged it twice on Saturday, after using it extensively, with 3G, GPS, phone calls, the web, and YouTube videos. There’s already advice to turn off features to conserve battery life, but having to choose functionality irks me.
  • AT&T reception is surprisingly spotty. We went from San Mateo down to Palo Alto, Redwood City, Hillsdale, and Belmont, all within the “3G” coverage area according to the map, but whenever I entered a building the coverage would drop significantly. I still barely get a reception (no service) within my apartment even for basic phone calls. My wife kept Verizon and I’m now thinking that was a good move, as their coverage is excellent everywhere.
  • Keyboard is still problematic. I guess it gets better over time, but I currently make a lot of mistakes and the whole interface makes me feel like I need smaller thumbs. Hard to imagine writing blog posts.
  • Can’t use it with one hand. Pretty much everything is a two-hands, look at the screen affair.

Conclusion

Definitely an impressive product, enough so that my iPod and MacBook won’t be traveling as much in the future. Biggest disappointments are the coverage and the battery life. But the iPhone is the first step toward truly mobile, location-aware computing, plus multi-touch. The possibilities for cool new apps are huge. This is a good time to board the bandwagon.

Here are some other reviews and iPhone miscellany:

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  • Mike
    Do you have a lot of music? Does the iPhone support the auto-fill function that the Shuffle does?

    I don't know that I could pick and choose 16 GB of music I'd definitely want - I've filled about 40 GB of an 80 GB iPod so far.

    Beyond that, do you think the price is worth it? May I ask which data plan you opted for?
  • I don't think you can do auto fill as on the shuffle. I do have a fair amount of music, so what I did is set up a playlist that syncs with the iPhone. At the bottom of iTunes you can see the space the playlist will take up. There's surely a way to set up a smart playlist that would randomly pick a bunch of songs, too. As for the price, yeah, so far it's definitely worth it. I got the cheapest plan. All the plans have unlimited data which is what I'm going to be using the phone for most.
  • Mike
    Nice! Didn't think of a smart playlist, that's a good idea.

    Oh man, I'll seriously need to look into this, then. Eventually. Thanks for the info!
  • jcieplinski
    I'm surprised to hear you say that you can't do much with one hand. I do almost everything, with the exception of extended typing of emails, or some games, with one hand.

    The keyboard gets better over time. Especially if you learn to trust it and stop trying to fix every letter that comes out wrong. The auto-correction works brilliantly. Learn to trust it. Plus, the more you type, the more words it learns from you, so it will guess even better over time.

    I type long emails all the time with my iPhone. I'm faster on that keyboard than I ever was on a Blackberry or Treo.

    Battery life should also improve over time. For one thing, you're using it a lot more right now than you will on the average day a month from now. Also, batteries tend to hold charge a little better once they've been worked in/gone through a few charge cycles. Of course, the strength of your signal will have a huge impact on battery life, so if you're getting poor reception in your house, your battery is getting drained a lot faster than it would normally.

    Have you tried switching to 2G when you're at home? Since you have WiFi at home anyway, your data will be the same. And your 2G signal may be stronger at home than the 3G is. The iPhone is supposed to switch between the two automatically when the 3G signal is just about nonexistent, but I've been reading that the threshold for that switch is maybe not what it should be.

    Just got my 16 GB white one this morning. Still lines everywhere, still some check-out issues. For me, AT&T didn't want to allow me to upgrade, even though I was an original iPhone user and an AT&T customer way before they were even AT&T. Evidently, their database of SIM and IMEI numbers isn't completely accurate, and that sometimes bounces the upgrade eligibility. Took more than 20 minutes for the Mac Specialist to get a customer service rep from AT&T to fix the glitch. Oddly enough, once I got past that obstacle, activation (the part that was so screwed for people on Friday) took less than a minute.
  • My inability to use the phone 1 handed and the keyboard are definitely
    because I'm still getting used to the device. I didn't have a V1
    iPhone so I have to go through that whole learning curve. I'll
    probably retract those gripes over time.

    Now the battery life - I have to fiddle with that some. I'm turning
    off the WiFi autodiscovery and turning off 3G unless I'm websurfing.
    Lastly the coverage is definitely worse than Verizon. It ultimately
    may not matter much as it's a mobile device, for which I'll obviously
    be outside of the house where the reception is better. But the
    coverage has me thinking I'll switch over to WiFi I'll do so, which
    includes the house and work. Ultimately, the litmus test will be
    during the work week when I'm out and about in SF and on the CalTrain
    this next week, I'm pretty hopeful it will all be fine.

    There could be a good side for people complaining about the 3G
    coverage as it will make AT&T build out their network quicker - I want
    mobile broadband now, please :)

    Cool that you got your phone, too, there was just no way having this
    weekend end without it!
  • Pretty much my conclusions exactly except the coverage part. Even the previous EDGE iphone would have been good to me (basically anything with a lighter data plan) for me to experience this. Now that I have it, I think the challenge is to really use it and find ways to make this investment worth it whether it be more productivity or social interaction (we can finally leave computers at home).

    Having said that, it is more a glorified browser than anything else until we get voice input or something even crazier. Of course they could start by allowing portrait mode for emails.
  • yeah now I'm trying to find apps that can be fun / useful on the go - twitterati and lastFM look promising. And I don't get why the keyboard can't be used in the rotated mode all the time - seems like only certain apps can be rotated.
  • So I picked one up this morning at the Downtown SF store (the line wasn't so bad, but purchase/activation time is still taking about 30-40 minutes).

    Downer is that I just noticed some weird oily anomaly that is visible on the screen (under the plastic). So I will have to take this unit back to the Apple store and exchange it. Kinda a pain in the arse, but the device looks slick.

    On the plus side I was able to keep my old family plan with the wife. All they did was tack on the $30 data fee.

    Oh wells.
  • I have a ton of music too....I use the genius on itunes to sync everything up. It makes the 16g feel like double...becuase there is always new stuff on it.
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