The iPhone Post
Monday, July 2nd, 2007[Audio version Note: I’m testing out the possibility of doing audio versions of my blog posts … or something else. Let me know what you think.]
I bought an iPhone. You’re surprised? Seriously? You don’t know me at all.
Friday morning, the line in front of the Astoria AT&T store was five people long. In Times Square, the line was only around 30 people at the AT&T store there. At about 3:30, I was probably #40 in line in at the Astoria store. No one knew how many phones any store would get, though rumors abounded that every store, even Apple Stores, would sell out fast. I had no desire to participate in the inevitable melee at the 5th Avenue Apple Store.
After an excruciating wait after the doors opened, three people were served, and the computers went down for a half-hour, the security guard announced that they were out of 8GB phones. “That’s impossible,” we all said. The line had barely moved, and we estimated maybe five people had actually gone in the store by then. I was wondering whether I should have taken the offer of the 12-year-old who was selling his place in line for $200. About a half-hour later, they announced that they were out of phones. The security guard said they had only received a shipment of 20. I was livid but determined.
I called the 5th Avenue Apple store and asked straight out if they still had iPhones and expected to meet demand—and how long the line was. The employee was very nice. She said they had plenty, though she didn’t know a precise number, and the line was around the block last time she looked. I decided to take a chance, and I hopped on the train.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I arrived at the famous cube and couldn’t find the line. A large crowd was standing on the sidewalk, and though there were barriers for a line to form, it was only about ten people long. Thinking someone would soon tell me that they were sold out or that the end of the line was really down at St. Patrick’s, I got in that line. Two minutes later, I was ignoring the you’re-paying-our-salaries hoops and hollers of the Apple employees at the entrance and walking down the stairs. The store was packed, and more employees ushered us into another line, a bit longer but moving quickly, to buy an iPhone. Five minutes later, I was standing in front of the Genius Bar facing a credit-card-only employee. After a very strange conversation where said employee asked me if I was excited and gave a dramatic pause before reading my total amount due, I walked out of the store with an iPhone. Total time: 20 minutes. I kicked myself swiftly in the ass for waiting at the AT&T store at all.
When the iPhone was announced earlier this year, why was I ecstatic? Why did I buy an iPhone? What’s the big deal?
- Every mobile phone I’ve ever used has sucked. I’ve usually had either a free phone or a $200-after-subsidies phone, but I’ve also had a Windows Mobile HTC phone and a Blackberry Pearl for work, and they all sucked. Non-intuitive UIs, horrible menus, bugs, crashes, stupid behavior, ugliness, and a host of other problems have always plagued any phone I’ve ever owned. I thought Apple could do it right. The iPod does a few things, and it does it very, very well. The menus make sense, the UI is terrific and simple, and though I’ve been the victim of a few bugs, I’ve always been very satisfied with it. It doesn’t hurt either that I gave up Windows four years ago and switched from Linux to Mac 20 months ago.
- I’m a geek, and while I demand functionality out of my toys, I also love the technology for its own sake. Apple (at least Steve Job’s Apple) makes beautiful, elegant toys for people like me. In the case of my Apple toys, I rarely hack them. While I require the ability to hack, break, and fix things, the fact that I can enjoy Apple products right out of the box and rarely want to change anything is very satisfying.
- It’s an Apple product. Using anything remotely like a smart phone with a Mac is almost always torture and usually requires one of a small pool third-party apps resulting from reverse-engineering. I wanted something native—something that knew what Mac’s Address Book, iCal, and Mail applications were and treated them as well or better than Outlook. I wanted a hand-held that wasn’t just Mac-compatible but Mac itself.
After playing with the iPhone over the weekend, I’m more than satisfied with it. At risk of sounding just like the Apple-friendly reviews before the release, it’s not perfect, but it’s amazing nonetheless.
- Multi-Touch is not perfect. I have small but pudgy digits, and while the built-in guessing usually works very well (It even learned the word “deanpence” and auto-fixed when I mistyped.), there is no guessing for passwords or URLs. Thankfully, when typing a password whose characters are rendered as asterisks, the key you press is enlarged over and above your finger so you can see what you typed and make corrections accordingly. When typing normal text, though, it’s amazingly accurate and very fun to use.
- SMS messages show up in bubbles as a conversation reminiscent of iChat’s interface. It’s a subtle touch and a welcome one that makes SMS behave more like instant messaging. I still have yet to hear why iChat itself isn’t on the iPhone, though, and I do notice its absence.
- Calendar has a “List” view instead of a “Week” view, but it may be an even better way to view my calendar.
- More on Photos and Camera when I play with them more. [Update, 2007/07/09:] I finally attempted to synchronize my photos, and while I synchronized about 1,000 photos, it went off without a hitch. iTunes “optimized” (i.e., shrunk the fuck out of) them for viewing on the iPhone, though I thought that could possibly be presumptuous. I may want to send full-quality photos by mail, no? In any case, they only take up about 300MB, which is next to nothing compared to the size of my music/podcast library. Viewing them seems to be very consistent to the look and feel of the other apps.
- YouTube is a fun addition that I wasn’t expecting until Apple announced it last week. It’s a standalone application, though, not the website. I didn’t have any problem searching for and watching “Robot Chicken” clips, so it appears that there is more than a small number of videos available. (There were concerns that since the videos are H.264 and not YouTube’s usual Flash videos, YouTube would limit the number of videos available on the iPhone. It still may be true.)
- Stocks is pretty useless for me. It would be nice if Apple had a larger number of native (or even local AJAX) apps that I could put on the home screen instead of apps like this that I’ll never use.
- Maps and Weather behave as expected. I put a friend on speaker on Friday while I searched for a bar in the Village without a hitch, and the weather forecast populates very quickly (faster on EDGE even than my Weatherbug Desktop widgets on my Mac).
- Clock is only really useful if you need to keep track of the time in another time zone—probably one further away than an hour. I never use it: Local time shows on the top menu bar almost all the time.
- Calculator … haven’t used it.
- Notes is really the big exception here. I’m sure it works fine, but next to the consistent look and feel of the other apps, Notes is fucking ugly. Everything on the iPhone appears to be in Helvetica, and white is the typical background color for text. Notes, however, is rendered in “Marker Felt” (or so John Gruber tells me) with a yellow background, and there’s no way to change this. Ugh.
- The Phone app is very straightforward and intuitive, even with the multiple ways of browsing contacts and recent calls. The phone senses when you’re holding it up to your face to talk, and it disables the screen; likewise, when you take it off of your face, the screen turns back on. Brilliant. Visual voicemail is a fucking lifesaver. I don’t know how I ever lived without it.
- Mail behaves mostly as expected, though I have a few quibbles. Having multiple accounts may be more trouble than it’s worth. For POP accounts at least, it appears that there’s no way to add folders and filter mail, and there’s no local spam filter. Thankfully GMail has good server-side spam filters, though my server-side filters that keep high-traffic lists archived and not cluttering the inbox are useless on the iPhone. On a side note: I was expecting to have trouble with GMail. When I had tried to use multiple POP clients (Mail at home, Thunderbird at work, for instance), GMail had always failed miserably in the past. Mail downloaded in one place never made it to the other, and I always used the website at work. However, though I panicked when iTunes imported my mail settings, and the iPhone started checking my GMail, I haven’t had that same problem. All email shows up both on the iPhone and on Mail. Did GMail fix this?
- Safari is definitely a full-featured browser (minus plugins). On double-tapping a section, it seems to zoom to the width of the text block you tapped on, though the font size may still be too small to read. Luckily, you can pinch and zoom anywhere you want, though sliding the page back and forth to read off the visible page can get annoying. Safari also seems to cache sparingly, and pages reload when you switch between open Safari windows. Also, I’ve encountered a lot of Javascript (clickable images on this site, for example) that simply doesn’t work as expected on the iPhone. The obvious omission of a Flash plugin is also very noticeable. The ubiquity of embedded Flash videos assures that all iPhone users will notice and probably become annoyed with the little green cube placeholders.
- iPod works mostly as expected too. Turning the iPhone on its side renders a CoverFlow view, though when I’m viewing only podcasts, CoverFlow shows all music, not just podcasts. The clickable button on the headphones is brilliant too; it lets me pause the current track (one click) or advance to the next one (two clicks); so easy.
Using EDGE, the GSM network’s 2/2.5-generation data network, isn’t horribly slow for my expectations, though it is definitely slow. I’ve been consistently testing the connection at about 150kbps, which is only three times as fast as dial-up. WiFi works mostly flawlessly, though I’m disappointed (despite the probable impracticality of it) that Apple didn’t include 802.11n support. I had previously bought an AirPort base station, and I had to enable 802.11g for the iPhone. [Update, 2007/07/09:] Also, while it auto-connects to access points that are either open or use standard authentication, it doesn’t seem to have any way to auto-login to hotpots (like T-Mobile) that use web-based logins, so while I’m in Starbucks, it thinks it’s connected to their WiFi hotspot, but in actuality has no DNS resolution (everything resolves to the T-Mobile hotspot sign-in page)—so basically nothing that requires internet access works in Starbucks until I manually login. Bummer. I’ll have to remove that hotspot from my list. To be fair, I don’t know of any phone that has a solution for this problem.
This week will be a good test for battery life, as I listen to a lot of podcasts and music. Anecdotally and without any real testing, the battery seemed to go low faster than I expected this weekend. [Update, 2007/07/09:] The battery life so far has been phenomenal. I listen to podcasts, use the phone, SMS, check email, and browse the web without hesitating and have yet to see a low battery. I bet that might change if I watched a lot of videos, though.
Finally, my major complaint about the iPhone is this: 8GB is pitiful. While flash memory is more expensive than hard drives, and more than 8GB would probably have made the iPhone prohibitively expensive, I can’t help but be annoyed that I had to be incredibly selective about what media I allowed to sync to my brand new toy. I have no lossless tracks in my library any more, I didn’t sync any video or photos, and I’m almost capped out on disk usage. Pitiful, though I’m sure my 60GB iPod gave me some wildly impractical expectations.
Overall: 5 out of 5 stars
