So, in light of the new data plan promotion for 3G phones up here in Canada via Rogers (part of our wireless oligopoly), I decided to go full bore and just go for it. Even though Rogers has extended this “special” rate for data plans for another month or three, it made sense for me. I have been paying through the nose for a Blackberry data plan that gives me 20MB per month; paying about half that amount for 6 gigabytes per month was a bit of a no-brainer.
Even though I’m a couple months late to the party, here are my thoughts
1. its a magnificent piece of technology. The iPhone has its faults (see below), but its a great piece of hardware. Silky smooth crystal touch screen. A nice solid un-plasticky kind of weight. A user-interface that is slick, easy to read, and otherwise gorgeous. It has something almost super-naturally tactile about it (given the whole touch-screen thing, that’s the point, I suppose) that makes you want to touch it and hold it all the time.
2. typing is atrocious. In spite of how awesome the UI is, the fact that it is almost 100% touch screen necessitates that the keyboard is also part of the touch screen. This means, unlike most data phones, there are no keys to provide touch-feed back when you’re typing. As someone who’s migrated from a Blackberry, this makes typing an atrociously frustrating chore, and although, I admit, I’ve only had it for a couple days, there is just no way I’ll be composing lengthy emails, or blogging for that matter, via iPhone. Perhaps my fingers are fat and pudgy, but even so, I find myself making far too many unintended keystrokes, even after about 10-15 hours of usage, and I just don’t see it improving.
3. iPhone “apps” are awesome. The iPhone apps store is one slick piece of work. You browse apps. You find apps. You download them directly to your iPhone. And you have a new app. I am not planning to jailbreak the phone, and yet, there’s still a ton of stuff available. Some of it is crap. Some of it is surprisingly good. Like, for example, “Epocrates”, which is a program that is popular amongst medical students and physicians, originally developed for the Palm Pilot. There’s a free iPhone version which is just as good as I remember it (allows you to search a comprehensive drug database, cross reference for adverse events), but given the iPhone’s excellent graphics, also has a “pill display” portion, where you can actually see what pills look like. This is an application that could have easily sold for bongo bucks — but its free.
4. 3G isn’t as fast as I thought it’d be. Caveat — I live in Toronto, and the 3G coverage is pretty excellent. I understand that in the states, or, other areas in Canada, the coverage can be quite spotty. Having said that, sure, the 3G network is meant to be between three and five times as fast as the EDGE network. But, it doesn’t really feel that fast. Why is that? Personally, I think its because unlike with the Blackberry I was previously using, which was an EDGE network phone, I was probably browsing mobile-optimized web pages. With the iPhone 3G, I am browsing web pages — which, perhaps, are three times as heavy, in terms of data size. Its able to stream video, however, which *is* something to see.
5. battery life sort of sucks. Coupled with the fact that there is no easy way (read: impossible) to change batteries, and the fact that most people will want to use the iPhone as a cool doo-hicky — and not merely a phone — you’ll perhaps find that the length of time your batter lasts is between 3 - 5 hours. Now, actually, compared to laptop batteries, this isn’t that bad (in my experience), but the problem, as I stated, is that you can’t change the batteries, and furthermore, for most people, they’ll also need the iPhone for one other thing: to make calls. Yesterday, I nearly ran out of batteries before the end of the day, and it wouldn’t have mattered so much except that I had to make a few unexpected emergency calls. I was sweating bullets, silently praying that I wouldn’t run out of juice while I was making those calls.
6. The camera is crippled. Displaying photos is nice. Taking photos, however, sucks. There’s no zoom. There’s no flash. And it suffers mightily from a longish exposure time, requiring your hands to be pretty still to avoid a blur on the photo. Especially at night. Having no zoom also sucks, and I didn’t realize how sucky this was until I actually needed it (case in point: I wanted to take a photo of an insect the other day — don’t ask — and I had to get so close to it that I was within eating distance)
While there are a ton of things that could be better (I don’t even want to think about how fragile it is), there’s one unmistakeable thing about the iPhone. It is an amazingly unique piece of hardware that does some things so well that it makes you forget (most times) about the others.
