iPhone

[Evan]

[ QUOTE ]
It still isnt activated, and although I had no problem with itunes this is beyond silly. I now received an emailing saying there was a problem and to contact them. So once again I call for the 7th time now, to be placed on hold for yet another hour to find out that my birthday "was" not put in, when I am 100% SURE it was. At this point I feel like they are just looking for things to be wrong on my end so that I quit going off about how long this is taking. It ticks me off to no end that they disconnected my other phone SO long before they planned on finishing the activation of the iphone (Oh 16 hours ago) Oh wait, the lady just informed me that she doesnt know why I was sent that email because my date of birth and sns WERE listed on the form filled out...this is a total nightmare...if she doesnt hook it up herself right now im gonna have issues. This sucks cause Im usually pretty calm about this stuff...but this is ridiculous

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Peachy, I heard some people have had success making the registration work by taking out the battery (while the phone is still on) and then putting it back in and rebooting the phone. Check here for instructions in case you can't figure it out on your own.

[pergesu]

Thursday night I decided I really wanted to get an iPhone. I wasn't sure up to that point, but I read a bunch of articles, watched a bunch of movies, and realized it was just so damn cool that I really wanted one.

I couldn't sleep that night. I kept saying I was going to get some sleep, I just needed to check the AT&T store first to see if anyone was lined up. So I'd go scope it out, come back to my house and lay down. And for some reason I couldn't sleep. So finally at 8am I went back down to the store to begin the campout. I officially began at 9 because I needed to go pick up RDS to take my car.

The line was great. I live in a small town and it was a bunch of really cool people. We got each other drinks, nobody complained when someone left line to go get lunch. Met a lot of fun people, it was a good time. You know, for standing in line for 9 hours.

Anyway, got my iPhone and used it quite a bit. Here are my thoughts:

Activation

Activation was super easy for me. I came home, plugged my iPhone in and iTunes popped up. Went through the wizard and I was on my way.

I have to say that I love this new activation. There was no work at all. All my billing info is already associated with my Apple ID so it was quick and painless. I've heard that a lot of people are having problems with it but I didn't.

The second sweet thing about the activation process is that as soon as it was over I was in iTunes ready to transfer my stuff over. Synched my address book, music, and a couple movies and I was ready to go.

Calling
Kind of boring, but it's a phone, so it's important. Calling is really great. You scroll through the address book, press a name and it dials. Nice.

Incoming calls are simple. If the phone is locked you slide the slider to answer. You can also press the top button to silence the ringer, or twice to send the call straight to voice mail. If you're using the phone, a grayed out overlay pops up letting you answer or dismiss the call.

Visual Voicemail
This thing rocks. Seriously. It's so nice viewing the different messages. Knowing exactly who called, when, deleting messages without listening to em. I love it.

Touch screen
imo, the awesomeness of this thing revolves entirely around the touch screen. Because it really doesn't do anything that you can't get in most other smart phones (except maybe the voice mail). It's just that the touch screen makes it a lot easier and more fun. Typing is really simple. I haven't had problems with accuracy, it's easy to hit the keys I want. It took me maybe 20 minutes to really get the hang of it. People say after a few days you get it...which may be true, and in that case I'll be super happy because it's already really easy. When people say to trust the dictionary, that's very true too. It's not really about misspelling words, but rather misshitting keys. Because of the QWERTY keyboard, it is VERY accurate at guessing what you intended to type. It really is amazing.

Also the screen is just beautiful. It works incredibly well under direct sunlight. In fact my friend was so impressed that he wanted to take a picture of it. He pulled out his digital camera to take a pic, and his view screen was completely black because of the sunlight. Pretty funny.

Texting
I do a TON of texting, so this is a big deal for me. It treats your various text conversations separately, grouping them by person. So instead of having an inbox and an outbox, with hundreds of different texts mixed up, you can easily see the different people you're talking to, along with a full message history. Also in the convo list it shows the time of the last message received, which is nice.

Web browsing
Web browsing on this is hotness. It's a full browser that just looks gorgeous. It really is just like using Safari on the mac. Very nice.

Apple was absolutely brilliant with their marketing, imo. I knew how to use this before I even picked it up, just from watching the commercials. So when I browsed the web, I knew exactly how to zoom in and out by pinching.

One of the things that's cool is how integrated everything is. I was just playing around and googled "quizno's 81501" to get the info for my local quizno's. Clicking the map image brought it up in google maps. Clicking the phone number prompted me to dial the number. Very nice.

Camera
It's good for a phone. Not an amazing camera, but still waaaaaaaay better than my razr.

One of the awesome things is the integration with iPhoto. I took a picture with my iPhone yesterday. Then later on when I wanted to synch more music, iPhoto popped up and imported the picture I had taken. Hotness.

Music
Great quality. It's an iPhone. Browsing my music collection by CD cover is cool. I don't know if some people might think it's kind of gimmicky or not...personally, I can understand not caring about it, being content to see the names of artists listed. I think the album art scrolling is cool, not a necessity of course, but definitely something I'm going to use from now on.

That's all I really want to talk about as far as features. There's other stuff...stocks, weather, youtube, calculator. All work great.

Gripes
I don't have many really.

I couldn't receive text messages last night. I could send them fine but for some reason I couldn't receive them. I spent a lot of time on hold with Apple support and nothing got resolved. Didn't surprise me since I was calling at 1am ET, but still it was frustrating. Finally a guy told me to call tomorrow and we'd get it resolved quickly.

So this morning I could receive texts, didn't need to call anyone up. Not sure what the deal was with that, but I'm happy.

MMS - A lot of people have brought up the fact that the iPhone can't do MMS (pic/vid) messaging. That's true. You can't send pictures. It's kind of remedied on the receiving end though...I was worried that it'd just ignore picture messages. Instead a text comes through saying "hey you got a pic message. Go to mymessages.com and enter this message id/password combo." So you don't actually miss out on the messages people send you...but it's not easy either. The message should at least have a link that prepopulates the form for you, so you can just click the link, press the login button and see the message. But no, it's lame.

Safari - Over all it's super sexy. I've got three complaints with it though. First of all is that it doesn't seem to save my passwords. When it didn't prompt me, my friend's explanation was, "It probably assumes you're the only person that uses it so it just saves everything." I like that explanation, but it's not true. I have to type my password in every time. Very lame. Also I don't know how to save images from web pages to my phone. So when a friend sends me a picture message and I check it out (see above), I can't figure out how to add it to my photo album. Last is the lack of flash - lots of sites use flash. And my job requires visiting sites that use flash, so it's a bummer that it doesn't work.

I have a feeling that the password and pic issue will be solved by me reading some documentation. That's another complaint, sort of - there isn't really any documentation. Mainly because it's so easy to use, but when there are things you don't know, it's like where the heck do I look?

Edge - Here's the big thing that critics are waiting for. Yeah it's slow. It's not stab-my-eyes-out slow, but it's slow. I probably wouldn't use my phone to show a chick a web page unless I preloaded the page. It takes a long time to load and we'd get bored. otoh, if I'm having lunch or something and don't particularly care about the load time, it's fine for simple browsing. I won't be using it for tons of browsing unless I'm on wifi. Despite that, email is very quick over edge, no problems with that at all.

Over all
I love this thing. It really is simply an amazing machine. It integrates perfectly with iLife - all of my contacts, music, movies, bookmarks, and photos get synched to the level I want them to be. And it's all kept perfectly in synch...changing a contact's info in my phone will update my laptop next time I connect them. I love that.

The experience is just fantastic. It actually feels good to use.

I think this phone has a lot of intangibles that make it great. These are things that people will either appreciate or they won't. If you do appreciate them, then this will really be one of the most amazing things you've put your hands on. If you don't appreciate them, you'll wonder what the hell all these psychos are doing spending $600 on a freaking phone. I completely understand that. Not everyone is going to be wowed by this. But if you are, you'll absolutely love it.

Pictures we took
It includes the phone in direct sunlight. In the pic it looks sort of washed out, but in reality it's not at all. Also the smudges aren't nearly as noticeable as they are in the photo.

Video - using iPhone as an iPod (NSF(W and children) I guess, there's profanity in the song playing)
Video - receiving a call

[guids]

lol @ spending 600$ on a phone when you are going to have to mail it to apple to get a new battery in 6 months.



personally Im waiting for microsofts phone.




PS Im making a prediction now, that there will be a rash of iphone security issues since apple is retardedly not letting anynoe program anything directly for the device. So all apps will be written for safari web browser, which will make it very very easy to commit denial of service/steal info etc attacks.

[SixT4]

Wow it can't send/receive pictures/video? My phone cost around $170 2 or 3 years ago and it can do that. I thought it was pretty much standard unless you bought a reeeeeally cheap phone.

Maybe text messaging isn't that big in the US? (I'm in the UK).

[guids]

[ QUOTE ]
Wow it can't send/receive pictures/video? My phone cost around $170 2 or 3 years ago and it can do that. I thought it was pretty much standard unless you bought a reeeeeally cheap phone.

Maybe text messaging isn't that big in the US? (I'm in the UK).

[/ QUOTE ]


the iphone is a gimmick device imo. The only functionality it has above and beyond what you kind find in any other basic phone is 4gigs of storage, and being able to pinch pictures.

[Patrick del Poker Grande]

What are the service plans available?

[Freakin]

[ QUOTE ]
Wow it can't send/receive pictures/video? My phone cost around $170 2 or 3 years ago and it can do that. I thought it was pretty much standard unless you bought a reeeeeally cheap phone.

Maybe text messaging isn't that big in the US? (I'm in the UK).

[/ QUOTE ]

It can send/receive pictures, but only through email... for some reason apple decided to not do MMS on this phone...

It's a pretty big deal...

[kerowo]

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What are the service plans available?

[/ QUOTE ]

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/06/26/atand...ation-for-iph/

[kerowo]

[ QUOTE ]
the iphone is a gimmick device imo. The only functionality it has above and beyond what you kind find in any other basic phone is 4gigs of storage, and being able to pinch pictures.

[/ QUOTE ]

And a user interface that is way ahead of any phone out there and actual web pages (sure non-flash and non-java, but those crappy mobile web pages weren't doing java or flash either) and an amazing media player, but yea, other than that it's crap.

If you have an Apple store around you should go look at it before dumping on it.

[Freakin]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
the iphone is a gimmick device imo. The only functionality it has above and beyond what you kind find in any other basic phone is 4gigs of storage, and being able to pinch pictures.

[/ QUOTE ]

And a user interface that is way ahead of any phone out there and actual web pages (sure non-flash and non-java, but those crappy mobile web pages weren't doing java or flash either) and an amazing media player, but yea, other than that it's crap.

If you have an Apple store around you should go look at it before dumping on it.

[/ QUOTE ]

as an iPod it's great, as a phone it's behind the times.

I mean, if Apple can talk everyone into paying twice what they should for an iPod with basic phone features, then good for them.

You can get many phones now that have full featured web browsers (plus normal phone features like MMS) for much less than an iPhone.

I'll probably wait until they put the same UI on a new line of iPods before I bother upgrading (and i'm a huge tech buff).