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Life with iPhone
Sep. 18th, 2008 03:33 pmTwo weeks ago i got my iPhone, so I thought it was about time to write about how I like it so far.
The basic answer is "A lot".
The longer answer starts out with noting that the basic thing that many reviews of the iPhone I've seen get wrong (and the basic flaw of all "iPhone-killers" I've seen talked about so far) is that the iPhone is not a phone. Sure, it's got mobile phone functionality. You can make and receive calls with it. But the phone application is no more special or prominent than the Safari application or the iPod application. No, the basic thing the iPhone is is a mobile Internet access platform. And that's what I really want.
As a phone, it's a phone. That's kind of it. The advanced phone functionality is easier to get to on the iPhone than it's on my Sony Ericsson work phone, but the difference is relatively slight.
As a web browser, the iPhone is enormously much better than anything else handheld I've ever seen. Comparing Safari on the iPhone with the pathetic excuse for a web browser on the Z770i is unequal on the same level as the old "Godzilla vs. Bambi" movie. Even a pretty good browser on the Z770i, like Opera Mini, isn't even playing in the same league. Apple has spent a lot of effort on making Mobile Safari the best browser possible given the physical restrictions, and they've succeeded to the point where I've occasionally been annoyed that I can't scroll a page on the Macbook by dragging my finger on the screen like I can on the iPhone. On this point, the iPhone has significantly exceeded my expectations, and those were pretty high to begin with.
As for other Internety applications, they're also pretty good. The mail client speaks IMAP4 over SSL, which is nice. It works reasonably well. The map widget is pretty nifty. And so on. The only builtin application I've found to be completely useless is the YouTube one, which I've never got to play more than a few seconds of a movie before stopping and waiting for download, not even when on a WLAN connection.
I have also, of course, downloaded a bunch of non-Apple applications. Really, with the App Store trivially reachable from the iPhone itself it'd be hard not to. They vary about as much as you expect software written by random people to do. Some are surprisingly good, like the TouchTerm ssh client, which gives an 80x24 screen that you scroll around on with finger movements. Much more usable than I expected. Some are crap and/or disguised advertisements for payware and/or frontends for subscription-only web services. The main point there is that downloading them and trying them out (or buying them, if relevant) is very, very easy.
The iPod application is all right. It's an iPod. Watching movies on it works better than I expected, and I've spent a couple of lunches watching episodes of The 4400.
The headset that came with the iPhone sucks. I'm now using the Sennheiser CX-300 phones I used for the iPod nano, and will buy a good headset soonish. I'd leave the original one out for the cats to play with if I wasn't worried that the stupid Birma might eat it.
Softwarewise, it's not perfect. Some webpages with lots of images and JavaScript makes Safari crash out to the menu view. After Telia's 3G network has played "Now you see me, now you don't" (that network has serious overloading problems, as far as I can tell) too many times
the iPhone stops seeing any cellular data network at all until it's rebooted. Voice calls and WLAN still work fine, but not 3G or EDGE. Oh, and I'm pretty sure the connection problem is with the network and not the phone, because it's heavily time-dependent. 8AM on Monday, no problem whatsoever. Lunch hour on Friday, yo-yo hell. In the exact same spot (right next to the Royal LIbrary in Stockholm, in case you want to go try it out yourself).
For many years, I have wanted to have a usable Internet connection wherever I go. Now I do. I am pleased.
The basic answer is "A lot".
The longer answer starts out with noting that the basic thing that many reviews of the iPhone I've seen get wrong (and the basic flaw of all "iPhone-killers" I've seen talked about so far) is that the iPhone is not a phone. Sure, it's got mobile phone functionality. You can make and receive calls with it. But the phone application is no more special or prominent than the Safari application or the iPod application. No, the basic thing the iPhone is is a mobile Internet access platform. And that's what I really want.
As a phone, it's a phone. That's kind of it. The advanced phone functionality is easier to get to on the iPhone than it's on my Sony Ericsson work phone, but the difference is relatively slight.
As a web browser, the iPhone is enormously much better than anything else handheld I've ever seen. Comparing Safari on the iPhone with the pathetic excuse for a web browser on the Z770i is unequal on the same level as the old "Godzilla vs. Bambi" movie. Even a pretty good browser on the Z770i, like Opera Mini, isn't even playing in the same league. Apple has spent a lot of effort on making Mobile Safari the best browser possible given the physical restrictions, and they've succeeded to the point where I've occasionally been annoyed that I can't scroll a page on the Macbook by dragging my finger on the screen like I can on the iPhone. On this point, the iPhone has significantly exceeded my expectations, and those were pretty high to begin with.
As for other Internety applications, they're also pretty good. The mail client speaks IMAP4 over SSL, which is nice. It works reasonably well. The map widget is pretty nifty. And so on. The only builtin application I've found to be completely useless is the YouTube one, which I've never got to play more than a few seconds of a movie before stopping and waiting for download, not even when on a WLAN connection.
I have also, of course, downloaded a bunch of non-Apple applications. Really, with the App Store trivially reachable from the iPhone itself it'd be hard not to. They vary about as much as you expect software written by random people to do. Some are surprisingly good, like the TouchTerm ssh client, which gives an 80x24 screen that you scroll around on with finger movements. Much more usable than I expected. Some are crap and/or disguised advertisements for payware and/or frontends for subscription-only web services. The main point there is that downloading them and trying them out (or buying them, if relevant) is very, very easy.
The iPod application is all right. It's an iPod. Watching movies on it works better than I expected, and I've spent a couple of lunches watching episodes of The 4400.
The headset that came with the iPhone sucks. I'm now using the Sennheiser CX-300 phones I used for the iPod nano, and will buy a good headset soonish. I'd leave the original one out for the cats to play with if I wasn't worried that the stupid Birma might eat it.
Softwarewise, it's not perfect. Some webpages with lots of images and JavaScript makes Safari crash out to the menu view. After Telia's 3G network has played "Now you see me, now you don't" (that network has serious overloading problems, as far as I can tell) too many times
the iPhone stops seeing any cellular data network at all until it's rebooted. Voice calls and WLAN still work fine, but not 3G or EDGE. Oh, and I'm pretty sure the connection problem is with the network and not the phone, because it's heavily time-dependent. 8AM on Monday, no problem whatsoever. Lunch hour on Friday, yo-yo hell. In the exact same spot (right next to the Royal LIbrary in Stockholm, in case you want to go try it out yourself).
For many years, I have wanted to have a usable Internet connection wherever I go. Now I do. I am pleased.
