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I picked mine up on the 29th @ 7PM without waiting by going to one of Apple’s flagship stores (University Village)…the great part is people who waited in a 1000ft line waited for nothing…and it only took about an hour to get through all of them. Anyhow…I picked up the 8GB and went home. Since I was on a Cingular family plan prior to my purchase, when I tried to activate it I encountered some problems; some kind of error because I was on a discounted plan through Boeing.
Since it was after hours, I had to wait until the next day until I could get the phone activated. My first impressions of the iPhone were great. Reading previous reviews, I was hesitant about the touch screen, but after using it, honestly, it’s a wierd thing to get used to but I don’t think I’ll have any problems as I continue to use the keypad.
I was able to sync all my iCals, contacts via Address Book, photos, and music without a problem. It’s unfortunate that the iPhone OS is approximately 700MB…
I was a bit worried when I heard there wasn’t a search function in the address book, but the scrolling in contacts is pretty simple. If you want to scroll slowly, you just flick up and down in the center of the screen, but if you want to scroll by entire letter groups all you need to do is flick the scroll bar up and down.
Animations are snappy and the phone is responsive, just like you see in the advertisements. One thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes the iPhone will forget how it is orientated, especially when I’m using Safari…so I have to wiggle it a few times. The keyboard is much easier to use in widescreen. Real browsers > mobile browsers.
EDGE isn’t SUPER fast, but I can hop on google maps or check email without a problem. 75% of the time I was in a free wifi hotspot today. Wifi really took a toll on my battery life though, and I was able to go through an entire charge before the day was over. My only gripes about the phone are that I can’t run certain things like Mail and Google maps in wide screen. I’d be nice because the keyboard is much easier to use in that format.
Mail is simple, and reminds me vaguely of OSX. One quirk I encountered was trying to set up POP access via Google Apps. Since Apple tries to make the iPhone as easy as possible to use, they may have tried a bit too hard. To log in with my GApps account, my ID is “jon@ngsthings.com”, but since the POP server is pop.gmail.com the iPhone thinks I have a gmail account and proceeds to add “@gmail.com” to my login ID (which would be fine if I was ONLY using Gmail). Obviously trying to log in with “jon@ngsthings.com@gmail.com” wouldn’t work.
To work around this problem, I had to delete all the mailboxes off the iPhone, reenter mail on the iPhone, click “Other” when I was prompted for the type of email I planned on using, THEN I was able to enter everything without the iPhone auto-completing. Only then was I able to get around the problem
I do have some gripes about mail…
- You can’t select all the messages and mark them as read…so that was a PITA since I have 500 unread messages now
- You can’t select more than one message at a time
- I can’t create folders to sort my mail
- It doesn’t do widescreen
- When you type, sometimes you are able to move your cursor to edit your words, but in some places, you can’t do it for some reason
- No widescreen in all applications
- Dock connector pinout for audio doesn’t seem to work with my dock connector in the car
It seems Apple has disabled the lineout for anything other than the included Dock connector!
This is a GIANT PITA! - Can’t sync via bluetooth
And finally, some gripes about the phone in general:
Everything considered…it’s basically the best thing I’ve purchased in a while. This is the Rev A, 1.0; I’m excited for the applications and improvements in the future.
