Trust me, I’m pretty much over the iPhone hype — as evidenced by the fact that it took me 5 days to go get a new one — so I won’t be blogging about it incessantly or spending any significant time discussing it. The time for that was a year ago when the first one debuted, and the new one isn’t an earth-shattering change.
Instead, I’ll periodically update this entry with some notes and impressions.
3G
The biggest problem with 3G is its unavailability. AT&T’s 3G subscribers pay a premium price to access data via this speedier system, but if one lives in an area without coverage — which is most places — they still must pay anyway if they have a 3G phone. My experience with 3G in the San Jose area, first with a Blackberry and then with a iPhone 3G, is that coverage is pretty good… if you’re in a car on a freeway. Turn off on to a residential street, and you lost 3G — if you go indoors, forget it. You often don’t even get EDGE, the default slower system.
My assumption is this: when phone companies began to build out the cellular infrastructure, they made a fatal assumption: that the only place people would use cellular phones was in their car. After all, back then cell phones were still installed in cars, and portable phones came with a battery and transmitter in a big bag.
Over time, as phones got smaller and personal, it became clear that people would use them everywhere. But by then, NIMBY groups decided they didn’t want any cell towers in the neighborhoods.
So here we are. In an era where more and more people are dumping landline phones in favor of mobiles, they can’t get signal in their homes.
GPS
This seems to work really well — again, when you are outdoors. It is pretty quick, no doubt because of the “Assisted” nature of the system. It tracked me consistently and smoothly while driving and on the highway the 3G system fed the map data quite well.
The GPS is so accurate that it pinpointed me in the back bedroom of my tiny house; now I understand the paranoid alert boxes asking for permission to access current location data. While I enjoy the feature in Twitterific that posts my current location, I’m not so sure that I want the precise coordinates of my backyard broadcast on the internet.
Lack of any live turn-by-turn routing means that the phone won’t be replacing my GPS navigation device. But it will certainly be useful outside the car.
Battery
Power usage was the reason given for not including 3G in the original iPhone, and I have to wonder how incredibly bad it must have been a year ago because today’s 3G iPhone has horrible battery life. I’m still trying to find the right balance between the various power-sapping services like 3G, push data, and GPS. I’ve been experimenting with different push settings to see if it helps; for instance, I’ve turned off push for my calendars and contacts and instead put them on manual. Turns out that by doing this, my calendars only sync when I open the calendar application, which is fine for me — others may need to background updating so that they get notifications of changes from the office so this isn’t necessarily a solution for them.
[Update] Apple has posted a page about optimizing battery life. In the small print at the bottom, they explain how they arrived at their battery estimates through various tests, and the settings they used in those tests. I’ve recreated their settings, from turning off “Ask to Join Wifi Networks” to disabling auto brightness, location services, push, and setting mail to check every 30 minutes. But there is one glaring thing in all their test configurations: they have call forwarding turned on.
In other words, they set their iPhone to not receive any calls. Oh yes, they can make calls, and that’s how they arrived at their 10 hours of talk time on 2G — but to do so they have disabled the ability of the phone to receive a call. I would submit that this is patently ridiculous and sort of renders the phone practically pointless, wouldn’t you?
Accessories
Looks like, once again, old accessories are useless and the iPod/iPhone ecosystem cycles around once again, generating more money for some and bankruptcy for others. My iPod hifi doesn’t work properly with the new phone — it doesn’t charge. The three docks scattered around the house are useless now (at $30 a pop).
Sound quality
People swear that sound quality is better. I think this is the usual phenomenon that accompanies any Apple product or software release — people swear something is new but nothing has changed. I don’t hear any difference at all. The sound quality is the same, the speaker is the same volume.
Looks
The new phone, despite Apple’s marketing claims, is clearly bigger than the old one. Not by much, but to my eye it is definitely significant. This is especially apparent if you put the two phones side by side. The new one is much wider, and this is exaggerated by the black borders around the screen, making the display look smaller. There’s just something about the proportions of the new phone that are strange, like the new wide iPod nano. It’s not quite right.
I got a white phone, realizing that the black version I’ve seen is quickly laden with greasy fingerprints. The white doesn’t show the fingerprints.
The phone rocks slightly when set down because of the curved back. This is somewhat annoying because I typically type on the phone sitting on a table during meetings, however it’s not nearly as bad as I first thought. The rocking is very slight.
Apps
So far, there are few gems and no must-haves. iPhone apps have a way to go before they mature; even the well-concepted ones like Twitterific, leveraging such integrated technology as location and camera, need tweaks to make them really useful (and speedy).
Unfortunately, the App Store is filled with the sort of craptacular nonsense that Apple’s web downloads page is famous for — there’s no quality control at all, and seemingly little imagination among “developers.” Example:
Mind Warp is an optical illusion that makes the skin on your hands boil and crawl. Stare at the center of the animation for 30 seconds, then look at the back of your hand. Price: $0.99
There are two — count’em, TWO — bubble-wrap simulators, 99¢ each.
THREE apps that do nothing but display a blank screen to emulate a “flashlight”.
Untold numbers of apps to calculate tips (doesn’t the iPhone come with a calculator? Don’t humans come with brains?).
How about the ability to “write or draw using a virtual pencil!” Only $4.99!
And really — is Sudoku the new “Hello, World”? Is there some unwritten rule that every developer must write a Sudoku game before they do anything else?
General rants
The iPhone system — like Mac OS X itself — has become inordinately complicated. There are days when I try to do something on my Mac and realize in frustration that they’ve added too many complicated functions with confusing interfaces, moving us closer to Windows. iPhone is getting complicated. Settings for different functions are scattered around here and there; nothing quite makes sense when it comes to settings for mail, calendars and contacts. Some settings for push/fetch are in one place, some are in another. Another confusion is that the settings for various apps are not contained with the apps themselves, but are put into the Settings app. To change a setting for, say, AIM, you exit the AIM app and then open a different one. Then exit that and go back to AIM.
UPDATE: Apps and Accounts
There are lots of new apps out there for social networking, chat & IM, etc. — but the major drawback here is that they tend to require yet another account. Twitter clients like Twinkle require you to create an account with them, even though you already have a Twitter account. The new Palringo software, which allows you to combine all your IM systems in one app, requires you to create an account with them. I’ve already got accounts for Twitter, Facebook, AIM, iChat, Loopt, Where, etc… do I really need to have yet another account for every freakin’ app? Do I need to disclose my personal information to various developers across the globe and have yet more passwords and usernames to remember? After only a few weeks I have already resolved to not use any app that requires me to log in to yet another account. Sorry, guys.
[More to come, probably]
