Well I managed to get an iPhone four weeks ago after trying for about 8 weeks. I got it from the 3 Store at the bottom of the QVB Building near the entrance to Town Hall Station.
So I've had four weeks with it like I say and I thought I'd jot down my impressions thus far.
I like it is the shortened version, alot. Physically it's a little big to hold but all the same it feels good in the hand- not too light, not too heavy. The screen is bewdaful really- how they will improve it I don't know, sometimes finger marks come up clearly and other (most) times it looks pristine.
The volume control button on the left side I knock / accidentally touch when browsing in landscape but otherwise not a problem. The silent mode button I've been using as I've taken to carrying the phone with me whilst at work.
Putting the headphones in doesn't seem natural and I'm concerned i might scratch the screen, all the same no real biggie.
The sleep mode button on the top also is placed nicely and feels nice/right to depress.
Phone calls have been good, clarity is better than my old phone and no drop outs yet.
I use a set of Sennheiser over the ear headphones and I love it when I'm listening to music and I get a call- I slide the right side of my headphones away and put the phone up to my ear. I get the voice of the caller in my left headphone.
I haven't set up voice mail and don't use voicemail.
iPod-This is pretty good tho somethings/features I haven't mastered yet or they don't quite exist or happen for me- I've knocked shuffle a couple of times accidentally and the screen can be sensitive when u chop and change your view and thumbs are bigger than they should be. When in landscape i can't adjust the volume- am I doin it wrong? Also you can access the basic features of the ipod whilst in most other apps (double click the home button) tho I've found the volume slider a little clunky.
I love being able to use the speakers- been walking around stack listening to my music! Yeah.
Web browsing- frustrating and amazing tho mostly pretty damn cool. Mobile versions of smh.com and news.com are great cos they load so quickly but an edited version of the real thing makes the news seem censored or at best selected for the common denominator. Some times having to pinch and stretch the page is a pain but at the same time it still seems pretty cool.
In many ways the screen is too small to view web pages but any bigger and it's going to be a drag in your pocket- you just have to accept that this is mobile internet.
I've been using Facebook alot more and being able to view and post on the move is very cool.
Twitter- the app i'm using is Twitteriffic which loads 100 tweets at a time- it's quite good, it was providing the tweeters icon but has strangely stopped doin that, overall this is OK.
I've bookmarked my Bloglines account- bookmarks as icons on your home pages is a cool feature too!- but Bloglines isn't that great on the iPhone- i may have to get a dedicated app for this as some feeds don't appear and after you look at a post and click back it takes you to the top of the page not where you clicked from.
I have about 3 or 4 pages open at a time which I can cope with as far as load time goes- 3 isn't the fastest network (Telstra is) but I can't really complain AND i get over a GB included each month!
I've paid for one app so far, Pocket Weather which has been very good - it updates each time i open it and gets a new temperture reading if the temp has changed since last opening. It also gives a 7 day forecast, wind direction, humidity, apparent temp, high and low temp and sunrise and sunset.
Maps- this is mostly pretty cool tho no real world application yet- I'd like to be able to zoom in increase the text size or the names of roads and street numbers and again being able to zoom into street view is pretty cool.
I'm going to New York for a holiday in a couple of weeks and I think the directions option will come in very helpful tho I'm not sure I will get 3G while i'm there- i'm hoping to have access to lots of free wireless!
Mail- I use this more to send than receive but it has come in handy from time to time.
Video Recording- this was important for me even tho I haven't used it much - the lighting needs to be premium and the sound does too. I intend to post video blogs to the family while away.
Voice Control - i haven't looked into this but it really is the future especially in regards to laws for using mobile devices while driving. The other day I wanted to suss out the cheapest and most convenient petrol station while driving but I was also in a rush and didn't want to stop.
It's an OK camera phone, the focus feature is quite good.
SMS- this is quite good- the way you can see the flow of conversation. The auto correction is quite good i've found. Just typing can be better some days than others.
Cut and paste I haven't used too much either yet.
Tethering- using your mobile as a modem - I learnt how to do this in the nick of time as my home broadband was running very low so i hooked up my laptop to the iPhone- i have to do this via bluetooth as I'm running OSX Tiger (or my Mac is not an Intel processor) - but it worked well tho not as fast as my home broadband it was pretty good all the same.
OK so that will do it, plenty of room for improvement and lot's for me to learn too.
Even tho it's a little computer it seemed easy enuf to get my head around and also their are "How to's" on Apples web site just in case.
The Apps are just another thing that sets this phone apart in my opinion although I can't really say as I haven't seen a Palm Pre in action and although I see plenty of Crackberries around, the keyboard/ screen and text size seem shortcomings from a distance.
Here's the same spot as my last post, shot a week or so later, but this time with a 5 megapixel camera- I wanted to see the difference in details for myself. The water looks a lovely shade of blue in this shot-as you can see we are enjoying some nice albeit cool weather in Sydney.
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