Now that I’ve got an iPhone (dumped my Treo)

I naturally have some opinions on the subject. This weekend was a gigantic gadget upgrade for me, having purchased (though not yet received) a new iMac (24″, 2.4Ghz), bought an iPhone and EVDO service and card (Sprint Sierra Wireless 595U). So, now that I’ve lived with my iPhone for a few days I got some stuff to say.

I am, thus far, very happy having traded my treo 650 for the iPhone. That weekend my internet was out so I was forced to use my iPhone exclusively for any internet access, a trial by fire! I have to say, it’s really a pretty reasonable experience, surfing most of the web over EDGE was perfectly fine. Sitting on the couch I just surfed whatever I felt like, something I never did with the Treo and I thought I liked Blazer. Safari does a great job of knowing the structure of a page so double tapping always zooms in to just the right column size and I only rarely switch to wide view, preferring a longer view of the page. Even filling out forms, googling, whatever, all of it just worked.

When wi-fi came back - surfing was that much better. It just picks it up (after typing in the WPA password) - it still isn’t super fast, but very useable. It’s good enough that a lot of surfing happens away from the desktop now - I don’t feel the need to go to the big screen every time.

The process of registering the phone itself was a revelation. Using iTunes and filling out a couple form fields to register the phone (which also cancelled my existing account with T-mobile and moved my phone number) is not just convenient - it’s a revolution. Going and getting a new phone is an hours long process, with all the filling out of papers and the guy making countless phone calls, to where I have no idea - it’s horrendous. Here, from the comfort of my own home it took about 10 minutes, and afterwards I got email alerts and SMS’s along the way as things happened after I finished filling the forms. It really, literally couldn’t have been easier.

The form factor of the phone is great - much slimmer than my Treo 650 and it fits much better in my pocket. I love the head detection that turns off the screen when you put it up to talk and turns it back on when you take it away. It’s a little smudgy, but not terribly so and has thus far proved scratch resistant. The mail app is easy to use, and while it is annoying that it won’t let me tell it that my system supports imap idle - it gets my mail every 15 minutes which is good enough, hopefully they’ll remedy that soon. Google maps is great - easier to use than the one on my Treo and prettier, to boot.

Visual voicemail. Awesome. I used to use Spinvox on my Treo because I hate getting voicemails, dailing in, waiting for the prompts, hitting 1, blah blah. Spinvox rescued me from that and now visual voicemail does, too. You see who called and when and can listen to it like any audio file. Easy as pie - even setting up voicemail is easy - no calling in and going through all the prompts, it’s just an app, click record and save and everything happens for you. It’s conceivable that I might try and get Spinvox working with the iPhone, I like having a texty version, but I’m going to live with visual voicemail for awhile and see how it goes.

There are some downsides. The thing I miss most is an offline RSS reader. I have filled many an idle moment (say on a train) catching up with my feeds, now no longer. Google Reader is nice, but useless when I don’t have connectivity. Another app I miss is my password database - I’m not really sure what to do on this front. Clipperz still hasn’t added support for the iPhone. Sigh. And while I haven’t had occasion to miss SSH if the need for it does arise, I will feel that probably most acutely. As for bulk texting, I never do that so it’s a non-issue for me. The lack of MMS is a little annoying, but since I can email pictures moblogging continues so it’s not too big of a loss for me.

As far as existing iPhone apps go. I pretty much like them all, mostly at least if not as much as the Treo version and generally significantly more. As people have noted, though, the phone does require a lot of extra tapping, the lack of hardware buttons on the phone really compromises the system by always taking you back to where you left off. So if you weren’t on the phone app, you’ll need to click to turn on and then click to the phone. Then you have to click to favourites or the number pad or contacts. And if you click into contacts you have to tap the letter of the person you are looking up and then scroll over to them, click them and then click the number. Writing it out makes it sound worse than it is, but even so, it isn’t a speedy process.

Those are pretty much my gripes. Typing is a non-issue for me. I’m pretty accurate, less than my Treo but plenty fast enough and the predictive text part (when it is on, I’m not sure when it’s on and when it’s off) does a nice job of making things just happen. The camera’s ok, leaps and bounds better than my 650’s. I wouldn’t mind seeing the screen pushed up on the device and an iPod style scroll wheel with four buttons at the cardinal points on the phone.

There is no doubt in my mind that the iPhone is a revolution - Apple has taken power away from the telco’s and used it to build things that are good for the consumer. You may not like the iPhone, but it has hopefully changed the game for handset makers. It isn’t that it is so technically great that no other phone can compete, other phones are already much more feature packed with better specs. To some degree it is because the software is so good that hopefully it spurs other handset makers to pay more attention to their software. But far more than that it is that no handset maker has bent the telcos to their will. Why couldn’t we have had visual voicemail years ago? Why does the signup process have to be so arduous? Why couldn’t other phones sync their mp3’s so easily with the phones? It’s because the telco’s have all the power and they don’t want any of that to happen.

Aug 15th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: iphone · review