As I mentioned in the last post, I don’t want this to sound like a complete Apple bash of the iPhone. So here are some thoughts about the good side of the iPhone, going through by component.

First and foremost, it really does just work. I’m not sure if a user manual came with the iPhone (and I can’t be arsed to get up and look in the box :p) but I certainly haven’t needed one yet.
As you’d expect and have no doubt seen already, the Home page or main menu lets you access anything on the iPhone with little more than one touch.

Setup and Config – I had absolutely no problems with activation. Unboxed, connected, log in to iTMS, done. It literally took less than 10 minutes. None of this having to wait 24hrs before you can recieve calls, straight away.
WiFi config is simple too, if you are broadcasting your network name (or iPhone discovers a new network), it provides you a list clearly indicating the name and security status of the network. If no key is required you just press that network and it does it’s thing. If you have to specify a key, so be it. I haven’t found any problems with it at all.
iPod – Just to get this out of the way quickly, you get exactly what you expect. Its just an iPod. The use of Cover Flow is really cool and beats the scroll wheel hands down. There’s not much to say about it tbh, what were you expecting!
iTMS – Whilst this only works when you are connected to WiFi, it’s a cool addition. Easy to search, buy and download. It all sync’s up with iTunes when you connect to the Mac too. One thing I found however, if a track you buy is available as a DRM free (iTunes Plus) version, although it prompts you with “This will be downloaded in iTunes Plus format”, it won’t download to the phone. I had to repurchase it through iTunes. I’m not sure if it was a one off (Slaves To Gravity – Meantime) or not as I haven’t bought anything else in that format.
The Top Tens and Featured lists make for good reading when you are bored, standing in line in Starbucks. That actually reminds me, i’m yet to see anything of the rumoured free downloads from a Starbucks yet. Was that just a rumour or just Stateside?
Widgets – To me, Stocks doesn’t seem to fit with the UK market. Whilst i’ve got shares in a few companies here and there, I don’t invest enough to *need* to know the share price OTF. I can’t think of many people I know that do. Of course, I could be well off the mark but it seems to me to be a bit of a fluff addition to the iPhone. Weather and Clock are a lot more relevant and useful, even though a few main cities in the UK don’t appear in the list – Reading, PA is listed but not the one in Berkshire. I was nicely surprised to find Portsmouth in there though.
Notes – I had a whole bunch of notes on my old phone; addresses, grocery lists, films I want to rent… You know, the kind of thing you think about for a minute then promptly forget until the next day/week.. The lack of Cut & Paste is a really ball ache here. You can’t even highlight a number and dial it. That said, it’s still useful, I just wish it would sync up with the Mac.
iCal/Contacts – In much the same way as the iPod functions, these work just great.
Mail/Safari – Ignoring (again) the lack of Cut & Paste as well as the inability to save images to the iPhone, these work exactly as i’d expect. Cookies are used in Safari so you don’t have to continually enter your credentials to access sites. Also the number of mainstream sites with dedicated iPhone interfaces is increasing daily – Facebook, BBC News, BBC Podcasts (although I don’t seem to be able to download the actual Podcasts!!).
Photos – The screen quality is excellent, my pictures from iPhoto look really great on the iPhone. The accelerometer part is more than just a gimmick here, it really does give a nice kind of ‘this is how it should be’ feel. Much better than my old phone – open the menu, joystick down to picture, open it, wait 5, landscape, wait 5.
The screen is obviously of a wonderful size and ratio. Even pictures taken with the (subpar) onboard camera look good at this resolution.
Phone – Visual Voicemail, at first it seemed a bit gimmicky but it’s actually very useful. No more having to sit through crap to hear if there is anything worth listening to. Other than that, the sound quality is fine both ways. The nice sync between the phone and mac contacts is also well thought (but obvious also).
SMS – Whilst i’ve bashed quite a bit about the missing bits of SMS on the iPhone, the conversation/chat style of displaying is really quite good. No more wondering WTF the reply means, no more having to back out of a message to the sent items then back to the message.

So after all that, do I enjoy using the iPhone? Yes. Now i’m getting used to it and now i’m actually comparing its usage against my previous phone (SE k800i), there are a lot of plus points about it. In-fact there are a lot more plus points than negatives. Taking it a step further, the majority of the negatives *could* be resolved in a firmware update, or even by 3rd party applications (assuming the SDK isn’t sandboxed off too much). As I find more and more sites and applications that are tailored for the iPhone, the usefulness of the device increases and will continue to do so.

[tags]iPhone, Apple, Mac, iPhoto, iTunes, iTMS[/tags]

Related posts:

1. A more objective look at iPhone (part 3: A few more words)
2. A more objective look at iPhone (part 1: Things the iPhone can't do)
3. What sucks about the iPhone

Let’s break it down into; Things the iPhone can’t do, Things the iPhone does badly, Things the iPhone does well.
I’m not sure i’ll get the time to write the whole article today so i’ll split it into three posts.

Things the iPhone can’t do

Firstly, these issues can be split into two groups; Hardware limitation and Software limitation.
I think it’s important to call these out seperately as obviously the Hardware stuff can’t be changed whereas the Software limitations _can_ be changed. Infact, and I need to find the quote, I read earlier in the week that a spokesperson from either o2 or Apple had confirmed that there will be additions to the software to bring it further inline with existing handsets.

Hardware

The camera – let’s make no bones about it, 2mp these days is a poor show. It has no flash which is something that is fairly common these days. It has no zoom, digitial or otherwise. Again this is almost standard on recent camera phones.
Quality wise, it produces adequate images when you manage to get good lighting. I’d compare it to the camera in a Macbook iSight.
Will I use it? Probably not as often as i’ve used the camera on previous phones, especially as it is missing the MMS ability (see Software section).

Connectivity – The EDGE network is pretty much as I expected, fairly slow. However, in comparison to the 3G service I used previously on Vodafone, it takes roughly the same amount of time to load Gmail or Google docs into Safari as my previous phone took to load the ‘optimized’ versions. Using it for IMAP connection to Gmail via the built in mail.app clone, it is more than satisfactory. I find myself able to check my email far easier than with my previous phone, although that is mostly likely due to Google rolling out IMAP support to Gmail.
WiFi – This actually works very well and does well to subsidise the EDGE network. Infact, when out and about I find myself using WiFi networks more than EDGE. The number of open networks (whether intentional or not ) has been quite pleasing. A quick look on The Clouds website shows a number of free to use networks in most of the bars and shops that I frequent locally. Even the local Sainsburys had an open network the other day, most useful for checking my grocery list on Google Docs.

Software

These are items that i’m sure could be fixed/included in a later update – whether they do or not is a different matter.

Bluetooth – Unable to transmit or recieve data from other devices. This is something I miss from my previous phone, recieving contacts, images or videos from colleagues and friends. Also, you can’t use it as a modem device over bluetooth either, i’m not sure you’d want to using EDGE anyway! I’d like to be able to sync my calendars and contacts over bluetooth (or even better over WiFi) to my Macbook without having to sync with iTunes.
MMS – You aren’t able to receive native MMS messages, instead you are sent an SMS message from o2 containing a password to view the image online at www.02.co.uk. I don’t know how this works with video or audio.
Video Recording – What with the fairly low pixel count on the camera, i’m not sure you’d want to use this anyway.
SMS – Due to the way that SMS conversations are stored, There is no way to send a message to multiple recipients. I’d quite often use this on a Saturday watching the football. There is no way to receive delivery reports for SMS messages. There is no way to forward on a sent or received SMS to another recipient. Lastly, if you accidentally hit the SEND button, you cannot cancel the message. This has caught me out a number of times, resulting in confusing and wasted SMSs!
Keyboard – I’m used to the T9 standard of predictive text, in that it offers you a list of potential words. I can see why this isn’t used on the iPhone (as you have the whole keyboard not just a bunch of numbers) but it only offers you one word which you have to forcibly reject by tapping the screen on the recommended word. This can get annoying when you hit space and it automatically changes what you’ve entered. The lack of Copy & Paste is also frustrating, not just from within SMS conversations or emails but you should be able to C&P between applications. If I want to quote something from a webpage or indeed a URL in SMS, you have to remember it and type it out yourself.
Images – Although they claim that it is a full version of Safari on the iPhone, there are a number of things missing. The most noticable for me so far is the inability to save images from webpages. If they fixed this it would be a decent enough workaround to the lack of direct MMS support.
Documents – It would be nice to be able to create/edit documents (iWork/Office/whatever) on the go and have them sync’d (over Bluetooth or WiFi ) with the Macbook.

That pretty much concludes my list so far of things the iPhone doesn’t do. Rather than rant on about how much it sucks, i’ll try and sweeten the deal by writing up the good side of it next.

[tags]iPhone, o2, SMS, MMS, Apple, Mac[/tags]

Related posts:

1. A more objective look at iPhone (part 3: A few more words)
2. What sucks about the iPhone
3. A more objective look at iPhone (part 2: Things the iPhone does well)

Related posts:

1. A more objective look at iPhone (part 1: Things the iPhone can't do)
2. Quick iPhone wish list
3. A more objective look at iPhone (part 2: Things the iPhone does well)

I’m angry. The problem is that they have the monoploy and you can’t get tickets anywhere else.
I don’t know who is worse, Ticketmaster or the touts that buy up the tickets with no intention of going and sell them on.

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I found a site, courtesy of Digg.com which has some great comparisons between 480p and 720p – 480 being the resolution in which standard SD (Standard Definition) film is recorded and broadcast and 720 being the lowest resolution to qualify as HD film.  (The p stands for progressive scan, stick it in google or wiki for the full details )

The sites creator has taken identical screen grabs of both sources from Apple.com movie trailers and has set them up as roll overs on the page.  The page takes quite some time to download as the images are big but it’s worth it.

The first image shown is the 480p or SD grab, when you mouse over it the 720p or HD grab is shown.  Note:  The first time you roll over, it has to download the 720p image so give it some time.
Once it is done, you can clearly see the difference in quality.  Notice the clarity of the skin in the Fantastic Four grab, the sharpness of the grab from The Simpsons and the others.

I was pretty sceptical of the difference before I got my panel but as soon as I put the HD trailers on that I’d downloaded over Xbox Live, I was smitten.  I guess HD really is one of those things you have to see to believe.

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I wanted to get a Wii out here but they are apparently region locked

I wanted to get a PS3 out here but they are sold out

My iPod is starting to wear out I think

Time for a new iPod

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1. Wii-ked

The last two days i’ve been one of the “experts” at one of our user groups, this one hosted at the Millenium Hilton on Church St.  If you know NYC, you might know this is *directly* opposite ground zero.
It’s been quite distracting really, the space where they are building doesn’t look big enough to house the 2 WTC towers, let alone the other one (or was it other ones?) that collapsed.
Apparently this Hilton was shut for 18 months after that day, there is a building to the left of ground zero that is still being fixed up from it.

From the heady hights of the presidential suite (swanky cocktail party, unfortunately i’m not staying in it!), which is atop of the hotel, the footprint just doesn’t compute.

Oh, and I went to the Apple store the other day and am gonna take the plunge and get me one!

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