So I know everyone and their brother has written their own review of the iPhone, but I wanted to wait for a while to make sure that I really understood the device before I wrote my review. It turns out that after nearly a month of ownership, I’m thoroughly pleased with the purchase decision. I was previously using a Treo 700wx on Sprint, and decided to switch over and try out AT&T and see what the iPhone had to offer.
The voice quality on the iPhone is roughly what I would expect. I’m used to the slightly better quality that most CDMA phones offer, but I was surprised to find the GSM-based iPhone really didn’t sound much different (I’ve tried GSM in the past and never found the quality to my liking). AT&T’s network is better for where I live and work, although I’ve found a few places where my Sprint phone worked that the iPhone doesn’t. All in all it’s a wash as to who has better coverage.
The data speeds of the EDGE based network are clearly not what I’m used to with full EVDO support on my Treo. That said, the superiority of the browser offered on the iPhone often makes up for it. Using Safari on the iPhone actually lets me find content on the Internet I otherwise couldn’t find or would take forever to scroll around on a poorly rendered page to locate. The browser really is excellent, although it does “crash” more often than I expected. When I’m in a WiFi hotspot, and I can use the WiFi support to surf the Internet, the iPhone is hands down better than my previous PDA phones for Internet access.
The basic Bluetooth integration with my car also works significantly better on the iPhone than it ever did with my Treo. I now get the full names and phone numbers of everyone in my phone, and it accurately reports who is calling when I receive a call. This is a very handy feature when it all works right.
With respect to other features, the iPhone isn’t the most feature laden phone. It has most everything you’d want in a typical cell phone, but it’s lacking the little extras that always made my Windows Mobile phone so much better for me. A few things in particular that I’ve noticed were lacking:
- No copy/paste capability
- Forward text messages
- Send/receive picture messages – This is especially bad because of the way AT&T deals with this. Instead of providing a hyperlink in the SMS notification of a picture message, they give you a username and password for the “viewmymessage.com” website, which are of course randomly generated cryptic messages. Of course, even if you manage to log into the website on the iPhone, AT&T uses a Flash app to render the pictures, so there is nothing you can do on the phone to get the pictures to show up
- Caps lock (minor issue, but can be annoying)
- Select text
- Search for a contact (useful when you have 100+ contacts, and you don’t want to scroll through them all to find and call someone)
- iChat/IM capability
- Custom ring tones (I thought every phone had this..)
- Send/receive files (or contacts) via Bluetooth
With respect to some of the apps that come on the iPhone, there are a few improvements I’d like to see for the next software update to make sure them a little more useful. For example:
Calendar: Support for more of what I would consider basic calendar features, like supporting free/busy/tentative status on appointments, improved capability for recurring appointments on the device, and better display of conflicting appointments in the agenda view.
Stocks: Be able to link over to some website for more information about a particular ticker, for example, to see more chart data, additional statistics, and a new feed for the symbol. This is pretty typical stock webpage stuff, and I’m surprised it’s not in the Stocks app on the phone.
iPod: I see the On The Go playlist is also a feature of the iPhone, but poorly implemented. There’s no way when you are browsing the track list or listening to a song to add it to the On The Go playlist. To do this, you have to go to the playlist, and then select “Add” to add songs to the list. Lame, that isn’t the way I want to build a playlist.
Of course, the one feature I really am waiting for, would be support to synchronize with a Microsoft Exchange server through Exchange ActiveSync. It’s nice that I can get my e-mail through IMAP, but my synchronizing my calendar and contacts between my corporate mailbox and my device is what I depend on to make sure I know where I’m going during the day. It’s the whole reason I need/want a smart phone in the first place. For now, I wrote a web application that works on the iPhone that provides a live view of my calendar data using Exchange Web Services. Let’s hope Apple managed to figure out how to make this more seamless for corporate users in a future update.
So, at the end of the day, what do I think about my iPhone? I’m extremely happy with the purchase. The iPhone is a technical marvel, and the user experience and interaction with the device alone is worth owning one. Make no mistake; this type of interaction is the future of mobile computing. Someday in the future, all devices will function as intuitively (or more so hopefully) as the iPhone. Technically, the software is a good attempt at V1 software. I except with future updates and a (hopefully available someday) 3rd party SDK for native applications on the phone, that the iPhone will become a truly create mobile platform that inspires other mobile vendors to really start creating some great devices to compete.