A Month With The iPhone
The longer I use the iPhone, the more I love it. Yes, love it. (Why don’t you marry it?-Because I’m already married.)
A few reasons:
1) It’s built incredibly solid. At first, you carry it around like it’s a glass bubble, but the more you handle it…the more it is treated like a cell phone. It holds up nice. The big, bright screen shares a pocket with my keys and there isn’t a scratch to be found.
I’m a big fan of electronics and gadgets, but I don’t buy them often. Usually, when you handle a gadget, it feels cheap. It feels like they cut every corner they could to make it less expensive to build. This includes usually laptops, phones, music players, cameras, etc. But this isn’t the case with most Apple products. The iPhone, iPod and Macbook are great examples.
2) After a month of use, it’s still a pleasure to use the phone. I’m not talking about all the web, SMS, etc. Those are fun too, but even the phone aspect is great to interact with every day. Going back to a regular phone would be near impossible for me now.
3) I’ve always used my mobile phones for email and internet lookups, but this iPhone brings it to a whole other level. If I were to go on a trip, I could easily leave my laptop at home and have the iPhone replace it for a few days without skipping a beat. (That never would have happened before.) Mail, Internet, and Calendar on the iPhone is just as powerful as it is on my comptuer. And since Netnewswire syncs with Newsgator, all of my feeds are available at anytime as well. (Just yesterday, Newsgator announced an iPhone interface for your online feeds. It’s pretty.)
4) The “Maps” application by Google is a huge selling point. We spent last week in Oceanside and I used it all the time. It’s very easy to find places, get directions, call restaurants, and just have fun with it. In fact, the Google Maps online could take some design points from the way the iPhone does it.
5) I love to watch Candace play with her phone. She loves it and uses it all the time. I regularly hear, “I love this phone.” from the other room.
6) The Wifi and EDGE internet connections are seamless. Getting online is very easy. I often have to remind myself how easy it is to use. Before, I’d see a link on tv and send myself a note reminding me to check it out next time I’m on the computer. I’ve caught myself doing that a couple times forgetting that the iPhone will give me the same experience as the computer will later. Pages load up beautifully. They are easy to read with the crystal clear screen. Apple has made input fields and drop down menus easy to use.
As an example, this morning I had to get a smog check for Candace. When I started the car up, I remembered that it still had the “Check Engine” light on because the dealership forgot to turn it off last time. As you know, the smog check won’t go thru if this light is on.
I was about to shut off the car to go back inside to look up how to turn it off. I caught myself and instead used the iPhone. It was right online with the house Wifi, it took 90 seconds to google the answer and turn the light off. Incredibly useful.
7) Sending and receiving text messages is useful and fun. The iPhone breaks it down by person as opposed to chronological. Instead of just having random snippets of text to go thru, the iPhone has them look like a chat window. You can scroll thru all past messages with a person and read it like a conversation.
8- The Photos are fun to scroll thru. Whether you’ve taken them with the phone or synced them over from your computer, you just flick thru them and enjoy. The screen makes them look great.
You can also easily sync pictures FROM the phone. So instead of your “Cheesy smile in front of the Rome Coliseum” picture just sitting on your phone, it can zip over to iPhoto easily.
9) The virtual keyboard is great to use. I’ve never been able to type this fast on a phone. Not to solicit myself, but I was quick with regular phones. I’d beat people one-handed. But I’m quicker with the iPhone’s keyboard and very, very rarely make mistakes. The more you use it and trust it, the faster it gets.
I also love that the keyboard can change according to what you are doing. This isn’t possible with plastic keyboards on Treos and Sidekicks. The buttons change. For example, when you are entering a url, the space bar isn’t used so it becoms a “.com” button.
10) As with the iPod, the unsung hero is iTunes. Syncing with iTunes is great. Your Address book, your calendar, your photos, music and movies all move over without a hitch.
Even better, iTunes keeps a backup of everything. This is incredibly nice for restoring. My first iPhone was being passed around and plopped into a root beer float. When I got my new iPhone, I plugged it in and within 2 minutes I was exactly where I was before with everything on my phone.
Apple called the iPhone “revolutionary.” I was skeptical. Now I’m not.
(PS, I just wrote this whole blog post from the iPhone while I’ve been waiting for the smog check.)