PhillC's Journal: Got me a New Gadget

With my birthday just a few days away, I've convinced my long suffering better half to plump for my present early. During an otherwise mundane clothes and food shopping excursion on Sunday, we found ourselves in an O2 store fondling an iPhone. I admit to being impressed.

My biggest reservation, without having seen the device itself, was the ease of SMS messaging and using the touch pad keyboard. It is easier than I imagined. I don't have the fattest fingers, but they aren't tiny toothpicks either, and the keyboard works fine. I'm probably a little slower using it than on my old Nokia N70, but in time I'm sure that'll improve. So, for my 34th birthday, I have received a new Apple iPhone.

The device itself is not especially light, weighing a little more than the new Nokia N95 using the "one-in-each-hand" weight test. The iPhone is thin though, about half the thickness of the N95. The screen is big, colourful and glorious. I've never been a particular Apple fanboy, have never owned an iPod and don't have any other Apple products in the household (Although my first personal computer, way back in 1986 or 1987 was an Apple IIe) but I will admit to the iPhone being quite aesthetically pleasing.

The activation process was reasonably straight forward, although when first plugged into my laptop via USB, the iPhone automatically associated itself with Sonic DVD burner rather than iTunes. No problem, I just uninstalled Sonic as it was OEM software that I never use anyway. Upgrade to iTunes 7.5 and away we go. A few minutes after completing the iTunes based registration process, I received an email saying that O2 has now activated my phone. However, I didn't actually receive service on my phone until some 12 hours later and this was only achieved by hard rebooting the device.

The iPhone picked up my WEP encrypted home wireless network no problem. After entering my password I was happily browsing away. My first disappointment was moments later. The Kapital Moto TV website uses an embedded QuickTime player to display QuickTime H.264 MOV files. In the iPhone's Safari browser these do not play, it looks like a plugin is missing. This is exceptionally odd to me, given that QuickTime is Apple technology! Somebody didn't really think on that one.

My first real joy with the iPhone wasn't far away though. Setting up my Gmail account in the iPhone's mail client, using IMAP settings was a breeze. The mail application works quite well, although you do lose Gmail's message threading capabilities. Reading my Gmail was one thing I did quite regularly on my Nokia N70, via Google's Symbian based mail reader. The iPhone's mail reader is faster and looks better. Plus good so far.

I thought I'd be frustrated by the inability to install third party applications without unlocking the phone, and maybe I will be in the future. At the moment, I'm OK with it and it stops me cluttering the thing up with slightly useful, but ultimately pointless applications. What I'd really like to see now is an iPhone SSH client for accessing my web server, but this isn't essential and I can probably live without it. What annoys me the most is that I can't remove the YouTube and Stocks icons from the iPhone home menu. I have absolutely zero interest in either. I'll probably take the plunge, invalidate my warranty and jail break the phone when the hacks are finished for 1.1.2 firmware - I'm not going to downgrade to 1.1.1.

In summary, this is how my iPhone experience looks so far:

Good:

• WiFi - works really well and I'm looking forward to making use of free access to The Cloud's hotspots.
• Email - Gmail on the iPhone with IMAP works a treat.
• Form factor - it's attractive
• Threaded SMS Conversations - handy, but might encourage me to keep old, redundant text messages.
• Landscape - the big screen is great for photo and video viewing. Also not bad for regular web pages using the zoom function.

Bad:

• Default Home icons - can't remove the useless YouTube and Stocks icons
• Can't Install New Apps - minor annoyance at the moment, but I'd like an SSH client on my iPhone
• Can't Remove Apps - only old people use YouTube or want Stock prices in the UK.
• Slippery - I am going to drop it at some point, but have ordered a rubberised case and screen protector already.
• Calendar - can't sync Google Calendar with iPhone Calendar application. Seems like it can only be done via a web based app.