iPhone Impressions

[drplokta]

The executive summary is that while its functionality is lacking in a number of areas (some of them important, and some of them not), and it's buggy in some respects, it's the most engaging gadget I've acquired at least since my first Mac (a last-generation TiBook 5½ years ago). It's simply fun to use, which makes up for a lot.

And now some details.

Form factor: Very acceptable. It's both wider and taller than the Nokia N70 it's replacing, but a good deal shorter and narrowed than the Nokia N800 that it's also replacing, and it's much thinner and lighter than either. It's the first allegedly portable gadget I've had that is comfortable in a shirt pocket. It also looks good, like a single lump of obsidian hewn from an iPhone quarry somewhere.

Functionality: Things it doesn't do, in decreasing order of annoyance:

• Bluetooth network tethering -- really needed for the TomTom to download traffic updates (at least unless and until they do a TomTom iPhone app --for more on that see below). Would also be handy to let me use the 3G Internet connection from the laptop, although I appreciate that that would annoy O2 -- but it shouldn't, since they're selling an allegedly unlimited Internet connection.
  
• Bluetooth file transfer -- would be a nice handy way to get stuff on or off the phone. I can't imagine why it's not there (except see notes below about the file system).
  
• Bluetooth sync -- why does it need a wired connection to sync calendars and contacts with a Mac or PC when Bluetooth would do it nicely?
  
• Bluetooth GPS lookup (are we seeing a pattern here?), to let my Kodak V610 camera acquire the location automatically from the phone at the time of taking photos. Presumably missing because a) Apple didn't put any useful Bluetooth profiles on the phone and b) the GPS chipset isn't powered unless an app specifically calls it, to save battery life.
  
• SD card slot.
  
• MMS -- I think I've sent two or three MMS messages in two years of having the capability, so no big deal.
  
• Video calls -- I've never made a video call except to try it out, so I really doubt I'll miss it.

Power: As other have mentioned, the battery life when using a 3G Internet connection is alarmingly short. A heavy Internet user would need to recharge during the day. I think I'll be OK as long as I remember to charge it every day.

Bugs: Crashes worryingly often when running third-party apps, to the extent that I'm not sure I see the point of the "walled garden" approach. Backup to the Mac takes several hours, which is just insane. Mobileme just doesn't work with Outlook calendars stored on an Exchange server, and also should sync with different categories in a single Outlook calendar rather than creating a new calendar for each category on the iPhone (and iCal).

App Store: A number of developers seem to be waiting a long time for their apps to be approved, and while I'm sure they're snowed under, Apple need to do whatever it takes to get apps approved in a reasonable time -- let's say two working days from submission. "Whatever it takes" may include relaxing their standards and cutting down on the amount of checking they do, until the backlog is cleared.

Apart from that, the App Store is going to be a raging success, and some developers will make an awful lot of money. It makes it ridiculously easy to buy software. It could do with some standard way of creating a time-limited free trial version of apps, however.

Navigation: The GPS seems reasonably quick and accurate outdoors, and pretty slow indoors. Which is to be expected. I tried it out in the car (while stationary), and it seemed to get a lock reasonably quickly, so it should be good for in-car satnav. The terms & conditions of the SDK prohibit turn-by-turn navigation programs, and there are all kinds of theories about the hardware not being up to it or Apple trying to suppress competition for a program they'll sell themselves, but I believe the real story is simpler. The map data on the iPhone comes from Google, who license it from TeleAtlas, who are owned by TomTom, and I suspect they're simply not licensed to use the maps for turn-by-turn navigation. Which would thus not exclude such a program from a company that actually owns the map data and can provide the data along with the app, which would be TomTom or Garmin, and I hope and expect that we'll see such apps later this year.

Camera: The Internet is full of complaints about the 2 megapixel camera, but a tiny camera in a phone is never going to be great quality. It's actually OK as long as you have reasonable (i.e. low) expectations, and in particular seems to perform well at low light levels, which is a good thing in a mobile phone camera. Shutter lag and time delay on startup are a bit of a problem.

Price: For once, the UK comes out pretty well on international price comparisons. The ex-VAT price for phone and contract for the full 18-month contract at the lowest level is £544. In the US, it's $1,459, which is around £730 -- you get a lot more minutes (which I wouldn't use) but no texts unless you add another $45 or £22 over 18 months. And after 18 months, you're still locked in for another 6 months and $420.

Individual applications (briefly):

• AIM (IM client -- free) -- seems like a pretty reasonable implementation, no problems, have hardly used it
  
• AirMe (instant photo uploads to Flickr -- free) -- 1.00 was buggy and crashed a lot, 1.02 seems stable, works pretty well. I'm using this one regularly.
  
• Banner Free (scrolling banner -- free) -- a bit of a gimmick, but might be useful one day. Not used it seriously.
  
• Bookshelf (ebook reader -- £5.99) -- the best ebook reader to date, and probably the app I'm going to spend most time in. Have already read a fair chunk of a novel. It's a bit buggy, and a new version is apparently awaiting approval.
  
• Break (Breakout game -- free) -- played it for five minutes and stopped. Doubt I'll try it again, but I've not deleted it yet.
  
• Byline (Google Reader RSS client -- £5.99) -- much better than Google's own web-based version of Google Reader for the iPhone, but it needs more ways to mark items as read. I'd wait for the next version.
  
• Comic Touch (Adds speech bubbles and captions to photos -- £2.99). Lots of fun, and will doubtless come in handy for the odd amusing photo post.
  
• Cube Runner (Flying game, temporarily withdrawn -- free) -- not very engaging, and I doubt I'll play it much.
  
• eReader (ebook reader, links to ereader.com and Fictionwise -- free) -- handy way to download books you've already bought, but not very user friendly, and certainly not as smooth as Bookshelf.
  
• Exposure (Flickr client -- free ad-supported, but paid version available) -- this is a pretty good client, and I especially like the ability to see Flickr photos near your current location. I'll probably upgrade to the paid version at some point.
  
• Facebook (Facebook client -- free) -- the new version works well, and this is one of the most polished apps available. I'll be using this one regularly.
  
• Fizz Weather (Weather forecasts -- £2.99) -- Much prettier than the built-in weather app, and with more information. I'll be using this one regularly.
  
• Go Figure Lite (Calculator for pre-determined formulae) -- will probably use it occasionally for conversions and suchlike, but doubt I'll ever have more than three formulae of my own and thus need to upgrade to the forthcoming paid version.
  
• iMaze (Mercury maze -- free) -- I find it very hard to control, but have barely touched it.
  
• iPint (Beer simulator -- free) -- In the "funny once" category, I think.
  
• Light (Torch -- free) -- all this does is give you a blank white screen to maximise the illumination from the phone. Other apps are available with more options (different colours, strobes, etc.), but this one is good enough for me. Have used it occasionally.
  
• Mandelbrot (The Mandelbrot set -- free) -- seems not to calculate sufficiently precisely, so there's too much black at high zoom levels.
  
• Morocco (Reversi -- free) -- Plays a better game than Othello, but it's really annoying that you can't save your preferences.
  
• MotionX Poker (Poker dice -- £2.99) -- purchased on bohemiancoast's recommendation, and it's great. Beautifully implemented, and pretty addictive.
  
• NearPics (Finds photos near you on Panoramio -- free) -- does what it says on the tin, but downloading the pictures can be slow.
  
• Numba (Pattern matching game, £3.99) -- Just bought it, haven't tried it yet. Has very good reviews.
  
• Othello (Reversi -- free) -- Better implemented than Morocco, but a very weak player.
  
• PayPal (PayPal client -- free) -- Just what it says, Haven't used it yet.
  
• reQall (Voice notes -- free) -- Not used it yet, as you have to set up an account, but it supposedly lets you make notes and have their timetable be automatically recognised.
  
• Shazam (Music recognition -- free) -- play it 12 seconds of music and it will tell you what it is. I've tried it a couple of times, and it seems to work really well.
  
• Stanza (ebook reader -- free) -- iPhone client for the Mac ebook reader Stanza. Not as smooth as Bookshelf, but seems to work OK.
  
• Sun Compass (compass -- £0.59) -- draws a compass rose with the current positions of the sun and moon based on the time and your GPS coordinates, so you can find your bearings. Nicely implemented and very pretty, but not terribly useful.
  
• Super Monkey Ball (Game -- £5.99) -- Looks fantastic, but pretty hard, and you can't stop and restart where you left off, which is pretty poor for a casual game on a phone.
  
• Tap Tap Revenge (Game -- free) -- A game rather in the vein of Dance Dance Revolution. I've barely touched it.
  
• Twinkle (Twitter client -- free) -- Not used yet, due to not having a Twitter account.
  
• Vicinity (Location program -- £1.79) -- The best program I've found for showing nearby information, photos, shops, restaurants, etc.
  
• Where To (Location program -- £2.99) -- Much prettier than Vicinity, but all it does is a Google Map search, and despite claiming to be optimised for the English language it's actually American -- it searches for "movie theaters" and "gas stations", for example.

And the ones I've already deleted:

• WeatherBug -- free weather client, not as good as the built-in app let alone Fizz Weather.
  
• Local Picks by Trip Advisor -- free restaurant and shop guide, but doesn't work very well.
  
• MoPhoTo -- free Flickr client, but not as good as AirMe or Exposure. Supports some other photo sites as well, but I don't use them.

File System: An oddity of iPhone OS is that there's no file system available to the user or to apps. In fact, apps seem to have no way to share data with each other. This causes a number or problems, and I suspect Apple will have to retrofit a file system into the OS at some point. Every app that needs files from your Mac/PC has to invent its own sui generis method of transferring them. If you want to get something back to your Mac/PC, email is the easiest way. Even if it had the hardware for an SD card reader, nothing could read the files. And so on.

Future: In version 3.0, I'd like to see:

• A decent selection of Bluetooth profiles
  
• Better battery life
  
• A shared file system accessible as a USB drive on a Mac or PC
  
• Increase in screen resolution to 720 x 480, but keeping the size the same
  
• Better camera

That's all that comes to mind right now, but I may well post a followup.

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I have a jailbroken iPod Touch 32Gb running OS 1.1.4, and there is indeed a filesystem (I have an AppleTalk file server running on it when I need to move files back and forth, and a terminal app and a shell and ssh); the filesystem type is bog-standard HFS+. Apple have locked the OS down to prevent filesystem access presumably to stop punters realizing how bletcherous the underpinnings are -- in OS 1.1.4, for example, everything is running as root!

Other weaknesses in the iPhone: no bluetooth HID (so no external keyboards), no office apps for editing documents (although DataViz's CEO has publicly spoken about being interested in porting Documents to Go, and it's a big enough market that I'd be astonished if they aren't doing that), screen res is only 320x480, like an old Palm (why not the 800x480 of the Nokia web tablets?) and the max 16Gb of RAM is going to feel cramped fast once you load up with movies and music, never mind moving your office onto it once DtG is available.

I'd grab one in a split second if someone gave it to me, but I'm holding out for decent third party apps and/or version 3.0 before I buy one with my own money. (Having said that, the iTouch plus a Nokia E90 gives me about 95% or more of what the iPhone can do.)

[drplokta]

Yeah, I wouldn't use a Bluetooth keyboard myself, but I agree that it's yet another missing Bluetooth profile. Take a look at the screen before dismissing it as only 480x320 -- it's about 160dpi compared with 220dpi for the Nokia N800, but it's still pretty good. I doubt that it will be incapable of handling office apps for much longer, given the size of the new iPhone app market.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

why not the 800x480 of the Nokia web tablets

Cost and Battery Life.

Despite the sales tag the internals and the screen on the iPhone and Touch are pretty damn cheap and it can show. My boss got through 2 in 6 months before going back to a Blackberry.

Plus more pixels means more processing which means more battery.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

That said, it is a really nice screen IMO.

[jessevanbrakel.livejournal.com]

I purchased mine for 2 years ago after my boss at the time got one. If out on a sales call, and realized I needed add'l paperwork I could pull it up on my pocket pc and email it to the customer in front of me (I set up merchant accounts, now I have my own biz buying mortgage notes and structured settlements).

[guybles.livejournal.com]

Interesting points. While I don't have anything like the same experience (the Carphone Whorehouse are clearly mocking me behind my back), I've had a few opportunities to play with one of these. Still, a few discussion points:

The Bluetooth functionality is very odd - there doesn't really seem to be a point to it being there, other than to sell the Apple Bluetooth headset. I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't been intentionally crippled to discourage use and increase battery life.

You make valid points on MMS and Video Calls - the former is irrelevant where you have e-mail (or a MobileMe gallery to upload photos to) and the latter is something the networks themselves stopped pushing ages ago, since nobody is interested in talking to a tiny, pixellated, jerky picture.

I can see myself spending quite some time being stingy with the power (restricting 3G to "only when I need it" and so on). It would be nice to see an App in the store that helps with this.

The GPS turn-by-turn navigation was, I heard, being addressed by TomTom themselves, albeit in a slightly odd manner. I can see it being realised as, in effect, advance submission of your route and downloading a podcast that is triggered by waypoints on the map. This might be an artefact of a compromise to battery power and 3G bandwidth.

Criticism of the camera always seems to be the last refuge of the antiPhones - but anyone who cares about halfway decent photos will carry a real camera. Otherwise, you want low-res photos for all the MMS messages you never send (see above).

The file system will, I imagine, be addressed by increasing use of MobileMe and iDisk. At the moment, the idea may well have been parked to satisfy the networks in terms of preventing subscribers from shifting around large amounts of data. The ability to use spare memory space as a USB drive will probably never be implemented.

I'd be intrigued to spend more time exploring MobileMe. I've invested with the intention of synchronising all my contacts - at long last - between computer and phone, but I'm hoping that the "cloud" notion that keeps being bandied around will allow me multiple ways to access my data, regardless of location (note: this does not include work, who seem to enjoy causing themselves trouble by only allowing IE6 on the common desktop).

[daveon.livejournal.com]

[MMS] the former is irrelevant where you have e-mail

Assuming that everybody you're wanting to send pictures to quickly has it. I was at a design meeting with a _large_ software company saying the same thing about SMS and debating why on Earth they should bother with such a dumb protocol in their phone platform when people had email.

Email isn't the same as phone to phone messaging.

It's not a show stopper for me, but it is for my wife.

[deandrepevis.livejournal.com]

I use my phone with an Asterisk server, but my mother uses the same phone without. A cheap VOIP-server or a buitl-in dialplan would be appreciated.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

I totally love me iPhone and have the three hour's queue to prove it, but the camera does indeed suck. My old and unfortunately stolen Nokia 6633, or whatever it was, took way better pictures. And yes, they are not "real" pictures, but I used the Nokia for taking the occasional funny shot and they were suprisingly good.

[brockmorey.livejournal.com]

They're nice people, and yes, sometimes they do good work. But you know what - they don't understand business.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Interesting list. Based on my Touch the Exchange connection is nicely done but there's a lot of functionality left out of the calender, for example being able to add people to meeting invites etc...

I can also see our company security going nuts about the ease of access.

I've been told I'll be probably getting a 3G one for evaluation purposes before I get a Sony Ericsson Xperia. We'll see what it's like then.

As for the Bluetooth stuff. One of our Bluetooth guys described it as the radio equivalent of tin cans and string. It's a really hard protocol to write profiles for and based on our analysis of the phone radio they should spend their money improving the network functionality first. Fixing Bluetooth bugs is generally a matter of months/years of endless Black Box testing on lots and lots of different rigs. Only Nokia and Sony Ericsson have done anything like enough of that and it shows.

[erikvolson.livejournal.com]

As many phones do, it has a bad battery life problem when it's really reaching to get a GSM/UTMS signal. You never notice this in Chicago, but I was just on a long trip to the far north, and when it was on the edge of a GSM tower's signal, the battery consumption went up alarmingly. This wasn't 3G, either -- AT&T's 3G network is currently available in major urban areas, but not systemwide.

3G Battery Consumption is pretty hard -- now you know why the original wasn't UTMS, and why the current one defaults to trying to find a 802.11 connection first.

[pmcmurray.livejournal.com]

I have been playing quite happily with my new iPhone, it's an impressive little beast! The battery life seems to be the only challenge for me, though I wouldn't like to try writing a longer piece than this on it :) I also need a decent kanji app on it.

However apart from kanji training this little device completely replaces my nokia and my palm.

[andrewducker]

Well, you've certainly simplified my decision. Having seen the fervour of the 3G iPhone I was feeling slightly tempted by it. I'm going to wait for the N96 instead though.

Maybe two models down the road...

[avatar.livejournal.com]

Do yourself a favour and get the Brain Challenge game. It has Numba and about 50 other minigames to play in one package, while giving you stats on how you're improving.

There's others I would recommend, but this one is top notch.