iPhone - it got me!

When I heard that the price of the iPhone 8gb was being reduced to £169 on the Tuesday evening before it happened I decided to finally get one. I was 90% convinced to get one anyhow, but this was the final push.

I was up early and down to my closest Carphone Warehouse by 9.10am. They confirmed the new price, which they had seen on their intranet only a few moments before, and I was their first customer of the day.

A week later I was back there to buy a second one, and they were all gone. Carphone Warehouse have confirmed that they've sold the lot (see the Register’s article here: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/04/25/uk_iphone_clear_out/) and o2 have only a few left in their retail stores and not a single one in their online store.

It’s really amazing to see how well this marketing strategy worked. To my mind they are clearly selling off their stock of 8gb before the launch of the 3g/ v2 iPhone which is expected by many to be announced on the 9th May at the WWDC.

Even knowing that the 3g version is imminent I decided that £169 is a great price for the iPhone, and I'm very pleased with that decision. It's just incredible.

The interface is fantastic and the best feature to me is the browser. It is by far and away the best mobile browser I have ever used. Compared to Safari on the Nokia E90 it is a completely different world. The way the iPhone's Safari handles scrolling and zooming is fantastic and the speed to load is like nothing I've experienced on a mobile device. Where my E90 will often fall down and not let me into certain web sites, my hosting control panel for instance, the iPhone sails through and loads the pages perfectly and quickly. I don't think I've come across a single website that the iPhone can't handle and the iPhone on GPRS will give the E90 a run for its money on HSDPA in loading a heavy website.

Text input on the iPhone is also superb, which is really surprising considering the absence of any kind of the keyboard. The on screen keyboard is very well done and the software which works out your mistakes and automatically corrects them for you is the really clever part - this allows me to type on the iPhone really very quickly. Coming from a die-hard “I need a qwerty keyboard on my phone” guy, that might be surprising.

There are a couple of areas where it shows that this is Apple's first attempt at a phone. It's not that anything is broken or badly written, it’s just that the iPhone is missing a few things that I've come to expect from a phone these days. 3G - 3.5G HSDPA in fact, Copy and Paste, Exchange ActiveSync, VoIP SIP client, Bluetooth stereo headset profile, and Bluetooth keyboard profile are my main issues.

A lot of those issues, if not all of them, will be fixed in the v2.0 firmware/ the v2/ 3G hardware I think and that will make the iPhone truly great.

The simplicity with which an extremely sophisticated piece of technology with fantastically clever software is presented to the user in this device has really got me interested in Apple products. The analogy of a "gateway drug" popped into my head a week or so ago. I thought that was perhaps because of the place I live, Brighton, which has held the infamous title as the place with the most drug related deaths in the country for the last 5 years (second to Blackpool this year I believe), but I heard Dan, Brandon, Patrick and Judie use the same term in the Podcast that they did here at JustAnotheriPhoneBlog: http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/2008/04/24/just-another-iphone-chat-come-join-in-with-us-next-monday-night/ so I'll go ahead and use it as well.

I agree with what those guys said in their super-long discussion, the iPhone IS a gateway drug and already I find myself warming to the idea of Mac. It’s only been a week and a half and I'm almost converted...good work Steve Jobs! If it wasn't for my obsession with UMPCs, and there being no UMPC from Apple, there would be no contest. I would happily use a mobile Mac device, although I'd probably keep an IBM-compatible (does anyone say that anymore?) PC on my desk, to begin with. And before anyone says it, no I don't class the Macbook Air as a UMPC.

In the JustAnotheriPhoneBlog Podcast the guys (and gal) disagreed amongst themselves about how they think the Apple Software Store will work. Patrick made the assertion that it's unlikely that Apple will have the man power to manually sit down and test every single application produced by third parties before making it available to the paying public. Brandon disagreed and thought that this is most likely what will happen, with a small number of quality sealed apps coming out that have been tested to destruction (perhaps employing automated testing tools for a lot of the grunt work). This sparked an interesting little debate; would we rather have a few very well tested, authorised, approved applications that will be rock solid stable and pose no risk to the ongoing stability of our iPhones, or a much more open market where we can make the decision for ourselves?

I don't know what my answer to that is. What I actually want is both...thousands of apps from tons of vendors that are all 100% reliable! I don't like iTunes, I never have. I much prefer the way my Nokia handles MP3s. The Nokia detects as a drive letter, you drag your MP3s on to it, and then you play them on the phone. If you want to copy them back again, go ahead. iTunes is a good deal more fussy than that and I'm sure iTunes will handle software purchases the same way that it handles MP3s. I'm already starting to prepare myself for that.

I jailbroke my iPhone less than 10 minutes after I got it home and I have been enjoying using the many applications and games available through the installer. Labyrinth, an iPhone version of those wooden tilting games where you have to guide a big ball bearing around a track with holes in it, is just the best use of the accelerometer I've seen. I even stumped up the 7 Euros and bought the 270 extra levels!

I also like Lockbox, by Nathan Black, which I've entered all of my important information into and can now access with just one password. Todo is also proving very useful, although this is one that I hope Apple releases in the v2.0 firmware and has it synchronising with Outlook through ActiveSync. A pre-release version of Fring came out the day that I got my iPhone and I stuck that straight on there. This goes some way towards fulfilling my VoIP SIP client requirement but unfortunately it’s not good enough. I can't make reliable calls at all. It does allow you to be connected to VoIP through Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, SIP, Google Talk and instant text messaging through Twitter, Yahoo, and AIM and I'd love to blame the pre-release status for the poor/ lack of performance but having tried Fring on a few Nokia phones I have to say that I've never really got it to work. At this point I’m just not sure it’s very good. I’d love to be proved wrong on that though.

I have also used Terminal to connect to SSH to a remote server and, whilst writing this, I have installed VNCsea - the native VNC client for the iPhone which has been broken on Installer every time I've tried to download and install it over the last week. Now I've got it installed it won't actually connect to my PC, but I'm sure I can sort it given a little time and it looks pretty good so far.

So in summary the iPhone is a very different device to my usual mobile (the Nokia E90) but, apart from a few small items that the new firmware and the new hardware will fix soon enough, I think that Apple have unceremoniously finished my affair with Nokia. And I won't be going back to Windows Mobile any time soon either.