Cluck The Book: June 2007 Archives

I waited in line. I bought an iPhone. I could post lots of pictures of these things, but you've seen enough of that. You've probably read enough reviews already, too, but I felt I should throw in my two cents.

Battery
I'm charging it for the first time now. I don't know if it really had a full charge when I bought it or not (it read full according the the pretty green battery icon), but I — like most of the other rabid iphone first-adopters — wasn't about to dally with a charger. I swung by a wifi hot spot to activate the iPhone before starting my commute home and started to use it immediately. The results:

One solid hour surfing, checking email, calling everyone I knew, and pushing every button I could find. This was all during the commute home (more on that later).
At home: an evening of occasional use (maybe an hour on/hour off - we'll call it three hours total) mostly watching youtube videos and trying to compare EDGE to WiFi speeds (more on that later, too).
about fifteen minutes of surfing in the morning, and playing about fifteen minutes worth of music through the built in speakers
almost two-and-half hours of listening to music via the headphones as I mowed the lawn and weed-whacked the fence-line (the iPhone was nestled in my pocket during all of this).
when I finished mowing, I checked my email and got the "20% battery life remaining" warning. I immediately started surfing and watching youtube for no reason other than to strain the battery -- in about another fifteen minutes it was past the 5% warning and I plugged it in.

I give it a non-scientific "five hours of heavy use and fifteen hours of total on-time" for the battery life. Again, that was the initial charge and it may fair better after the full charge its getting right now. Even if it doesn't - that is respectable, and MUCH better than the crappy charge I get from my RAZR

Typing
It's not hype, its easy. I typed three emails and some SMS messages while driving home from the store. I had never used the virtual keyboard before, and sure I made some typos but it was still easier than typing on my RAZR. Some notes:

The screen is clear and bright enough (and the text large enough) that I was able to see what I was typing, even while being distracted by driving. (note: yea, I know this wasnt safe, but could YOU resist playing with your new toy during an hour-long commute?)
I typed everything with the thumb of my right thumb (left hand was on the wheel), and it wasn't very difficult.
later, placing the iPhone on a flat surface, I was able to peck with my two index fingers and get amazingly fast input - with very very typos. The auto-complete logic they use really is good.
the ".com" button when entering URLs is handy, but I missed easy access to "@" and ".COM" when entering email addresses (entering them in web login screens, mainly). It would be nice to have more context-awareness in order to display specialized keyboard layouts for more than just safari.

Surfing
EDGE really isn't that slow, and wifi screams. However, the winning feature in my mind is what you get to do with the page after it loads, more than how long it takes to load. What you get to do is this: You get to READ it. The ability to zoom in and scroll around is so easy that you can very quickly and easily 9and comfortably) read an entire news site, bog, or other text-heavy page. And once its loaded, you get to do all that in real time. Absolutely BRILLIANT.

Email
Email is easy and great, but what I can't find is a way to filter spam. In Mail.app I have spam being filtered out so I dont have to look at it, but on the iPhone I get to see every plea from penis-enlargers and CIALIS hawkers. At least the 'delete' animation is cool: the trashcan opens its lid and the offending email gets sucked in.

Voicemail
I haven't gotten any yet - partly because its the weekend, and partly because I forgot to set up my voicemail and so a few friends were unable to leave voicemail. One thing that I didn't realize is that, if using the EDGE network to surf (or whatever), you will not get inbound calls and people will instead be routed directly to your voicemail. or in my case, having forgotten to set up voicemail, directly into limbo. More on this later.

Durability
I haven't dared conduct a 'scratch test', but I have carried it unprotected in my pocket for a full day, and other than a few greasy fingerprints it is as good as new. I will be buying a case (just in case, if you'll pardon the pun) but the options at the AT&T store weren't compelling so I'll be ordering online (I think I'll go for the SPECK case, made of silicon).

Voice Clarity
This is a phone, right? Well, here's the low dow on the voice quality:

It sounds great on the iphone end: very clear, very easy to hear.
Reports are that there is a lot of background noise on the other end (ie., for the people i am talking to). However, they have all pointed out (when asked) that it is clearly background noise. In other words, it is noticeable but subdued, and the consensus is among all of my friends that it sounds better than my RAZR did.
When listening to music, the music fades as the phone rings, and resumes after you hang up. Very nice.
When listening to music while mowing the lawn, the music fades as the phone rings, but neither you or the person on the other end of the call will be able to hear a damn thing until you turn off the lawn mower (but I had to try).

Photos
It takes pretty decent pictures, but nothing to replace my Nikon D50. I was pleasantly surprised when I plugged the iphone into my laptop to copy over a playlist: iPhoto opened and offered to download the photos I had taken on the iPhone. Not really surprising I suppose, but worlds beyond how the RAZR deals with photos (which is: it makes you navigate layers deep into weird menus just to scroll through each image one at a time, with little or no hope of ever using the photo for anything else).

Clock
Not that telling time is that useful, but the clock also provides fast and intuitive access to a stopwatch (with multi-lap timing) and a timer. Score one for all of us cooks!

I'm sure I'll have more as I continue to use this amazing Toy/Phone/MP3 Player/Browser/Mail Client/Whatever. until then I have just one question: