Finally: The iPhone Review

FYI, this article is four pages long so click "Full Story" for the whole piece

The iPhone is in my possession as I�m sure you know from previous posts and I was finally able to break away from the gazillion features to write a piece about this device. I thought that it would be easier to just do a video cast about it but I�m still having issues with everything AV on my old MacBook and brand new MacBook Pro. The issues are ongoing and I don�t want to talk about it. Anyway, back to the fun and exciting iPhone coverage!

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Now that my personal reflection has concluded, I think it�s time to discuss iPhone!!!! I know that four exclamation points is a bit much but it really is that exciting. I was the second person in north east Florida to own an iPhone and I�m hoping that ten years from now when we�re surrounded by water and there aren�t any clouds left in the sky that iPhone will be the only brand of cell phone and I will have bragging rights that I was one of the first to purchase one of these. I�m been the first adopter of Apple devices time and time again but this time I�m not alone. When I bought the first iPod, everyone laughed that the layer was too big and too expensive and when I purchased my first Mac running Mac OS 10.0, there were more people laughing that I was insane for not waiting it out. It felt good when I got in line for the iPhone with thousand of others all over the US and we were all part of a club. A club of individuals that saved our pennies, took off from work, cancelled the contracts from our old carriers and went ahead and ordered some iPhone cases from the web in anticipation of holding this little beauty in our hands.

I was in line with 4 other guys that lined up about 20 hours before the iPhone went on sale and it was worth it to be a part of that group. The 20 hours gave me plenty of time to migrate all of my contacts and calendars out of Outlook 2007 and into Apple�s Address Book and iCal programs. I have to pause for a second and say that I don�t use a PC at home but my work computer is where all of the contacts and appointments lies. This is because we have Treo 700w phones issues to all of us that sync with Outlook and our Exchange server. Anyway, I remotely retrieved all of my info and merged it with my Mac�s address book and then spent a few more hours researching how to open up IMAP on the company Exchange Server as tasked by my boss and learned that the security issues were too huge and that I should probably just wait for Apple to update the iPhone for Exchange. On a side note, I hope all of the readers enjoyed Friday�s iPhone coverage. I updated DTT almost 30 times that day with photos, video and audio coverage. I�ve gotten some good feedback and I thank you all for visiting.

I purchased two iPhones that day because one had already been sold for enough to cover the price of both and some. I shipped the other one off and took my iPhone home to decide whether or not I should list it on eBay too. I�m glad I didn�t because right after the release, eBay�s iPhone market fell through and there were hundreds of iPhones that received no bids because many individuals learned that they could simply go down to the local Apple Store an get one for retail price. My girlfriend, Laura Wiggins, did the honors of opening the iPhone packaging and she turned it on. The Apple logo appeared and we began the activation process via iTunes. The activation process was super easy and I�m so glad that I wasn�t caught with issues where I was stuck with an iPhone that was �awaiting activation� for 48 hours. Bloggers like Josh Hallet (hyku.com) and folks over at iLounge.com were waiting for 48 hours as of this writing for the activation process to complete. I simply tacked my iPhone onto Laura�s plan an hour after purchasing the device and the next day we went into the AT&T; store and switched to a family plan. A great deal because AT&T; pro-rated our month so I got my first 100 dollars off for the plan.

Synchronizing the iPod is great but I constantly feel like I�m walking on glass in regards to space requirements. I�m the owner of a 2-gigabyte nano and an 80-gigabyte iPod. The 80gb fits all of my music and videos but the iPhone forces me to select my very favorite content, which means that there will always be one song that I don�t have on me. People say to me that I can�t possibly listen to all 10 thousand songs in a day but when I get the hankering for some Celine Dion, I need to have it! I have some of her songs in my library and I never listen but one day will call for some Celine and I�ll be without her. I managed to fit 700 songs, 18 videos, 127 photos and my emails and contacts and still have 214 megabytes available. I want at least one thousand songs but then I won�t be able to fit both Zoolander and Jackass: The Movie on my iPhone and those are just requirements when you�re in a doctor�s waiting room.

Now to the nitty-gritty. Let�s discuss FEATURES! I�m not going to tell you everything that the iPhone does because you can stop wasting your time and head over to http://apple.com/iphone and view their 22 minute video featuring almost every aspect of the iPhone from a guy that tells about the iPhone a lot better than I can. I�m going to discuss the best and worst aspects of the iPhone and we�re talking NITY-GRITTY! The iPhone boots in 20 seconds, which is fantastic. You can hit the power button while music is playing and it will continue to function. You can pause the music with your Apple stereo headset and adjust the volume with the audio buttons on the side of the device. When you wake the phone while it is playing music, the wallpaper will actually be the album art of your currently playing song with the standard option to �slide and unlock�. Of note, you can�t play a video and tap the power button to just hear the audio. Videos stop playing when you set the phone to standby.

I�m extremely worried that the home button will get worn down overtime. This is the primary application-switching button and I use it constantly. In Safari, I have to hit the home button then click on iPod then click �next song� to move to the next track then hit the home button and click �Safari� and now I�m back to surfing. That�s a lot of action for one button and like my Treo�s �OK� key, this button will quickly wear out but that�s just my guess.

I�m not happy with the EDGE data network. It�s slow as hell to be honest. I can�t stand Google Maps and I�ve already gone back to my Treo for looking up directions and phone numbers from Google. At home and work I have Wi-fi. There are also a few spots around town and some bars that I frequent that have wireless so I�m not totally upset about the data speeds but when I really need to find a phone number or check some song lyrics to a song, the Internet is painful. EDGE may be faster after the new AT&T; boost but I�m coming from an EVDO equipped connection and the speed is painful on EDGE.
This is the best iPod ever made. Coverflow, scrolling, on-the-go, videos, scrubbing and shuffle controls, full album artwork and the buttons are all so beautiful and terrific to use. I can�t say enough about it. Go to the Apple Store and try it for yourself. If you�re overseas then check out the Apple video. My only complaint about music is that there are no external iPhone buttons for changing tracks. If you�re in an application, you have to exit that and go to the iPod section to do simple things like pause our music or change tracks. The stereo headset has pause / play controls but I use a pair of Shure earphones so I�m out of luck in this category.

All of the applications serve a purpose but the ones that rely on the EDGE data connection are crippled out of the box. YouTube is a great application with awesome features. I feel that YouTube on the iPhone is much better than the one on the AppleTV but if you�re not connected to a Wi-fi connection, the videos load too slow or don�t load at all. Synching email takes way too long on the EDGE connection and retrieving basic stock info takes a while to refresh. Notes is a good application but what�s the point of taking notes if you can�t copy and paste them into anywhere? You can email notes which is helpful and you can�t add a reminder from a note which would be a great enhancement.

I have to praise and curse the keyboard. It�s a love / hate relationship at this point. The virtual keyboard is terrific because it can be placed anywhere on the screen, Apple can modify / move buttons and change the look of the keyboard depending on your purpose. It�s only there when you need it and not they�re when you really don�t need it. When I want to see photos on a full screen, I can do that and when I need to enter my password to Twitter, there�s the keyboard! Everyone that sees me with an iPod asks about the speed and how fast I can type on he virtual keyboard. It�s great in my opinion I�ve been using a Treo 700 for over a year now and I�m already typing faster on the iPhone. I had to learn to trust the iPhone and just type where I thought the keys were. After about 15 emails and a few notes, the iPhone knew my commonly used words and corrected items on the fly. You can turn off auto-correct but I strongly encourage that you keep it on. What�s annoying at first makes everything better after a weekend of heavy use. I do recommend purchasing the iPhone on a Friday and using it for the weekend before you head back to work so you can get the feel for the keyboard where you�re not making too many mistakes.

The calendar, weather and stock applications feel very incomplete. Stocks and weather is just the widgets that are preinstalled in the Mac OS X dashboard. They function great but I�m still venturing over to Google for my stocks and local weather information. I do like that you can have multiple cities in the weather section. I�m not sure of the limit and I have four cities being tracked as of now. The calendar application needs a lot of work. It seems very week compared to iCal and you can�t add appointments to difference calendars. All appointments that are created on iPhone go into a calendar in iCal that you chose in iTunes. Of course these appointments can be cut and pasted into another calendar once synchronized with your Mac but that�s just another step.

On a side note, I would happily resubscribe with .Mac if they could sync with iPhone. Apple has a perfect over the air solution for pushing down email, synching contacts, calendars and other information via .Mac. When I make changes to my address book or bookmarks they automatically sync with .Mac and my iPhone could sync that info over the cellular line with .Mac and I could also setup .Mac to receive all of my email accounts and when a new message comes in, it pushes that down to my iPhone. Apple, let�s set this up ASAP and you�ll get tons of new subscribers to your service.

I�m going to also revisit Microsoft Exchange and Blackberry Enterprise Server. Gruber of Daring Fireball posed the question of why is push email so important? Why can�t folks just connect to Exchange with IMAP and be happy? I live off of Exchange and other co-workers live on Blackberry Enterprise Server. The reason I won�t enable IMAP inbound to our server is the security risk it contains. Blackberry is a closed system so good luck licensing that. The easiest way to get your corporate emails on to your mobile device is to create an external account in Microsoft�s Active Directory and forward a copy of all email that come to my mailbox to a Yahoo! Account. From there, Yahoo will push those emails to my iPhone for free but the only problem is that I�ll be replying from a Yahoo! Account and not from my corporate account.

I do appreciate that you can lock the iPhone after a period of inactivity with a pass code. After I hit the standby button and a minute passes, you�ll have to enter a four-digit pin to unlock the device. This at least makes me feel better about someone getting my info. Some gripe about the lack of disk mode for the iPhone but I�m glad that you can only sync the iPhone with a computer that activated it because that keeps people from copying your info off to their computer. The only way to sync iPhone with a new computer is performing a system format, which also means that they have to get passed my four-digit pin.

There is VPN support on the iPhone but I have not had a chance to play around with this yet. Heck, the first time I used the iPod feature was during my run earlier and the time I am spending to write this article. The settings panel is super easy to navigate. There are dedicated sections to each function of the device and I can�t help but look at settings on my Treo700w and laugh at how easy Apple makes things. It�s like Microsoft doesn�t even try when they�re developing an operating system.

The last thing that I�m going to cover is how sturdy this device is. I have seen people drop this thing in person, on video and heard the stories. Each iPhone has escaped with only a few scratches. Apple�s choice to use glass for the front piece was a great idea and has proven to work exceptionally well. You can�t scratch the screen even if you�re pushing on it with a set of keys as hard as you can. The iPhone can take drops from 10 feet in the air to asphalt and still keep working. It cannot take being submerged in water but that�s about the only thing it can�t take. Individuals trying to take apart the phone to see what makes it tick experience a lot of hurdles trying to get into the case and every article about the iPhone insides always concludes with, �Apple has done a good job making this a very solid and well built product� and after seeing a video of two guys trying to break into the iPhone with a hammer and breaking a sweat, I completely agree. I�m glad to know that this phone is made to travel.

The question I�m getting from everyone is if they should purchase one. My response is only if they can afford to lose this and buy another one. If you can buy an iPhone for six hundred dollars and lose it and have enough money in the bank to buy another one then you should definitely get one. If you have to save for a couple of months for one of these then stick with the RAZR. This phone is expensive and if you completely hate Cingular, don�t already have an iPod or use iTunes or don�t have $600 then wait out for a cheaper model in 6-18 months. The iPhone, with all of its downfalls, is the best mobile device ever made and I would buy one for every one of my friends if I had a million dollars. I think Steve Jobs feels the exact same way since he announced last Thursday that every employee of Apple would be receiving one in about a month and a free year of service would be included with the phone for free and for those who didn�t know, that means all 18 thousand Apple employees. Steve really loves this device and believes in iPhone and after using one for 2 days, I believe too!

This is a quick overview of what a bunch of others out there are saying...http://thenewsroom.com/details/476174?c_id=wom-bc-js

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