Filed under: Mobile
I’m not going to keep posting about this phone - there’s too much out there already. Instead, I’m making a mega-post with the whole experience and initial impressions wrapped into one. So enjoy or skip right past it - your choice.
The Underdog:
First, I need to give some major credit to my Nokia N73. I spent literally 11 hours tethered to that thing, since I didn’t bring my Macbook with me. I was checking email, talking through SMS and AIM (through SMS), constantly refreshing Google Reader mobile in the webkit browser to see what was going on in the other lines, and updating the flickr feed with Shozu. And check out the amazing quality of the photos from it too!! At one point, I was listening to the built-in FM radio (take that iPhone!), downloading email, uploading a photo, and browsing the web at the same time, when a phone came in and the radio faded out nicely - like a frickin’ iPhone!
I actually asked myself, “If I didn’t want to test work stuff on this phone so bad, would I really want it?”, and to be honest, I was up in the air about it for a while.
In the end though, I would have had a much nicer line waiting experience with the iPhone. I would’ve had to hack something together with email to replace Shozu, settled for crappier pics and no movies (or brought my camera), and lived without the one FM station the N73 could tune. But I’d have my own music collection with me and maybe some movies too. Theoretically I could’ve had this on the N73 too - but it’s just not built to make that easy.
The Line
The buying experience itself was surreal. Mall cops had no idea what to do with us - telling us we couldn’t use the folding chairs we bought, and even couldn’t even sit on the floor for a while - until they realized they were about to have an uprising on their hands. They gave us the floor quickly, but took about 8 hours to let us have the chairs. Here’s a video of the line and the blacked out apple store:
The demographics on the line were far and wide. I was surrounded by some nice high school kids - one of which was into development and took an AP Computer Science class this year. There were some teachers and white collar professionals who were into tech. Then there were just average working folks who were caught up in the hype, and teenagers who wanted the latest thing. I also spotted a few Manhattanites coming out to Long Island for an easier time - you could tell by the clothes and the $800 glasses.
At 2pm, they put black curtains in the windows. When the black curtains were lifted, one of the big iPhones in the window was counting down. At 6pm, they let the first group in, and people started getting antsy. Once in a while, you’d hear “Hurry up and buy the damn phone!” even though people were only in there for a minute or so. Then there was the “cutting” controversy amongst the people around me. Some kids tried to get basically 10 spots ahead or something (which in terms of getting a phone didn’t matter whatsoever) and I found myself in the middle of High School again. So I just stood there and shot video - the kid with the lip ring is the one in question.
Once I got in the store (I was number 20 or so), They had the accessories in the usual spot - problem was, organization broke down at that point. People didn’t want to get out of line to actually buy the phone at the cash register in order to look at accessories. So it became kind of a free-for-all at the back of the store. Since they kept the number of people in the store down, it didn’t get out of hand.
Leaving the store with an iPhone was the most surreal. Apple employees lined the exit and cheered like you just won the Olympics. They seemed so honestly excited about you buying a phone - I really think it was sincere. This was a huge day for pretty much every Apple employee and man were they loving it. With the employee stares beaming down on me as I left, I felt that I had to thank them and seem more excited than I actually was, so I let out a couple of “yay!’s and thanks!”. I shot a video too:
The Unboxing:
So after a 30 minute drive I get the phone home and do some slow unboxing. It’s packaged like a fine piece of jewelry, so I couldn’t resist taking some shots. You’ll find this kinda unbox porn all over the net now, but here’s mine.
The Initial Rage:
You can see by the comments in this post, that my first goal of getting mail set up on the device was met with frustration - to say the least. Make no mistakes - at this firmware revision, the iPhone does not integrate well with exchange. There may be an exchage tab in the config screen, but it’s even worse than the IMAP lie that is Entourage’s “support” on the desktop. I was having trouble with my outgoing server for a while, but I think the problem is a serverside setting letting me in to SMTP - not TLS encryption like I was thinking. I managed to get Google’s SMTP server to work - which uses TLS, so I have a basic level of mail now. Not ideal at all.
The big outstanding problem with mail on the phone is that deleting/moving mail doesn’t apply the delete actions to the server immediately. There’s a setting to remove deleted items at most daily. I keep thinking I’m missing something here, because this kind of thing just seems ridiculous. At this point if I delete on the device and come back to my desktop within a day, I have to do it all again on the desktop. Someone please give me some guidance if I’m missing something, because this is really unacceptable.
Update: You know what? If an email item on the server is marked as read, it won’t update it on the phone. You’ll never get it there. It just ignores it. But it doesn’t do this all the time - my very old messages were synced. I guess the takeaway here is that it’s very very unpredictable, and I’m used to a mobile inbox that is a mirror of my desktop inbox. I actually made an appointment with a Mac Genius tomorrow to ask him/her wtf is going on here and if it might be corrected in a future update. I doubt I’ll get a satisfactory answer, but you never know.
Update 2: I knew the session with the Mac Genius was going to be useless when he said this: “Are the mail settings in Mail or in Settings?” He never really played with an iPhone. As he was fumbling around, I came up with an idea to delete the messages and then delete them from the trash on the phone as well. I thought this would trigger a purge. Nope. So there’s no solution to this yet that I know of.
Otherwise, emailing is great. It’s a desktop app on a phone - except for support for some filetypes which I would have liked - like WAV and MP3. The phone plays them, why can’t mail play the attachments?
The Rest:
To be honest, the mail thing soured me. I couldn’t care less about the rest of the phone, since I’ve seen the features ad-nauseam for the past months. It works as advertised. Really.
Safari - the reason I bought the thing - is the real web. They didn’t lie - pages render well (with some minor quirks like all browsers have between them). The zoomy thing is great, amazing, and makes the web experience on the phone completely different, new and pleasant. The double-tap zoom thing for web pages detects HTML elements and tries to do its best to adjust the zoom amount to get you the right zoom level to look at that part of the page (eg. it zooms right to a specific column of text to fill the screen with no side scrolling). Browsing on EDGE is fine. I’ve been doing it on the N73 for a while so I deal with it.
Google Reader detects the iPhone’s user-agent and puts up a custom site for it. It’s mostly a jazzed up version of their WAP reader, but it’s cool nonetheless. I hope they expand it to make it use some of the iPhone features most phones suck at - like Javascript.
The iPod works as advertised. This doesn’t really excite me like the connectivity features, but it’s nice to be able to play music and video in such a pleasant way. Apple and (insert content owner name here) can go to hell however, if they think I’m going to pay $20 for a subscription to the Ice Road Truckers TV season when I already pay a load to get it on cable. Fair use is not here, and this device would be a zillion times better if it were.
Update: Video podcasts don’t play as video on the iPhone. You only hear the audio. Only files in Movies or TV Shows will play as video on the device. Copying video podcasts to a synced playlist will ignore those files when syncing. Also, you can’t drag and drop files directly to the device from other spots in iTunes or external files like you can an iPod. Bad, bad.
The keyboard is fine for me. I’m coming off of T9 here though, and I’ve used virtual keypads many many times in the past. The predictive text is helpful - but I wish it did the double space = period space thing blackberries do.
For me, YouTube didn’t work over WiFi. It buffered and stuttered and was unusable. Over EDGE however, it was AWESOME! Whaaaaa? Yeah - I’m not kidding. They scale the video for the appropriate bandwidth and they totally nailed it. I don’t know if the servers handling the WiFi content were loaded down with all the new owners last night or what, but EDGE was doing just great. Yesterday, with all the rumors of AT&T boosting the EDGE network for the iPhone launch, I did a bunch of DSLReports bandwidth tests from my N73. I consistently got 250kbps or higher. That’s quite a number for this tech, and it was showing with this YouTube test.
Update: YouTube over WiFi is a-ok now. Must have been a launch night hiccup.
Maps is Google Maps on a phone. It’s the best mobile implementation I’ve seen. Very well done. There’s plenty of demos out there to check out if you’re interested.
I really want to know what kind of RAM and CPU this thing has. I know someone will rip it apart and find out. It renders pages as well (or better than) my PS3, and that has 256 megs of RAM in it. The secret to getting all of this good stuff in one package is to let the software developers have the resources they need - so iPhone as a hardware platform must be pretty impressive. I can’t wait to get the hard data.
One thing that’s a bit of a downer (besides mail connectivity) is the fact that it’s a closed system. I’m not even talking from a developer standpoint here. Every phone I buy is a smartphone with a huge library of software out there to help make the phone my own. Once I get the basics set up, I’m always downloading apps like a madman. There’s none of that here. I explored the phone in 10 mins and then I was done. That’s all I get until the next firmware update.
The Initial Conclusion:
No matter what you think, this isn’t about the device itself. The excitement here is that Apple managed to get my grandmother saying “internet on the phone.” The device delivers it, which is important because the iPhone early adopters will be the salesmen of “The Web in Your Hand” as much as the iPhone itself - and as a person in the middle of the mobile industry, that’s what’s getting my adrenaline pumped.