iPhone'd

Well, I did buy an iPhone after all. My Verizon contract was up, it’s a few days from my birthday— all the rationalization I needed was already there, so Apple, you got me. Again.

I drove up to the local mall at 6:30 PM and found a pretty long line for the Apple store. I heard they had 500 units in stock, so I decided to wait. But they were very well prepared, and the line moved very quickly. I was out of the store by 7 PM (my apologies to those that waited all day or even overnight in some cases). With my purchase in hand, I went home to try out the activation.

But, as some have found, it didn’t go so smoothly. My problem turned out to be that I was transferring a number from another service. Apparently there were some issues there and I had to return to the mall to work through them with an AT&T rep. That took longer than buying the phone itself. In the end, we managed to activate the account.

The phone is now set up and functional and I’ve had a chance to play with it. First impressions and thoughts…

• Love the UI, the shape and feel of the device.
• Love the WiFi support, Safari, Google Maps, YouTube, Mail. All the built-in apps function very well. Honestly, having Google Maps everywhere I go is a killer app for this thing. I just wish it supported GPS as well (any bets on how long until an iPhone accessory surfaces to add GPS?).
• For some reason I can’t find the one video I uploaded to YouTube. I can find it from my computer, but not using the YouTube search option on the iPhone.
• Concerned about the EDGE connectivity and throughput. Most places I frequent have WiFi now, but everywhere else I will likely be using EDGE (on my commute, etc.) and that will probably be painful from what I’ve read. But I love that the data plan is unlimited use, so I don’t have to worry about watching my usage. It’s nice that the phone will choose WiFi over EDGE if it can, and it’s not something you have to select— it just uses the best connection available.
• Confused that I can’t select a music track for a ringtone. Although I can see the business reasons why not; the ringtone market is pretty lucrative, but really… it’s silly that this isn’t possible. This is a music player after all. I also can’t select a music track as the sound for an alarm.
• I’ve had a few hiccups from doing multiple things at a time. Such as playing music and using Google Maps. It just returned to the main menu all of a sudden and the music stopped playing. Some sort of soft reset? Software problems that are bound to be fixed, but a little annoying naturally.
• I’m intrigued by the choice of a “Safari” label for the browser. Most devices would label that as “Web”. It has occurred to me that the iPhone is perhaps the reason Safari was made in the first place.
• I’m really happy to see support for viewing attachments in Mail. I just noticed that it doesn’t support playing .wav audio attachments which is a shame, since that’s how Vonage sends voice mail notifications.
• It’s nice that iPhone syncs with the phone to grab pictures you’ve taken. I no longer have to email photos from my wireless phone to keep a copy of them. My old phone, a piece of garbage from LG, only had room for 60 low-res, pictures. And it was a tedious experience to offload those images. Navigate to the photo gallery; choose to email photo; select contact; send; navigate to outbox; delete the sent message; navigate to gallery; delete the picture. Repeat that a few dozen times and you’ll see why I started to be very selective in the mobile pictures I took.
• Looking forward to the web-based services that will spring up for the iPhone (and some have already).
• Looking forward to support for full-blown third-party iPhone applications.
• Worried I might get mugged for carrying this around in public.

And… I bought one for Georgia. Because I love her that much.