One Week With iPhone 3G
10 Aug
Many people that know me call me Gadget Girl. They think I’m always first to have some hot new gadget. This, most of the time, is not true. I rarely get a new gadget without planning to get the maximum use out of that gadget. I also know that those pioneers that go out to get a gadget first many times gets screwed. That has been me as I have several gadgets that are no longer supported or were never followed with a new model. While I like my iPod nano and iPod mini, I had no intention of getting an iPhone last year when they first released. They were too expensive and I already had a Blackberry for work and a separate personal cell phone.
This year I happened to be in the market for a smartphone as I am with a new employer that requires employees to buy their own phones but reimburses the cost of the monthly plan. The tables were turned when I found out that that the iPhone 3G would have support for corporate email (Exchange via Activesync) and would be half the price as the previous version. The speed of 3G had not been a factor in my determination at all since I had not used the previous iPhone to know how slow it may or may not have been.
It took me two weeks to get my phone from the first time I went into the AT&T store. I got it last Tuesday. In order to fully experience the phone, I decided to remove the three or four gadgets (Motorola RAZR, Palm LifeDrive, iPod Nano, and sometimes Sony PSP) from my bag that the iPhone would replace. After one week of use, there are things that I like and other things that I don’t like.
Likes:
- Email displays inline graphics. I have not seen this on the Blackberry, Treo or LifeDrive.
- Ability to see full websites and like some of the sites specifically designed for iPhone.
- AOL Radio app does not require wi-fi.
- Interface is easier than Blackberry (very easy to pick up).
- Ability to use other apps while on the phone.
- Can easily switch between headset, speaker and iPhone while on a call. This always caused me problems with both the Blackberry and the Treo I had for work.
- Opens PDFs and they look normal. I could only see the text portions of PDFs on the Blackberry and needed special software for the Treo. I have not yet tried any other document format.
Dislikes/Wishlist:
- Does not support multiple email signatures for different accounts. I’m struggling with this because I have my work email, GMail and YahooMail set up on the phone. What email address do I put in the signature?
- Synchronization of notes. I need need NEED this. Apparently notes don’t sync via iTunes or via Activesync.
- Synchronization of tasks. Ditto what I said about notes.
- I knew about the inability to cut and paste but I didn’t know that I can’t select text (or at least I haven’t found a way). This would be useful in deleteing large amounts of text.
- Want to collapse folders or not even see some of them in mail app. I don’t need to see my spam and trash folders on a regular basis. I would love to hide them.
- Would like all mail displayed in same view like Blackberry. I have to navigate too much to switch accounts.
- Can’t use as storage device. If I save something to take with me I can’t use the phone. This is disappointing.
- Had to cut nails. They were getting too long anyway. After cutting them my use of the vertical and horizontal keyboard has drastically improved.
- Couldn’t download podcast from web – had to stream it. It would be great if I could download directly to a datastore of some sort on the phone. This would be great for podcasts or for email attachments to access them later.
- Want different notification tones for different email accounts. This is not a big deal but it would be nice.
- Can’t use my iPod chargers and docks with the iPhone. That’s very unfortunate especially when I’ve run the battery down using one of my Twitter apps and Safari all day.
- Personally I don’t want to know that I have email if I’m listening to music but that comes along with the all-in-one device thing.
I have barely even scratched the surface in usage of my iPhone. The interface is cool but there are some features that appear to be left out. I do hope that Apple will release an upgrade at some point that addresses some of these missing features.
