As you’ve seen in one of earlier posts, I’ve been the lucky recipient of an iPhone. I wanted to take a few weeks to play with the phone and incorporate it into my every day life as my primary device. For my job I was carrying a flip phone and a Samsung BlackJack (my primary email device). When receiving the iPhone I decided I would start carrying one device for all my needs. I’ve utilized essentially all features on the phone that any normal consumer would use on a day to day basis. Although I’m a huge Apple fan I am giving this my honest product review, which I think you’ll see below.

Design: The phone has clearly revolutionized the look and feel of mobile handsets to come and I would be a little surprised to hear others disagree. It’s about as thin as an iPod and a little taller. The one noticeable difference in my mind is the weight. The phone is a little heavier than an iPod or in my case a Samsung BlackJack.
User Interface: The operating system is the sleekest of any handset thus far. Utilizing OS X is clearly a key factor in the clean and extremely user friendly interface making it one of, if not the most attractive handset. I have been hearing that the responsiveness of the screen to ones touch does wear over time which would be interesting as it would essentially become a $600 paper-weight. It has taken a lot of getting used in regards to selecting exactly what you meant to touch. Even after two weeks it thinks I have selected another application.

iPod: This works very similar to a video iPod only cooler incorporating the slide features between songs/artists etc. The speaker is surprisingly loud at its max volume .

Keyboard/Keypad: Typing SMS messages (text messages) and emails has been extremely frustrating thus far. Although it has become much easier than day one, typing is still a little tricky. If you’re a business person and email often throughout the day this may not be the phone for you, I’m even considering switching back to my blackberry for this reason. The word recognition is pretty slick but for me it has often predicted words that I was not intending on using. Hopefully this is something that is addressed in the next update. As for the keypad, when dialing a number not already in your contacts the keypad takes up the whole screen making it extremely easy to dial any number quickly.

Contacts: If you use Apple’s Address Book syncing your contacts is amazingly fast and simple…my problem was that my contacts were located in both entourage and my old handset. I personally was not about to go to the AT&T store to pay for this to be completed so I looked at it as an opportunity to get all my contacts into one place and begin utilizing my Apple Address Book. A few hours later all my contacts were in the palm of my hand.

Calendar: This was very simple as I imported my work schedule from entourage into iCal and now have access to all my calendar events.

Mail: Mainly, I believe if you’re an avid email user this phone is not for you. Between the keyboard and the viewing options its made my emailing experience a little frustrating. Having multiple accounts is great but obviously can be done using a Blackberry as well. I can view about 8 emails on the screen at a time when I disable the “preview” mode, which can show up to 5 lines of the email.

Safari: This has surprisingly impressed me! I really love using safari everyday and when on a WiFi network it moves pretty quickly. I can’t say the same for when on the AT&T network as that has been a little inconsistent. The viewing of pages is extremely easy and fluid regarding use. Visiting sites that are not in your favorites can be frustrating if you are not comfortable with the keyboard.

Photos: The camera is pretty good quality but is greatly affected by the shake of ones hand. The previewing option for browsing through past photos is extremely easy.

Weather: The weather app is one I use everyday. You can have a number of locations set and slide back and forth between all of them to see the weather in your area.

Stocks: Now that I’m finally starting to save money and invest this app is extremely nice to have. I brows at my stocks on a daily basis to stay updated on the market.

Network: This has obviously been one of the most debated items when hearing about the iPhone as it was not released as a 3G phone. This personally has been the biggest disappointment of the phone as in the last two weeks I’ve probably had only a handful of successful calls from start to finish. Meaning that a majority of my calls have been lost or disconnected due to service related issues. Often the person on the other end cannot hear what I’m saying nor can I hear them. This continues to be spotty during calls fading in and out. If anything should be evaluated and updated for the next round, it should be addressing the network and how the phone makes calls. I’ll definitely be moving on from the iPhone if this is not resolved.

Interesting Words From AT&T: Seeing as that I work with AT&T on a daily basis I have heard the views from some of the executives themselves. If you’re an AT&T (Cingular) subscriber you may have visited MEdia Net. This is the mobile web home-page on an AT&T handset. It also leads to MEdia Mall, the one stop shop for all your ringtone, graphics, application and gaming needs. MEdia Net is a significant driver of revenue for the mobile/data group. It allows them to offer up the content of all of their partnering vendors such as EA Mobile, iPlay and Sony Pictures to name a few. Well, why do I bring this up? The iPhone utilizes Safari which is a full on web browser thus not sending users to MEdia Mall where they may happen to purchase a ringtone for $2.99 or a game that could be up to $10. I just found it interesting that an extremely important revenue stream in the AT&T model was not even included in the most popular handset ever to be created.

Final Thoughts: Well this has already been a long review and anyone is welcome to their own opinions and I would love to hear them. The phone is by far the coolest phone on the market. period. As far as if its the right phone for you, i would seriously think about how you use your current phone before spending the money. Business people, I would definitely think hard! I know it hasn’t been touted as the “business phone” but it is cool enough to actually deal with it, I would just say think hard about it. As you all do too, I look forward to how this phone continues to change the mobile industry and what updates will come next.

To see pictures of my phone just check out my Flickr account.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Apple, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.