I, Phone!
(Lamest post title, EVER.)
So, as you may have deduced from previous posts in which I said I got an iPhone, I got an iPhone. HW got one as well, as getting the AT&T family plan saves money! Even so, our monthly phone bill is going up by about 50%, which is a relatively small price to pay for having completely changed our lives for the better.
Am I comparing the iPhone to organized religion? Of course not. There’s no comparison. The iPhone is far better. I have an idea for a comic in which Steve Jobs crashes through a brick wall, yells “OH YEAH!” and then I and several of my friends drink his contents with straws. Get it? He contains and/or is made of KoolAid! A KoolAid that I drink from with extreme prejudice.
If you haven’t played with one yet, here’s how the iPhone delivers the awesome: it is a phone, an mp3 player, a “camera,” an organizer, and let’s face it the thing is just a computer in hand-held form. There is little I can do on my MacBook that I can’t do on my iPhone. I can’t really compose and record music, or do photoediting, but those are not things I’m likely to have to do while, say, driving to work.
The interaction is entirely through the touch screen, which is basically “Star Trek: The Next Generation” come to life. It doesn’t need many physical buttons because if you need to hit a button it will provide one for you on the screen, and through the magic of electricity it detects your finger and makes FUN.
I’ve downloaded, conservatively, 3,481 applications to it (3,300 of which I’ve later removed for being sucky), with an ease that is rivaled only by every other Apple product. Even better, it has the ability to interact directly with the iTunes store over the 3G cellular network, so you can download podcasts and songs directly. There’s even an app or 10 that helps you figure out what song you may be listening to somewhere by starting the app and holding the phone to the speaker. Whaaaaaa? Yes. It works; at the hockey game last week, a song came over the loudspeakers that could be described as “reasonably boss,” and I just started the Midomi app and held my phone in the air. 10 seconds later, it reported: “Into Philadelphia,” by “IKE.” Whoever that is. Either way, I downloaded the tune on Amazon later (I don’t fully trust Apple’s DRM situation yet) and ’twas rad. It even has the ability to connect to local WiFi networks, if you want to do some hardcore downloads.
Okay, there are a few cons, that I’ve so far discovered:
- The keyboard, being completely non-tactile, can be challenging. It’s easier in landscape mode (in many applications, if you turn the phone sideways, an accelerometer in the phone detects this and turns the display to match…totally sweet), where the keyboard is wider, but you can’t do this in email or SMS text mode, also known as the applications where this would be most useful. That’s something I’d like to see fixed in an update, Apple.
- The iTunes system limits you to downloading files no larger than 10MB if you’re using the 3G cellular network. If you want anything bigger, which includes a lot of audio podcasts and virtually every videocast, you need to find a WiFi network or download it on your regular computer and sync it over. This is frustrating because the place where I’m most likely to want to download podcasts is at work, where we have no WiFi network and I can’t get to the iTunes store, let alone actually install iTunes on my work lappy. If I remember, I’ll grab them at home, but I am not good at remembering.
- Some of the applications are, let’s say, a tad unstable. Right now things are working okay, but sometimes I’ll install or uninstall an app, and suddenly almost every other downloaded app just crashes on startup. I usually have to delete and reinstall something, and then they all work fine. Weird, and a little disconcerting, given Apple’s usual reliability.
- The camera kinda sucks. The resolution isn’t actually too bad (I think it’s 2MP, which is about on par with a cheap digital camera from 2002), but there’s no flash, and the sensor is pretty noisy. It seems to do okay outdoors, but indoors, even with reasonably strong light, the pictures are fairly horrible; blurry and lots of artifacts. Also, it doesn’t do video. What the hell? Even my Crapberry does video.
Okay, that’s enough negativity. Let me tell you about some of the other awesomes:
- You can put Pandora on this thing, and it’s actually astoundingly reliable. No lag, no pauses in the tunes. It just does its Pandora thing. After I installed that, I also found the in-many-ways-better Slacker Radio, which just presents you with dozens of radio stations, instead of having you seed your own with song requests. You can still tell it to get rid of tunes you don’t like with the “ban” function, and you can mark favorites for more-frequent playing. Like Pandora, you’re limited as to how many songs you can ban or skip in an hour (6), but unlike Pandora you can upgrade to a paid version that lets you skip as much as you want. There’s also a Public Radio app, that basically finds the non-commercial radio stations to you and links you to their web feeds. Obviously you can just do this via FM if you have a regular radio handy, but you can also find stations all over the country, not just the ones nearest you.
- GPS. Oh, the GPS. It can do so many things. Obviously, it comes with a map application (Google Maps, in fact), but you can allow any application to use it, so people have come up with stuff that uses it to find local restaurants of great deliciousness (Urbanspoon) or even just track your own movements, if you find it useful to know where you’ve been (like after jogging or biking, if you want to know your distance). There’s even an app that automates finding your car, if you’re parked somewhere in a big city and got kinda lost.
- The Safari browser is so pimp compared to the Blackberry browser that I can’t even describe it. If you have Blackberry Curve, you know how you can’t view half of all websites because they’re too large or complicated for the BB browser to handle? Yeah, the iPhone doesn’t have that problem. You know how the BB browser handles java like I handle discussions of testicular surgery (lots of fainting and dispersions cast on my manliness)? The iPhone doesn’t have that problem.
It doesn’t have Flash yet, which is weak, but apparently Top Men are Working On It.
- You know how, if you have your Blackberry set up for IMAP to a regular email account, deletions from a webmail or Outlook client aren’t reflected on the Blackberry? Yeah, not a problem with the iPhone. It was a little frustrating setting up my matthearn.com email address because I don’t have SSL working, but a little googling and I had it down. And this thing allows me to view all my folders (well, 200 messages max in each, but still), unlike the Blackberry which just sees my Inbox.
- I should stop burning the Blackberry, but the Facebook app for Blackberry sucks. You can see stuff, but can’t do much. The iPhone one works great, although it has some of its own problems (clicking on some of your notifications of photo comments doesn’t take you to the photo, but to the commenter’s wall).
HW is not as thoroughly excited about her iPhone, mostly because her last phone was made by Archimedes during his downtime between Peloponnesian Wars, and she’s confused by modern technology. But she’ll come around. I’ll have to buy her a MacBook Pro for Christmas, which is fine with me.
