My iPhone 3G Experience

I’ve had it for a while but only now got around to writing this. Despite the negative points below its still by far the best phone I have ever owned and I love it to bits.

The OMG!!!

1. Flush headphone jack and dramatically improved audio quality! Summed up: it’s actually an iPod now. I can easily say this is the one feature that sold me on the new phone. On the old iPhone every preset I wanted to use caused serious distortion even at low volume, making it utterly useless as an iPod.
2. The new case. I continually rejoice at the curved all-plastic back. The plastic has a much higher friction coefficient than the old aluminium back. In other words, the new back is way more “grippy”. The old phone would slip and slide around in my hand, leaving me anxious about dropping it. The result of this was that I actually used the front glass to hang on to the phone. Not ideal when this is the main control interface. The curved edges are nice too, doing away with that scary sounding thud when placing your phone on the table. Now you get a brief wobble which sounds way better for the phone.
3. Aurora Feint. Freakin awesome puzzle/RPG game. Totally addictive and very immersive animation/interface/music/sfx. And Free! Unfortunately, it’s a total memory hog, and menus can sometimes lag. In most cases it requires a phone reboot prior to play. But its all worth it.
4. The App Store. What an excellent idea. Makes the phone a true “platform” swinging the doors wide open for some extremely creative software. A shame Apple is so restrictive about some of their apps. Google “rejected from app store“.

The Good

1. I complained to Optus staff that I didn’t want to be sans-phone while my number was ported over to Optus. So they gave me my new SIM early so when the port occurred, I could just chuck the SIM into my interim phone. Oh yeah, and the closest store is 1.5 hrs drive so they posted my phone, which was nice. Still had to visit the store to sign up which was to be expected.
2. No in-store activation! As a consequence of the first point, I managed to completely avoid the rumoured in-store activation. When my iPhone arrived, I just chucked in the SIM and activated it myself through iTunes. Interesting side-note: The store trainee was the one who suggested iPhones could be activated by users at home. She said “the only reason we activate in-store is so that customers can walk away with a working phone”.
3. The country code bug is gone. I won’t say “fixed” because it could have been a quirk of Virgin’s service. The bug was that texts came from number format +61418555555 whereas calls show up as 0418555555. The phone saw these as separate numbers, so you had to have both numbers stored in a contact which is just annoying.

The Dissapointing

1. My biggest disappointment is that most developers, including those at Apple refuse to acknowledge the device’s superior usability when turned sideways. Not only is typing remarkably more efficient with a bigger keyboard and nice fat buttons, but most non-keyboard apps are more comfortable to use, especially Safari which I use exclusively sideways. Apps I would like to see with sideways support include SMS, Mail (composing), Maps, and basically anything where you type.
2. The App Store interface needs some work. I read in a blog about the lack of a shopping cart. This becomes a big deal when you are scrolling through a list of 500 apps, you install one and it exits App Store. You go back into App Store and its at the summary screen of the App you just installed. You go back to the list of apps and you’ve lost your place in the list. This forces users to remember their place in the list and this is a serious usability flaw. A shopping cart would eliminate this by removing the “exit after install pressed” behaviour. It would also be useful as you could browse the store over EDGE/3G and wait until you had WiFi to “checkout” as it were.
3. YouTube is inexplicably slow at buffering videos even over WiFi. I load the same movie in Firefox and there are no underruns, but on the iPhone, videos take minutes to buffer (longer than the length of the video in some cases). This just makes you ditch the phone and walk over to your computer! YouTube also lacks a proper cache, meaning that if you’ve just watched a video a minute ago and want to watch it again, the whole movie is downloaded again. There is so enough room on the flash for even a small cache of 50MB or so.
4. No MMS. I didn’t actually realise this until I was sent a text saying “You have recieved an MMS. Visit this website to view it” Lame Apple. Just LAME. This omission of a technology that has been present in phones for several years simply lets down something calling itself a next generation device.
5. Lack of proper Gtalk app. There is Palringo but it’s bloatware. I just want a slim Gtalk app with push message support. Thanks in advance Google.
6. No 3G Optus coverage. I’m stuck with GPRS up here. There is “3G” coverage, but on the 900MHz band which conveniently is not supported by the iPhone. Not such a big deal. I’m over it.
7. Still no Flash. Perhaps we can blame Adobe and licensing restrictions etc. for this. But why the lack of flash, Apple? Please explain.
8. Shazam. You hold your iPhone up to the radio or some other music source. The app picks the artist and track name. It works, but the probabilty that a track is correctly identified is directly proportional to the popularity of the song. Not something I’ll lose sleep over, but disappointing nonetheless.
9. No Dock. Last in the list because I wouldn’t use it anyway. But I didn’t get a dock with my iPhone. Meh.

The Downright Bad

1. The Ringtones. No excuses! These are some of the worst ringtones I have ever seen in the history of the universe. Seriously, I would have Crazy Frog before I would have some of the included ringtones. At least you can (relatively) easily make your own. This customisation doesn’t extend to other sfx, most importantly the SMS alert. I shouldn’t have to jailbreak my phone Apple. But your sounds are SO CRAP I’ll do it in a blink once a suitably stable hack emerges.
2. No Visual Voicemail! WTF? Excuse me while I rewatch the Keynote and observe this as one of the key features of the iPhone. I smell a class-action lawsuit, I do. Unfortunately, I doubt the ACCC could do much as I suspect Apple were very careful not to advertise this feature in Australia.
3. iTunes Account problem. You can only authorise 5 computers to download apps to the iPhone. If you want to waste one of those auth slots, here’s how. Sign in with iTunes account. Authorise that computer when it prompts you. Change your email address on iTunes account. Attempt to download apps to iPhone. Get prompted again to authorise this computer. Lose one of your auth slots. Voila!
4. The Optus support voice recognition lady. OMG she is such an idiot! Why can’t these things just say “Press 1 for mobile phones”, “Press 2 for landline”? I want to know who on earth decided that voice recognition in this context is more usable than the old number menus. She is kinda fun to mess with though. I was so frustrated one day at work I started shouting at her. Her response induced at least 30 minutes of uncontrollable laughter. Me: “Suck my balls!” Response: “I’m having trouble with that”. I guess you had to be there…