I’m not going to do an extremely long review of the iPhone because everyone is doing that. I will say before I get too much farther into this I will let you all know that I am writing this on my iPhone so if there are any spelling errors, I blame the keyboard.
Before I get into the review I’ll say that the speeds I was getting over EDGE were around 200kbps (150kbps during peak times) and on my home wifi network where I usually get 4mbps I was getting around 2.5mbps with my iPhone. Now I’m going to break it down similar to how John Gruber did on Daring Fireball.
Activation – Mine activated very fast, only took about 2 minutes from the time I hit submit to have it activated until my phone told me it was activated. It was very simple to activate the phone only having to input a few items into boxes and it all was finished. I already had an AT&T plan so the only real option I had was how many minutes to get. Pricing seemed very reasonable.
Mail – There is no way to copy and paste text which makes quoting difficult but the mail application works very well with presets for popular email services. I have 3 email accounts set up on it and it doesn’t seem like there is any artificial limit to how many email accounts you can have.
Safari – It is very fast and works very well. I love the fact that you can have multiple pages open at the same time. The only thing that I have noticed about using Safari is that occasionally if I open a complicated web page or I have a lot of web pages open alongside listening to music from the iPod function the iPod function will crash on me. It is a little frustrating but rarely happens and I’m sure that it can easily be fixed in the first software update.
More after the jump
Keyboard – I like the keyboard a lot, it has taken a little bit of time to get used to but as you get used to it you will learn to love it. I have already began using it with two thumbs. The predictive text-like function works fairly well without giving me much trouble at all.
YouTube – It is barely usable over EDGE but works very well over Wifi. The videos do show how bad they truly are on that beautiful screen. The other thing about YouTube is that not all videos are available only the ones that either YouTube wants to be available or only the ones that have been encoded in H.264.
Earbuds – They sound better then the old iPod headphones to me but I will admit I don’t have golden ears. They are very comfortable in my ear. Also the play/pause/next functionality is genius with that little button you squeeze. The people I have talked to through the earbuds said that they couldn’t tell the difference between holding the phone to my head or using the earbuds. One thing I mentioned in the question answer post is that the headphone jack is recessed just enough so that many headphones won’t work with it because the ends are too big.
All in all I love the iPhone. I don’t know whether or not the hype has got to me but I will say that if there is any way to explain the experience of using the iPhone is that it is practically an ultra-portable notebook because it can do practically all I need it to do.
The pricing is still rough. $499 or $599 is pretty steep but I was surprised how many people were willing to plunk down their $450-$650 for the phone.
For more about the iPhone check out “Ask me about the iPhone“