My Review: iPhone Rocks

ScottW

ScottW

Founder
Staff member
To sum up this review quickly, it rocks!

Panicked this morning on getting in line somewhere, and opted for a tiny AT&T store and arrived at 8:20am, was the 4th person in line. I would have been the 30th or more at the Apple Store or 15th at other larger AT&T stores. It was raining non-stop until 2pm.

While few people joined us until after 1pm, mum was the word on how many iPhones where coming in. At 5:50pm they came out, said they had 20 iPhones, 10 8GB and 10 4GB phones. They handed out 20 tickets, around 40 people where in line. They then let in 5 people at a time to the store, and I was in the first round.

Since I already had AT&T service, it was painless to get and activate via iTunes, didn't even have to enter billing information.

The iPhone is everything they make it out to be in more. Anyone who is "picky" about this phone, wouldn't be happy with anything. Typing on the keyword is a breeze, and I was typing with two thumbs as fast or faster than I have on a Blackberry, the auto-correction makes this possible.

The screen is so clear, you want to lick it. While I didn't post this using it, I could have done so and did make some posts using it.

If you have a chance to get one of these, get it. It's worth breaking a contract with any other carrier.

I'll write more later, want to go back and play with it some more!! Wish I had this thing waiting in line for 10 hours!

Scott
 
thanks for the review scott. I am eager to see what the general consensus is around the podcasting and blogging community. While I don't expect iPhone haters will stop hating the iPhone, I hope they will at least acknowledge their mistakes regarding keyboard, etc; so far people seem to be saying they are non-issues.

How is the battery life so far?

sounds like it was easy enough to get one though if you had only to arrive at 8AM. makes me feel for the guy who waited in line 5 days early! slight overkill it would seem!

EDIT: trying to get onto digg.com to see what iPhone news and reviews are out there and it seems to be down. that says a lot!
 
Not to make anybody mad, but, not wanting to wait in line, I was going to order from the online Apple store, but at 6PM (EDT), I signed on only to find out that the store was "down" until 6PM (PDT)---3 more hours!!

Decided to go to local ATT store and see how bad it was. Got there at 7:30--waited maybe 15 minutes, and walked out at 8PM with the last 4gig unit. All 8gig's were gone.

Yes---It Rocks!!!
 
Damn, I feel lucky. I waited in line at an AT&T store for 15 min (starting around 6:20), they sold out when it got down to the 2nd person in front of me. Went to the next location at the Mall, they only had 4GB models. One of their employees told me to try the 'old mall' across town. Walked in (7:15), asked "do you have any 8GB models?", and promptly said give me one when they said yes. Somehow that store had received a couple hundred of each model.

Battery life is great, but be careful if you're using the wifi feature. Seems that likes to eat power.

I have to say Apple hit a major homerun with this thing (if you forget about the AT&T exclusivity part). Not only from my experience with it, but from the people who I saw buying one or playing with them at the different stores last night. Seems like everyone who touched one either bought it, or were drooling pretty hard over it.

The only thing bothering me is the lack of ringtones and not being able to turn songs on the phone into a ringtone. Supposedly this is going to be something you setup in iTunes in the future, but I wouldn't mind some different tones right now.
 
mdnky said:
Damn, I feel lucky. I waited in line at an AT&T store for 15 min (starting around 6:20), they sold out when it got down to the 2nd person in front of me. Went to the next location at the Mall, they only had 4GB models. One of their employees told me to try the 'old mall' across town. Walked in (7:15), asked "do you have any 8GB models?", and promptly said give me one when they said yes. Somehow that store had received a couple hundred of each model.

Battery life is great, but be careful if you're using the wifi feature. Seems that likes to eat power.

I have to say Apple hit a major homerun with this thing (if you forget about the AT&T exclusivity part). Not only from my experience with it, but from the people who I saw buying one or playing with them at the different stores last night. Seems like everyone who touched one either bought it, or were drooling pretty hard over it.

The only thing bothering me is the lack of ringtones and not being able to turn songs on the phone into a ringtone. Supposedly this is going to be something you setup in iTunes in the future, but I wouldn't mind some different tones right now.
Click to expand...

Just curious, how do the ringers sound? How about music played through the internal speaker?
 
What is there is varied and sounds alright...just too basic for my tastes for the most part.

Music played though the internal speaker sounds really good all things considered. I was pleasantly surprised by that actually.
 
I did enjoy walking up to my local mall @ 7:00pm to find they had plenty of stock. Line was only 10 deep! I'm sure happy Apple employees are not restricted from buying iPhones early as At&t employees are (in regards to their using it as their company phone).

Typing with the iPhone keyboard really is easy and will win many people over.

(on iPhone now)
 
Few questions from me too! :D

First is, does it have some kind of memory card slot? I know the higher spec model has an 8GB flash drive already but another 2GB from a micro SD card would be even nicer.

Second how sturdy is the design? My phones tend to get dropped and accidentally knocked about quite a bit due to the job I'm in, don't fancy shelling out this kind of money only for the screen to shatter at the first bump.

Third! Is the touch screen hard or soft?

And finally how is the camera? 2mega pixel is pretty 'old skool' these days in phones, I've skipped straight from vga(pretty bad) to 3.2(pretty good) and now to 5mp in previous phones, so would be interested to know how it compares.

Cheers!
 
Sorry, no memory expansion. The top slot is the Sim slot. Unit is extremely sturdy. It's very solid indeed. From some reports out there the stress tests have come out very well. Touchscreen is solid glass. It's not like the HTC or palm pilots of old where they had a plastic film over it that felt spongy.

I took a couple of shots with the camera so far and it's a common camera, no extra frills with it. I find I am able to take decent pictures with it as opposed to my old cell-cameras which resulted in shaky shots.

Looking forward to other opinions on this as I'm sure I am a little bias.
 
Glad about the screen, was a bit worried about leaving a key or something in the same pocket and ruining it, remember the soft ones on older pdas seemed a bit flimsy.

Any chance you could post a couple of camera pics?
 
Here's a quick shot from my couch. I would get up and get an outside shot, but as you can see from the photo, the couch monster would not be very happy with me as she is resting up against me.
 

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PC World did some tests on one (durability) and reported that it passed with flying colors. Besides a key test, they also dropped it from varying heights on varying surfaces, the most extreme being over the tester's head onto concrete a few times. The phone came out with nothing but a few scratches/dents on the stainless trim surrounding the edge.

iPhone stress test video
(Note: There's a really stupid commercial before the actual test video plays...)
 
from video test said:
Hey that's pretty darn impressive. That's one hell of a resilient screen they've got on there. Look at that, still shiny - no scratches.
Click to expand...
He's really trying towards the end, possibly a bit miffed that it won't scratch. ::ha::
 
Today, I went out of town, out of the KC metro area, into central Missouri (1.75 hours outside KC) where only farmers live, cattle are raised for food, and the corn is about 8 ft tall.

While I knew that having data service from a carrier like Sprint was out of the question, I didn't figure AT&T had data coverage in the middle of nowhere. Low and behold, I was wrong. While I never did get it to pull up a web page when I tried it, the phone was checking my email and pulling in new email for me, when I wasn't looking. The "E" showed up on the signal indicator, so I know things where working good. I was at a farm the entire time, so I wasn't moving much, other than in/around the yard at a home.

With Sprint service, that would have been a pipe-dream. Thanks AT&T.

The iPhone was getting pretty low on batteries. The "usage indicator" said that it had around 6 hours of use, and 15 hours or so of standby time. I had only used 3 minutes of that time as a phone, and downloaded around 6mb of data from the Edge network. I still had battery left.

I was the talk of the event, especially in such a rural area, the City Slicker I was, with my iPhone, waiting in line for 10 hours etc. People where pretty amazed by it.

The PC World tests are awesome, love to see it. I feel more comfortable with my phone and letting others touch it now. :)

As others have mentioned, screen is solid, but very very responsive. Once thing I have been VERY surprised is smudges and grease on it from your skin. Last night, after fingering my phone for quite some time, I had yet to notice any smudging on it. But, with the screen off and in the right light, wow... it looked pretty nasty... and yet, clear as day on the screen when turned on. I have used PDA phones where you get grease on them and everything was "blurry".

The screen is BRIGHT, very BRIGHT. Then I realized, it was only about half-way on brightness, so I turned ti all the way up, and I think I could light a room with it. Very clear and bright screen.

You can lock the phone, so that you enter a code to gain access, which is nice.

A few disappointments at the moment, but I'm sure will be added later...

1) Calendar App has no TODO list sync, in fact, nowhere are your TODO items synced to the phone.

2) If you run IMAP and have mail rules setup to send certain emails to certain folders, the iPhone mail application doesn't check individual folders for new emails, just the main inbox. Outside of that detail, it seems to work pretty good. T

I am already coming up with a Wishlist, and some things can't be done via Web 2.0 programming... and so hopefully down the road Apple will open development on it.

Using WebShell for iPhone, I was able to SSH to my servers with the iPhone and while the default layout of the web app needs reworking with some additional functionality, my iPhone is now basically fills my primary mobile need, which allows me to feel comfortable getting a desktop system vs a laptop for my next system upgrade.

Camera takes the best photos of any camera phone I have had. It does wonderful pics in good light, and in overcast or poor light situations, it leaves much to be desired, but so has any other camera phone I have had. So, I don't really see this as a disappointment, just par for the course.

I tried out the headphones today, and they worked well. It was nice to be listening to music, have someone call you, take the call, all while your headphones are on, and then ending the call and going back to your music. The headphones have a mic built-in along with a remote. Very nice.

The "loud" speaker on the iPhone is not the best I have heard, but at the same time, is fine for most needs. It sounds like most typical tiny speakers on phones, so not much of a disappointment in that department, par for the course.

Overall, the device is smaller than I thought it would be and many of commented on that. I can type VERY fast with two thumbs and the autocorrection feature is very awesome and works much better than I imagined it would.

My wife did drop it (ugh) about 2-feet to our padded/carpeted floor and it was fine. :)

I am glad to see the PC World tests... the phone is VERY small in your hand and I can see that it would be easy to drop, as my wife proved today.

Visual voice-mail was kind of weird. I've only had one voice mail come in since getting it, and the voice quality of the messages seemed less than what I was typically used too. But, it's a voicemail that you'll probably delete anyhow and so not real downfall for that.

As others have said... very snappy, not slow anywhere... and pictures really just fly across the screen as fast as you can slide your finger back and forth across the screen... so fast you can hardly see the photos going by.
 
Is the auto correction intrusive at all? I know on phones the t9 dictionary thing that constantly tries to guess the word you're typing can be irritating, especially as it never seems to come up with the right word!

Very impressed with how sturdy it sounds, like I said my phones do tend to get bashed about a bit so its nice to know it's not going to (hopefully) break easily. I suppose being built as one solid unit rather than having the battery clip in, then the back slide on etc etc like on regular phones helps a bit.

From the picture posted, the camera looks quite sufficient for snapshots and quick videos aswell. Can you upload directly from the phone to Youtube or Flickr?
 
not sure about changing the language, but it's not intrusive IMO. It basically pops up a little box to the side and below the word you're typing. You can either keep typing or hit return. It doesn't overpower the word itself like other phones I've used do. It basically stays out of the way if you don't want to mess with it.

((posted via iPhone))
 
The auto-correction works differently than what you are used to, as in the phone dictionaries or even computer dictionary auto-corrections. The auto-correction only suggests one word and assumes that it is correct. If you just keep typing and don't stop, then it just auto-corrects all your words. You can then go back and re-read what you wrote and most of the time, it's 100% correct.

I think the key with typing is to "trust" the phone, which is hard to do especially when your not used to something being so good at what it does.

I don't see anything that references an auto-correction language.

I tried to post an attachment to this site via the file upload feature on the phone, but it had disabled the file upload buttons. So, doubt that you could post directly to flick'r or other services. When you plug in the iPhone, iPhone launches to import any photos and iTunes run to sync up everything.
 
mw84 said:
From the picture posted, the camera looks quite sufficient for snapshots and quick videos aswell. Can you upload directly from the phone to Youtube or Flickr?
Click to expand...

It's not capable of recording video. Something else Apple doesn't think we need, just like Picture Messaging and 3G.

Those things better be fixed by the time it hits the UK because our mobile phone market is waaaaaaay ahead of the US market in those departments.
 
I love my iPhone. The battery life is simply amazing, the screen clarity is amazing, the ease of use is ridiculously easy. All in all, I don't have any real complaints. I am looking forward to updates, however, perhaps with the addition of iChat. I would also like the option to select a home page for the web, but those are really non-issues. I find that I can type on the keyboard incredibly fast, and if you do trust the keyboard, you will be pleasantly surprised.
I'm not sure why everyone is wanting to record video on the phone. I find the video is usually crap on most cell phones, hence why I use an actual video camera. Plus I have a nice digital camera to take photos, so that's a non-issue as well (although the camera is pretty nice on the iphone).
 
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