One Week Review Of My iPhone

So as I sit here writing this, next to my laptop lays the Holy Grail of cell phones right now – the Apple iPhone. I purchased my iPhone on the day of its release, Friday, June 29th. Its been a week since I’ve owned this extremely coveted device and I think I’m ready to report on what I like and dislike about it.

First and foremost, without any bias or to simply praise the iPhone, I want to start off by saying that the iPhone is the nicest, slickest, and the phone with the best interface that I have experienced to date. Mind you…I’ve gone through my array of mobile devices through the last decade or so…

As I had mentioned in a previous blog entry, I had no issues activating my iPhone through iTunes on June 29th. It was an extremely easy process and went quiet flawlessly. In less than 5 minutes, my iPhone was registered, a new number assigned to it, and it was ready to rock. In order to register and activate the iPhone, the most recent version of iTunes – v. 7.3 needs to be installed on your PC or Mac.

To make a phone call using this device is pretty quiet simple. All you have to do is either type out the phone number on the touch screen or select one of your contacts. The clarity of the call was ok although in some instances there was a problem with the volume/loudness on the call and I could barely hear anything the person on the other end was saying. This may have just been signal strength or network issues, even though I had a very strong signal as did the person I was speaking with.

In addition to the simple way of making phone calls, another neat feature unique to the iPhone is the visual voice mail feature. It’s a totally new and refreshing way to get voice mails and it makes you wonder why no other phone company thought about this yet?!

The iPhone has a built-in, 2.0 mega-pixel camera that works great for a camera phone. The large screen on the iPhone makes picture taking more fun than even on a regular digital camera. You can view the images in landscape or portrait mode just by rotating the iPhone ninety degrees in either direction. You can then flick through the images or play a slideshow. The only downfall with the iPhone here is that you cannot shoot any videos at all.

The iPhone also has built in speakers that are great to use with the iPod feature. The volume can be easily controlled and is adequate for being able to listen to your music without headphones/earbuds.

Browsing the web or watching YouTube videos by simply clicking a button on the screen is great. The videos off of YouTube look really good on the iPhone’s screen. While surfing the web, you can zoom in on content real easily by touching the screen with two fingers and moving them apart at a 45 degree angle.

Setting up an email account was quiet easy for me as well. I use Gmail for my email right now, and in less than a minute, the iPhone was setup and able to receive my emails. Just make sure that you setup/turn on your POP email on your email providers site.

The Google Maps feature is another very cool tool. You can easily look up businesses by name or category, plot a course from one location to another, and easily call them with a touch of a button. As you type in a location, the iPhone tries to match it to one of your contacts. You have access to both Google’s regular and satellite maps and can view a list of driving directions with traffic information turned on or off.

To use all of these Web features you need to be either connected to a Wi-Fi network or use AT&T’s EDGE network. The iPhone easily finds Wi-Fi networks, and displays them on the screen. By simply clicking on one, you can easily connect to it.

The battery life of the iPhone is decent, but on mine I come no where close to Apple’s ratings of 8 hours of talk time and 6 hours of internet use. My iPhone is usually in need of a charge after an extensive period of use in a couple of hours. This might be because of my settings and the giant screen using up a lot of power. I’ll have to do some real testing on the battery life and report back!