The iPhone is gadget heaven. It really does restore your sense of childlike wonder. I’ve had a blast all weekend running my greasy finger over its glassy surface.
It’s a Crackberry for the masses. Finally, mobile email, messaging and web browsing is fun and easy — how did it take so long?
I’ve had a Treo and cell phone email for years, but never, ever used them — they’re a mess. Now I’m an iPhone text addict — a 41-year-old acting like a teenager.
I bought one on Friday and have been out around town with my kids all weekend. The little angels monopolized it, surfing the web and watching YouTube. They figured it out immediately. I showed them one thing — how to use your fingers to shrink and zoom — that was it. I took some calls, surfed the web and sent some email.
I found it’s not all roses — there’s serious issues using it for work — but in general, we’re true believers.
The Good and The Bad after the jump. Plus camera phone samples.
iPhone picture samples — one third their original size.
The Good:
1. The Web, in all its glory. Using Wi-Fi, the Web is a dream. You flit from site to site like a butterfly. A greasy finger is the most natural way to scroll around pages and zoom in — it’s easier than using the mouse on a desktop machine.
2. Corrective text works great. You botch letters in almost every word you type, but if you get three out of seven letters in the correct sequence, it guesses the word you want. I’ve been whizzing through email, no problem. One thing in my favor: I’ve no Crackberry muscle memories to unlearn.
3. Google Maps: fast, fun and traffic updates for free.
4. The camera – It’s a lot better than any other camera phone I’ve had. See samples above (I had to seriously downgrade the files to upload them to WordPress).
5. Entertainment — The screen is spectacular. It’s as good as watching high-def on a HDTV. Even the white earbuds sound pretty good.
6. Syncing is painless. It slurped over all the contacts, calendars, music and videos. Not a glitch. It’s so painless, you take it for granted. But having used PlaysForShit devices, easy sync is a blessing from above.
The Bad:
1. No cut and paste. No document editing. No webpage saving. The iPhone’s not much good for blogging.
2. AT&T’s EDGE network stinks. It’s dead slow.
3. No universal landscape keyboard. The keybaord can be rotated into landscape mode only in Safari. Seems natural to have a large landscape keyboard in email and notes also.
4. A host of missing features: No search for contacts, no MMS picture messaging, no cut and paste, no Flash or Java in Safari, no Bluetooth file transfer, can’t be used a PC modem, no camera zoom, no video recording.
38 responses to “The Three Word iPhone Review – It Fuckin’ Rocks!”
your pictures came out very nice… those all your kids? yikes
The missing features all sound like things that can be added via software updates. If they had waited for perfection, it wouldn’t have shipped Friday. I am damned impressed as it is.
Nothing you can do about EDGE, but as a former Cingular data customer, I had my expectations set already. :-) The service is fine for email, just isn’t good for interactive things like web browsing.
Great picture!
Yea, I second that it is gorgeous and it def rocks my socks! To add to the missing features, iChat. Seems like an obvious missing feature. Here’s hoping for that at revision 1.1
That four letter word with in the present continuous does not mix well with kids…
I’m from Colombia, south america, I wonder how much time we’ll have to wait to see one of those in our streets
I’m extremely happy with my iPhone, but with that said, there are a ton of things they need to fix. Fortunately, I think all of them are software issues.
Safari crashes a good amount (I guess it *is* the same Safari as the one that runs under OS X). Also, Safari has taken down the music player quite often. If I want to play music, it’s best if I don’t surf at the same time.
Yes, landscape mode does work under Safari. Yes, it would be nice if it worked under different apps as well. But it’s also incomplete. It doesn’t do autocorrect (maybe this was intentional, as you’re less likely to make mistakes?) Also, the magnify-glass doesn’t work properly under it.
I’m not sure this is a bug (can anyone confirm this?), but the only way to transfer music to my iPhone is through playlists. I can’t directly drag music on to it. Worse, the only way I can organize music on the iPhone is through the on-the-go interface they had previously. Seriously lame. With the current interface, I should be able to more easily build a play list than that. More egregious, it ‘lost’ my music, until I had it reboot at least one time.
Maps works well. Really well. Only, it would be *really* nice if I could mark it up. with a touch interface this would seem like a natural thing to do. Maybe I want to add a land-mark, or highlight an area of interest. Also, selecting a path would be real nice. All of these features are supported by the google maps web page already.
I won’t go into what’s wrong with Notes, since everyone else has covered that. SMS works well, and I have yet to try out visual voice mail. I haven’t used EDGE extensively, but it works well for me. Maybe it’s not as fast as WIFI, but it’s fast enough. I never tried it before the speed-boost, but considering when I’m on the go, I’m usually just trying to look up a few random important things, than browse hundreds of web pages.
Apple definitely still has a lot of bugs to get out of their current software, and improvements to the UI. But overall, it’s really nice. I think for it to reach it’s true potential, it needs an open SDK, and if that fails, a decent scripting language.
Why would you want zoom on your phone camera. it’s always digital zoom which looks terrible and besides you can zoom in on the pictures that you take afterwards or cut/crop them for another purpose. And it’s nice to see that lots of those issues could be fixed in software later, aside from the whole edge network thing.
Nice summary of points. It’s satisfying to read some no frills, straight hands-on comments.
However, I think each update I read here causes me to die a little inside. If you come across it, don’t be shy to drop some info on when Canadians, Europeans etc. are going to be getting our hands on this thing.
I’m in agreement with you, Leander. I would, however, add A2D2 audio streaming (even mono-audio streaming) to the missing features. I don’t want to be shackled to the white headphones when I could be wire free with a set of bluetooth ‘phones.
I love my iPhone, it’s awesome. The only thing I found weird, is I tried to leave you a comment via my iPhone but when I typed the system ran very slow. It doesn’t do this on my site, or on any other that I have found, just when I try to leave a comment. Anyway, I’m sure that’s something within iPhone Safari but I didn’t know if anyone else was having the same issue.
A 2MP camera is the best camera phone you ve ever had ??? Are you an Amish or something ? In Europe, only entry level phones have 2MP cameras… the standard is 5MP and upwards. And is it true that the camera only takes stills and NO video ? I think i ve read that somewhere but it cant be true, right ? I mean that would be a joke…
Spare us the four-letter words in the title. Surely someone with your writing talents can find a more appropriate adjective.
At least when it comes to Europe it will have G3
I just got mine on Friday. Your review is spot-on. One thing I’d like to add to the negatives is the inability to highlight text to delete quickly. Instead you’re forced to hold the delete key down which can be a pain at times. Related to this, there’s no way to “undo” so if I’m replying to an email for example and I want to delete a fair chunk of text and I hold down the delete key too long and accidently delete more text than I wanted, there’s no way to undo my last action and get my text back. Oh, and the ringtone selection is too limited as the vast majority are so annoying that you wouldn’t be caught dead having that go off in public (well most of us wouldn’t be caught dead).
The UI is a true joy to use, and it’s hard to resists picking it up to just screw around with it, simply for the sheer wonder of it. It’s like moving an invisibly thin piece of film across a frictionless surface (that’s how responsive the UI is, it actually creates that illusion for you).
I think you’re being a tad harsh on the EDGE speeds as well. It’s not great, don’t get me wrong, but I was expecting such a horrible experience that when I actually used it I was pleasantly surprised. It is fast enough to be usable when there’s no wi-fi available and is far from abysmal (more like just a below average-to-poor)–“dead slow” seems excessively critical to me.
There are still some dangerous features that new iPhone users should be wary of:
http://video.dotcomedy.com/pla…
Geez, all the complaints about 4 letter words make me want to point out that “fuckin’,” is 6.
…just sayin’.
I hear the Crackberry is addicting, but I think we may need a 12-step program for iPhone addicts. It’s FREAKING AWESOME!
As long as we’re mentioning missing stuff, though…
– Voice Dial (requested everywhere)
– Flash/Javascript (requested commonly)
– Real apps/widgets or at least downloadable (locally stored) web apps (haven’t seen this mentioned yet)
– Games, just to specify WHAT apps (definitely requested everywhere)
– I also second the A2DP/stereo bluetooth thing, but for now I bought the V-Moda Vibe Duos.
Best phone I’ve ever had (5-10 times as good as the last one: Treo 700p). Do I miss some things? Yes, USB modem use at 700-900 kbps, my Bible app, TextTwist game, Sprint network coverage. Would I go back to the Treo? No freaking way.
David
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