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A week with the iPhone
By farseeker | August 20, 2008
So, I’ve had the iPhone for a week now. As I mentioned in my own blog I wasn’t exactly blown away by it. Don’t get me wrong, as a PDA its great, but it’s nothing that hugely unique. And in its crippled state (as is how apple ships it, and how it’s meant to be used) it’s not that flexible. Only Apple sanctioned apps was getting a bit of a pest as I really needed some flexible VoIP. Seeing as it runs on Unix (more on that later), it should have been a lot more flexible.
As a PDA, I’ve used better. The new HTC’s are a better PDA. No questions asked. No other way around it. And as a PHONE, it’s not really very good. Reception is poor, call quality is poor, phone interface leaves a lot to be desired and iTunes doesn’t send the ringtone to the bluetooth hands free in my car, which means I get the default ringtone that’s built into the hands free. You can’t receive vCards by Bluetooth, you can’t use MP3s as ringtones, I’m yet to find out how to use custom message tones, there’s no MMS, no video calling (big whoop) and you have to use iTunes. I hate iTunes. I aways have, and my opinion of it has not changed. The iTunes window consistantly restores as black and sometimes refuses to recognise the iPhone and insists on setting up a new sync partnership (or restore from an old backup). At least you can now copy songs to the iPhone without putting them into the music library first.
So, as a PDA, I’ve used better, as a phone it’s poor and the peripheral software is, well, shit.
So. What else? Sex appeal? 11/10. All the women in the office love it. The interface IS very good and is VERY swish and fun to use. I dont know if the springboard will ever get old. The only poor thing about the interface is the keyboard. In portrait mode it’s very difficult to type with. In landscape mode, it’s much much easier to use (you can type on it like a HTC) but almost no apps support landscape. Usability is fantastic. It doesn’t come with a user manual (which is great for the environmentalists) and, frankly, it doesn’t need one. Now, I’m not exactly a technological dumbass, but nobody I’ve let play with the phone has gotten lost (after they find the home button at the bottom of the device) and everyone is straight into it. It is very very very very very easy to use. Much easier than a Windows Mobile. More stable and faster than a windows mobile too.
As mentioned before, the iPhone runs on a Unix BSD subsystem. This means that underneath it is a fully fledged operating system. But also as mentioned before you can only run apple-sanctioned applications on it. Unless you jailbreak it. Which I knew about before I got it, and had every intention of doing. Now, every single tutorial on how to do it was missing some vital information, or had the information wrong, or had information for the wrong version of the iPhone. Still, after three days I finally managed to get it jailbroken. This means I can now install any application on it. AND this gives me access to the Unix subsource via SSH. And it’s running an FTP daemon so that it’s easy to get files on/off it (you can’t use it as a storage device because of th DFS file system). After installing APT-GET which I’m yet to use, in theory, should be able to install pretty much anything (I don’t know if it’s got a compiler but if it does you could obviously compile stuff on there too). Since having this ability, the phone is very very flexible. I’m going to spend months finding useful and cool apps to run on it. I’ve already got three whole pages on the springboard filled with stuff.
Something I’ve overlooked so far is the included data on the plans. Mainly because this varies from plan to plan, carrier to carrier. I’ve got 250mb/month and so far I’ve used 15mb in the past week. That’s of over-the-air data, I should say, obviously wifi data isn’t counted (I spent 95% of my time around wireless networks).
So, overall I must say I like the iPhone. But only because it’s been jailbroken. If I couldn’t jailbreak it I would be very dissapointed right about now. Especially as I’m married to this thing for at least two years. But as it stands, I think I’m going to be very happy. Very happy indeed.
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