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When was the last time you dated a woman who was nice and sexy and at the same time intelligent too? Welcome to the iPhone. Steve Jobs magic is working.
The iPhone is not only a sexy phone but extremely intelligent. Once you use it, you would find other phones are so dumb!
I tried a Windows mobile phone. While talking it would blank out the screen. Which is a good way to save power but…. during a call if I had to wake up the screen, I had to tap the screen. While doing that, some other button would get accidently activated and the call would get disconnected or go on hold.
Similarly on many touch screen phones, you would find that while talking, when the ear touches the screen, it activates some button that you didn’t wanted it to.
How does iPhone manage this? It has a proximity sensor. The proximity sensor switches off the touch screen when you take the phone close to your ear, and turns it back on when you take it off. Simple technology but extremely practical.
The iPhone interface is also the best I have seen. Very easy to use and intuitive. It hides all the complexity that a normal user wouldn’t use.
What Apple is missing in the iPhone that they are not trying to make it a replacement for a computer. It still requires the computer and iTunes to sync music, pod casts, etc. You also can’t sync your address book with Yahoo or Gmail directly, this again requires iTunes.
What more I like about the iPhone:
- Good battery life, goes on for 2 days on moderate use.
- Good sound quality through speakers and the headphone. The sound volume is good for music. However the volume is low for the phone and the speaker phone even after when the volume is on full. Didn’t figure out that one!
- Excellent screen resolution and good video playback.
- Conferencing facility works well.
- Email works well, I tried IMAP and Gmail.
- EDGE works well and it switches to WiFi whenever available.
- No crash. It has never crashed on me. It does get slow at times, when you load up too many applications but never had a crash. This is amazing considering how many times a Windows Mobile phone crashes.
- Also the operating system response is fast.
- WiFi works well and the Safari browser works well.
- Very attractively prices at US$ 399 in US. Hope they can maintain the same price in the rest of the world.
Now what I don’t like about the phone:
- Very very proprietary. Everything is proprietary and it feels like your locked into Apple for life.
- You can’t use it to connect your computer to the internet using the iPhones EDGE/GPRS service. Apparently this is again locked by Apple. There are sites that explain you how to do that in a round about way. But that’s a little complex for an average Joe user.
- You can’t edit emails once they are in the outbox but not yet sent.
- No option to send electronic business cards like Palm, Nokia and other cellphones.
- Once you sync your music/video from one computer, you can’t sync with another computer. If you do that you will lose all your music and videos. This may have been done to prevent people from sharing music but its a big pain for the average use. I feel every more sorry for Windows uses, who need to re-format their computer every couple of months. They better have backups of their iTunes.
- The phone does get a bit hot when used. Its still doesn’t get as hot as a Nokia but still its irritating.
- No expandable memory, which means you cant add more memory. With 8GB and now 16GB phones, they may not be required by most uses, but why live with a limitation?
- Camera is good but only 2 megapixel. No flash or zoom or any other camera features such as scene modes.
- No camera in the front which is required for video conferencing.
- Regular head phones jack doesn’t work. You need only an iPhone jack. Proprietary!!!
- It has excellent maps but no GPS.
- If you face a problem with the battery, replacing battery is a rocket science! Its not as easy as the other phones where you can just change the battery.
- No video recording so you can’t make some fancy home videos
- No timer for Silent mode. I like this feature in my Nokia phone, when I go for a meeting for say 2 hours, I can put the silent profile which expires in 2 hours. So after 2 hours the phone switches off the silent profile. In iPhone, you will have to manually switch it back.
- Big problem with recognising Numbers. If I have a number saved as 55555 without the country code and the caller ID send the number with +15555 (country code), it won’t understand. Nokia does this very well and that’s a limitation of the iPhone.
- Couldn’t find a way to synchronise your calendar with any other web service. Would have liked if it could sync with Google Calendar.
- No PDF reader, Adobe Acrobat! Apparently Adobe asked $2 per device as license fees and Steve Jobs said FO! So we get F$%#.
- No TV out cable included. So if you want the watch the videos on TV you can’t right do it out of the box. You need to buy a cable from Apple which cost $49.
The iPhone’s SMS is very poor, perhaps because SMS is not big in the US but it surely is in India and other countries. Hope Apple fixes it before they want to sell it to Europe and Asia.
- No MMS.
- No SMS forwarding. Not a big deal, there are third party applications that allow you to do that but it would be nice if Apple included that by default.
- SMS with special characters. These are alerts are sent by Banks/Airlines. They show as garbled on the iPhone.
- No option for sending group SMS.
Conclusion:
For me the iPhone is the smartest device I have ever used. And if you don’t mind some of the limitations mentioned about, its definitely worthy the try.
PS: If Steve Jobs is reading this, good work! But keep it open 
Read Earlier post:
Why wait to buy the iPhone
