iPhone – First Impressions

So after playing with my new 16Gb White iPhone for the best part of the afternoon, I thought I would post my impressions .

The very first thing I noticed was the usability! This phone is ridiculously easy to drive. The menus drive perfectly the response time on the phone is light speed compared to the iMate JasJam (HTC TyTN) or any WindowsMobile device I have ever used.
The build quality of the phone is excellent! It’s evenly weighted buttons are nice to push and feels like a very sturdy device. Being a touch screen phone its got fingerprints all over the front of it, but the white back doesn’t show the prints 1/2 as bad as the black on the front. I was very surprised at the included headphones, for standard headphones they don’t sound too bad. As with all Apple products, the box presentation was excellent!

Exchange Active Sync
Having previously used WindowsMobile, Exchange Active Sync is something that I have come to rely on as part of my everyday job. When Windows Mobile 6 came out, one of the new features was the ability to have HTML emails, well HTML emails were only available if the Exchange server was running Exchange 2007. With us still using Exchange 2003 at work, this was something that we had to live without. But the iPhone DOES HAVE HTML EMAILS even with Exchange 2003!!! This is great! Why oh why Microsoft couldn’t this work for WindowsMobile 6? Meh, I don’t care I now have an iPhone!! :p
My only gripe with the Exchange Active Sync, is well not that I have found yet… How to tell it to sync the sub folders of my inbox. Also when you have quite a few sub folders in folders they all become expanded, as seen in the picture.

App Store
Now this is one thing that got me a bit excited about the iPhone. The 3rd Party Apps!! There are quite a few in the App Store and the fact that you can download apps from your PC or on the road with your iPhone is pretty cool. So far I’ve gotten Twitterrific, Facebook, ShoZu and my favourite one PhoneSaber!! Will have to have a PhoneSaber fight with the other iPhones at work on Monday

 

Bluetooth
One thing that always bugged me about the JasJam was the total randomness that the Bluetooth would have. Sometimes it would work, other times it would make a buzzing sound or even just not work at all.
The headunit in my car is one of the Pioneer Bluetooth ones, jumped in the car, paired it up. Hey presto! Working Bluetooth! One thing that is a bit disappointing was the Bluetooth doesn’t support the A2DP protocol, so my FreePulse headphones won’t sync without a dongle.

iTunes
The iTunes store on the iPhone is awesome letting you preview your music purchase it and sync it back to your iTunes on your PC. A disappointing part is that it only works when you have access to WiFi. Sounds like a demand from ATT or maybe Apple are being data conscious for people that have Telstra plans, I don’t know… I’m wondering if this is something that could be fixed via Jail Breaking the phone

Conclusion
This is a very sweet phone and probably the most user friendly and practical phone I have ever used. Top marks to Apple on the interface, it looks brilliant and also works!! I will continue to post my experiences as time progresses.