Well iPhone day has come and gone in the UK and Germany. Here it launched at 6:02 (why, oh why, did they make that joke?!) on Friday 9th, and seems to have been quite well accepted. I have had a fair bit of personal experience with the whole process thanks to both of my parents getting one this weekend. Activation is relatively painless, although having to wait a few hours for O2 to get their act together on this before you can really use the device and learn its intricacies was rather annoying.
As with most Apple products I have experienced, the experience as a user is lovely. The interface is revolutionary, and I don’t foresee a resurgence of buttons after this. Even the doubters are coming around to some extent once they use it. It is such a natural way to interface with your device, and comes into its own when something like a mouse or other cursor-based input device is not available. Of course this is not the first touch device on the market, and it won’t be the last, but combined with the hype that Apple products seem to generate purely by existing, and the fact that everyone who seems to use it can get to grips with it very quickly, means that I expect this will be one of the most famous, for a while at least. Indeed, my own mother, who by her own admission does not like technology, has come to, at the very least, not loathe this device. The big numbers of keypad dialling seem to be a big hit, and the simplicity of the SMS features have gone down well too. A QWERTY keyboard makes a world of difference it seems, as does auto-correcting typos.
Settings is relatively intuitive, although I am not sure why Bluetooth is in ‘General’. Took me a few minutes to find to pair the respective headsets to the devices. Speaking of which, I really like how the iPhone deals with headsets. When a call is made, it gives access to an ‘audio source’ list, from which the desired device can be chosen. This is especially useful when it is used to connect via bluetooth to a car hands-free, where some conversations need to become private quickly, and can be transferred seamlessly to the phones speaker and back again as need be. Again this is not a new feature, but like so many things, it is made easy to achieve, and so might as well be!
I am not going to do a feature by feature review, because these already exist all over the net in a much more polished form than I could accomplish. Suffice it to say that for most users this seems to be a very good choice of phone provided you don’t mind O2, and don’t mind being seen with this device. That said, for someone like myself, I still think my reasons for not wanting one are valid – 8GB is too little storage, and EDGE is old tech and is in fact a step backward for Europe. Like the loss of Concorde, and so the effective cessation of commercial supersonic flight, this kind of backtracking is pretty unacceptable. If and when there is a 3G/HSDPA iPhone with more storage, then I might consider getting one. Until then it is a toss-up between a Blackberry and a Nokia N-series. Suggestions?
