iPhone: First Thoughts

POSTED AT 00:03 on 13th November 2007

I got an iPhone on Friday when they were released in the UK and thought I would quickly share my thoughts on it. I’ve been playing with it constantly since I got it 4 days ago, and so far i’m loving it!

Activation
The activation was a breeze!

I was expecting long delays and the agony of having to wait hours for the phone to activate and so was very surprised when it only took about 10 mins…the whole process was incredibly smooth.

Since I already had a contract with O2 all I had to do was enter my existing mobile number, confirm the activation code sent in an SMS to my old phone and hit go!

Phone
The actual phone part of the iPhone is very easy to use and understand. I had some initial problems trying to figure out how to get my contacts in the correct order (ordered by first name, with the format first name – second name). This annoyed me a little bit as I’m not sure many people in the UK order their address book by the last name and so seemed strange to not have it set as default.

The one thing has is truly annoying though is that lack of formatting for UK numbers. Everything seems to be set for an American telephone number format of (XXX) XXX-XXXX whereas in the UK we have XXXX XXXXXX or XXXXX XXXXXX. Maybe there is a setting that I just haven’t changed, but I can’t find it for the life of me.

SMS
I’ve love the iChat-esk look of the SMS and it makes it much easier to have full conversations over text. Will be interesting to see how it handles a thread of a few hundred SMS’s…but will have to wait a few months for that to happen.

Email
Since I’ve never had a PDA or a blackberry before, I’ve never experienced email on a handheld device, but am finding it easy to use and send little messages despite the many flaws.

The major flaws for me are:

- Ability to only have a single signature for all email you send out. I have 4 IMAP accounts on the phone for both personal and business and they really need to have there own unique signatures – especially for business use since you are required by law to include address and business info. Plus if I want to then upload a photo to flickr over email, i don’t really want my personal contact number tacked on the bottom as the photo description.

- I’m getting a lot of spam – I wouldn’t normally see it as Mail.app filters it all in the background. The only current work around for this to to always keep Mail.app open on your mac and allow that to filter the email before viewing it on the iPhone.

- No view all unread email option. This would make it so much easier to manage multiple IMAP accounts since you wouldn’t have to click back and forth between them.

Web
This is the real strong point of the whole phone. Browsing the web is so easy and painless to do. Some sites, such as facebook, that include an iPhone version are easier to use than their full version counterparts.

Again the whole browsing experience isn’t complete and could be improved with a few additions:

- Open link in new window. Since its a bitch to go back on some sites, this option with a double click or something would really help out.

- Again, there doesn’t seem to be any UK localization. The web address entry form has no other option to quickly add a ‘.co.uk’ instead of ‘.com’. What would be really great is if it allowed you to select a different domain ending if you hold it down.

Conclusion
Yes there are a few bad things about the iPhone, but the pro’s totally out way them and am very glad that I got one on the launch day.

I also find the touch screen keyboard easy to use and the corrective spelling is fantastic other than on slang such as ‘gd’ and ‘bk’…I’m finding it so easy to use that I decide to write this whole post on my iPhone…pretty neat!