One year of iPhone
By glazou on Monday 10 November 2008, 10:30 - Permalink
I bought my iPhone exactly a year ago during W3C Technical Plenary Meeting in Boston. After those twelve months, here's what I think of my iPhone:
- good hardware quality : I often keep my iphone in my pockets, sometimes with coins and even keys. Not a single scratch.
- I wonder how I've resisted using a Motorola Razr or a Windows Mobile-based phone. I don't stand those beasts any more. In particular Windows Mobile. I love my iPhone.
- I'm not happy with firmware 2.0 and 2.1 ; for some unknown reason, launching an app became slower and slower. My iPhone sometimes needs 10 seconds to show the list of SMSs or make the list of phone contacts active and clickable. I have enough memory on all partitions, this is not the root of the problem.
- the loudspeaker is ridiculously weak... When my phone is in its belt holster and I wear a sweater and a jacket, I can't even hear it ring.
- the spellchecker is extremely annoying ; touching a suggestion should accept it instead of refusing it ! I often end up with a text corrected by the spell checker that is absolutely not what I had in mind. Most people I know here in France disable the spellchecker.
- why do I need a cable to sync with iTunes when my iPhone has wifi ?
- the proprietary jack headphone/microphone connector is a pain.
- Safari crashes far too often. Safari on the iPhone is a really cool browser but it's really too easy to crash. Last time I made it crash, I only tried to move to landscape mode while a trivial HTML test page was not entirely loaded yet...
- I still miss my iPod's clickwheel.
- the quality of the builtin camera is absolutely miserable.
Comments
I got mine just a few weeks ago (a 3G), and some of your issues are now resolved. The speaker is slightly louder by most accounts (depends who you ask). Should note that because the original iPhones didn't have any wire mesh over the speaker, lint can get in there and muffle the sound. The proprietary headphone jack was really just recessed. This is now gone.
The plastic back for some people is developing hairline fractures... but that seems to vary... might have been a bad batch or something. Seems to be mainly white iPhone 3G's.
I 100% agree about the spellchecker/autocomplete sucking. Then again, few implementations don't suck.
I'm still hoping for push notification to launch so we can "background" apps. That's really the major thing I want to see.
The cable to sync your phone is really because it would kill many 802.11g networks to sync 16GB of video/music. People won't understand that and blame it on a "bug" that Apple needs to fix. Heck your battery may die half way. By using USB2, they save the network, and their reputation.
Well, to summarize your post "It has many problems, but I love it" or the other way round.
WM users - I am one of them - say exactly the opposite : "It has everything, but I don't like it"
With the 3G, the speaker is indeed louder and with OS 2.1, opening the list of contacts should be much faster.
About the crashes, it helps to restart the iPhone from time to time. It is recommended to do it whenever you install an app.
I missed the scrollwheel too at the beginning but not anymore. With the alphabetical index, no more scrolling back and forth through thousands of songs. With the play/pause/skip controls directly on the headphones and with the volume on the side of the device, no more fidgeting in the pocket trying to figure the orientation of the thing, unlock the switch and skip the song without touching the volume or change the volume without skipping the song. And with the double-click on the home button to see what's playing, no more navigating back and forth and up and down the menus.