my thoughts on the iphone

so last thursday, i had the fabulous idea of purchasing an iphone, especially being that i was already in a cingular 2 year contract. so i picked up the 4gb model. after having used it for nearly a week now, here are my thoughts:

pros

• the screen is amazing.

• it has wifi.

• safari on it is awesome.

• the whole means of navigation (zooming with your two fingers in safari and google maps) is off the hook.

• visual voicemail rocks! why wasn’t this available before!?

• pull based email is good for personal email accounts.

• the screen rotates when the device rotates which is really cool (accelerometer).

cons

• no 3g. edge is slow! i guess usually, this is not a problem because you have wifi in most places these days, but still, in places with no wifi, 3g would be nice.

• the phone voice quality is not that good - if you turn the volume on calls to maximum, the voice doesn’t sound right. the speaker phone also doesn’t get too loud.

• the web browser has no arabic support!

• no cut and paste… come on, this one should be obvious!

• while one can supposedly play quicktime videos from within safari, i couldn’t play m3us or mp3s off of an ftp on it. not sure if that’s just me though…

• no custom mp3 ringtones! you can only use one of the handful of preloaded ones.

• no custom alarm tones! you have to use one of the handful of preloaded ones.

• no games! what, so i have to be on the internet playing javascript games?

• it comes with a youtube application, but only a fraction of all videos are available because they have to be encoded in a certain way. this is supposed to be fixed soon though.

• no api! i want to write my own apps for it, but i can’t. people are working on it, but still…

so that’s my review in a nutshell. overall, a nice phone, but if they iron out some of those issues, it’d be incredible. a lot of those issues could be fixed by releasing a software update and opening up their api, but whether or not they’ll actually do it, only time will tell. in the meanwhile, hackers have done a good job playing with th internals of the phone, and its only a matter of time until we get unlocked iphones that will run custom applications.