my thoughts on the iphone

Jul 12, 2007 · 2 minute read
technology
iphone thoughts

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.