The New Experience

I’ve lived with my iPhone 3G for a fortnight now and have decided that enough time has passed for me to be able to make some sensible comments about the experience. Initially I was ‘too intoxicated’ to be able to write clearly, but the passing of time has enabled some more mature reflection.

Things that I wanted and like

When deciding to go for the iPhone 3G I wanted two things in particular, and so far, the phone has excelled in delivering these features.

• I wanted an easier experience of having an office in my pocket - of being able to take calls and make appointments in my mobile diary quickly and smoothly when away from home.  The iPhone certainly makes this a relatively ‘pain-free’ operation.  When a call comes in I can put it onto speakerphone by pressing an onscreen icon, and by pressing another one, a large calendar appears so that I can check and make appointments with ease while talking.  I was theoretically able to do this with my previous phone, but the small screen and the fiddly buttons meant that I never tried it more than twice.  Now I can do it with confidence.  My phone book also syncs (via iTunes) with the hundreds of contact details in my email address book and my appointments sync (via iTunes) with my desktop calendar.  It really is helping me run an office away from home.

• I wanted meaningful access to the internet so that I could keep up with emails while away from the office and also ‘play’ in idle moments when sitting waiting in car parks or on trains or in cafes when I didn’t have a paper to read.  I have to say that the internet experience far exceeds anything I dared imagine for a mobile phone.  My previous experience had been of slow connections on a small screen that had to be moved up and down and sideways with buttons.  The iPhone is amazing.  First, it has four ways of connecting to the internet and always selects the fastest available.  (WIth an O2 contract, unlimited free internet connection and wi-fi access is included in the bundle.)  I used the slowest connection (the standard WAP connection) while in the middle of nowhere on holiday for a week and it was perfectly adequate for sending and receiving emails and checking the odd fact.  The fastest connection is through wi-fi.  At home my phone automatically logs into my wi-fi network and will do so in the various wi-fi hotspots in my home town.  (While travelling back from holiday I was amused to discover that I had been connected to a wi-fi network in a Little Chef in the middle of nowhere.) Once connected, there is no fiddling with buttons to read part of the screen.  You are shown the whole page on the screen, and then using your fingers, you just zoom in on the part you want to read.  They really have solved the problem of how to make a large screen usable on a small device.  The phone also supports PUSH email (which you can get for free - see ‘Free’ PUSH Email), or you can tell it to fetch your email every 15 minutes.

Things that I hadn’t expected and love

I could write reams on this but need to limit myself, so don’t panic.  The Apple store has hundreds of applications for the phone, many of them free, that can be easily downloaded and installed and I am sure that more will appear as time goes on.  Think of the phone as a mini-computer.  For example, there are applications to link your phone to Flickr, WordPress, Typepad, Twitter, Facebook, to get weather reports for your location, to give you currency exchange rates, and to give you information on your stocks and shares.  Five things, in particular, have dazzled me so far.

• I was worried about text input.  I have chunky fingers.  I had got used to predictive texting on robust buttons.  I wasn’t sure how my hands would adapt to a touch-screen qwerty keyboard.  I was genuinely surprised and relieved to discover how easy text entry is.  I rarely hit the wrong key, and when I do, the inbuilt dictionary instinctively recognises the fact and offers me the correct word, regardless of my spelling - like intelligent predictive texting.  Consequently, writing fairly substantial emails is a realistic possibility.

• I have been really impressed by the GPS (global positioning system) function.  I thought this would be a cute novelty, but it has been seamlessly integrated into several applications which exploit it.  At its simplest you can find out where you are and see this on Google Maps.  You can then find routes to any destination, together with stage by stage instructions.  As I am someone who always gets lost, this will prove useful.  However, this facility is linked to the contacts address book and to addresses in other programs so that whenever you find an address you can just press a key and get a route to that address from your current location worked out.  OK, it isn’t SATNAV for driving, but it will help you find addresses that you otherwise might spend hours looking for, and it will help prevent me from getting lost in London.

• Following on from the above, there is a wonderful free application called Vicinity which ‘does what is says on the tin’.  It tells you where you are and then provides information on all the things you might want to know about the area within a 10 mile radius - shops, super markets, garages, taxis, take-aways, banks, pubs, restaurants, cafes, hotels, local places on interest, Wikipedia articles, Flickr photos of the area.  It will be really useful for the times you find yourself in a new area and need a coffee, taxi, or somewhere to take the mother-in-law.

• When I was in hospital recently I passed some of the hours of enforced stillness on my back by watching videos and TV programmes that I had downloaded onto my iPod Nano.  The screen was small, but the experience was better than staring at the ceiling for 6 hours.  The larger screen on the iPhone makes the experience of watching videos and TV programmes much more enjoyable.  I would estimate that the screen in at least 2 times larger than my Nano screen.  The iPhone iPod experience is great.  You can easily sync (via iTunes) with your existing iPod devices and download new material from your iTunes account via a wi-fi connection.  There is also a free application pre-installed that links you to YouTube so that you can download and watch free videos with ease.  And I really, really do mean ‘with ease’.

• One of the most impressive silly ‘play’ things is to do with music recognition.  There are two programs that will tell you artist and album details of any music that you hear.  Shazam listens to a recording, while Midomi will take words either typed, spoken, or sung (yes, sung) and then searches the database before coming back with the answer.  If nothing else, it will amuse your friends at boring parties.  The programs then link into iTunes so that you can buy the tracks if you want to, and into YouTube so that you can download any relevant available free video.  Everybody I have shown this too has been skeptical at first, and then totally amazed by it.

Things that I miss

On my old phone there were various functions that the new iPhone doesn’t have that I feared I would miss.  To be honest, I don’t miss making video calls, or the ability to take videos (I never did get round to posting to YouTube).  The three things that I have missed so far are:

• The ability to send MMS.  Yes, that’s right, the new iPhone 3G won’t send picture messages.  OK, you can email pictures, but you can’t send MMS.
• The ability to send sounds and icons in text messages :-).  Yep, the phone won’t do that either.  Straightforward text, or nothing.
• The ability to transfer information between phones (sending ringtones to friends) via bluetooth.  Be warned - although the phone does have bluetooth, it only links into headsets and can’t be used for transmitting and receiving from other phones or for ‘toothing’.

The puzzling questions

Given that the phone will do so much, there are puzzling questions:

• Why can’t the phone send MMS?
• Why is a phone, which is so visual, and exploits visual media (you can change pictures with your fingers of by changing the angle of the phone) limited by an inflexible 2 megapixel camera.  My old phone had a 3.2 megapixel camera with flash, zoom, and macro.  Sony are about to bring out an 8 megapixel cameraphone.  Why on earth didn’t Apple put a better camera into this handset?

However, despite the minor limitations, it does so much so well, and I love it!

Oh, and er … yes …  you can make and receive phone calls as well.

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