don’t be a jerk

Over the weekend, some very mean, nasty robber men broke into my apartment and told me that I would have to choose between my beloved parrot, Ed O’Neill, and my beloved, brand new iPhone.
I totally flipped out and killed them all with my bare hands, so everything’s cool now, but seriously I think I would have chosen the iPhone.
 
I’m still writing my 72 Hour Film Shootout journal, but in the meantime:

The iPhone came out this past Friday. After seeing the lines at the local Cingular and Apple Stores, I didn’t even bother trying to get one.

On Saturday morning, Mike G calls me.

“Dave, they have 4-gig iPhones at the 3rd Street Apple Store.”

By lunchtime we were both walking down the 3rd Street Promenade with very pretty little iPhone bags. I really wished that Apple hadn’t given us these pretty little iPhone bags. They practically begged for the carrier to receive an ass-beating and a thorough robbing.

Engadget did a massive review. I agree with some parts and not others. Here’s my mini-review:

I’m an Apple fan and shareholder, but not an absolute blind loyalist (at least by my own reckoning.) It was a struggle for me to live through Apple’s G4 years, and despite what anyone says, I firmly believe that the AppleTV is a crap product.

That being said, I think the iPhone is a benchmark product in Apple’s history. It’s just a really, really well designed piece of machinery. Is it perfect? No, but it’s future potential is enormous, even in its current incarnation.

-Design: It looks like my old Sony Clie PDA, which I was always very fond of.

-Interface: Amazing. A perfect blend of futuristic efficiency mixed with real-world familiarity. Try scrolling through your contact sheet or a web page. It gets the job done, but with the comforting illusion of seemingly real-world physics.

-Battery life: For the first two days, I noticed myself running out of battery power by the end of the day, if not much earlier. Of course, I was using the thing pretty much non-stop and spending my nights jealously guarding it and hiding it from the world at large.

However, I’ve found that when I’m doing mainly phone use (ie, leaving the phone on standby and just making calls) the battery goes a long, long way. What really kills the battery is when I’m using wi-fi instead of EDGE, and dicking around with all the features, such as video, web-browsing, email, etc. Those higher end functions hit the power supply much harder.

For the past 2 days, I’ve finally chilled out on futzing with this thing every minute of the day. Today I did moderate mail, web, and google maps and made the usual number of phone calls, and my battery meter looks like it’s at 90%. Very impressive.

-Visual Voice Mail is very cool, very useful, and I can’t believe it took this long for someone to come up with the idea. However, when testing, sometimes I get my messages pretty quick, and sometimes it takes an unusually long time. I figure this is an AT&T issue.

-Keyboard: I’m still getting used to the keyboard. The autocorrection works amazingly well, but I don’t like the fact that I need to rely on it. Safari Widescreen typing (a la Sidekick style) is problem free, but you can’t currently type this way when making notes and sending SMS messages. Walt Mossberg says to give it a week, but I do miss the tactile feel of my Treo keyboard. I hope a future software update enables widescreen keyboard for all apps.

-Half-baked Bluetooth: I have a Jabra BT500 which worked flawlessly with my old phones. If it was within range of my phone it hooked up and worked. Now I easily paired it with my new iPhone, and it seems to work alright, but I tend to leave my headset in the car, and when I go away and come back to it, the iPhone will detect it and see it as paired, but will not automatically start routing calls back to it. Currently, everytime I come back to my car, I have to manually re-pair the headset to the iPhone.

Granted, the “hands-free” cell phone driving law doesn’t take effect until July 1st 2008, but still, this worked for me last week on my old phone. I’d like for it to work now.

Also, no bluetooth syncing!!! Only cable syncing.

I understand how bluetooth may not have the bandwidth to transfer gigs of music and videos, but it should be able to easily handle contacts and calendar events. This is one big feature that I miss. Hopefully Apple will remedy this in a future software update.

 
I’m coming off a Verizon Treo650, which I was actually very fond of. I’ll say this right now: The iPhone does not currently match up feature-wise with the Treo. With the exception of Visual Voice mail, the Treo currently does everything the iPhone does and more. Much more, in fact. The Treo supports MMS and video recording, which the iPhone currently does not. The Treo also has a much more feature filled calendar application than the iPhone and better business email options (albeit through 3rd party software).

However, for the most part, whatever the iPhone does that the Treo also does, the iPhone does much better.

At this time I will say that feature-wise and in a purely practical sense, the Treo may possibly be better than the iPhone. However, a few promised software updates from Apple should change that real quick.

I recently messed around with a korean phone and a Korean mp3 player and aside from marvelling at their functionality, I also marvelled at how frigging complicated they were to use. This is because Korea is a nation of techno-geeks that will soon give birth to a generation of cyborg babies. The Koreans are a race of people that speak in 1s and 0s and probably thoroughly memorize their instruction manuals before even picking up a product.

Americans, on the other hand, are fleshy morons. We need things to be a simple as possible. That’s where Apple’s interface team comes in. In some ways, I like to think of Apple products as well designed children’s movies. Sure they’re for kids and simpletons, but if they’re done right, grown-ups can enjoy them too.