Surferbill

My First 24 Hours As An iPhone Owner

I’ve had my Nokia 6230 phone since the beginning of time (or at least that’s how it feels) and vowed to replace it this year. I spent several months last year coming up with my needs and wants, investigating alternatives, waiting for the G1 to come out and generally being in a state of analysis paralysis. After much to-ing and fro-ing, I bought the iPhone this week.

I went with the 8GB black version. I already have an iPod (60GB) and even 16GB doesn’t come close to meeting my needs. Oh, and I don’t want a flat battery after 8 hours of listening/day.

Let’s start with the good bits first:

• It looks damn cool.
• It’s so easy to use.
• I get that feeling of nostalgia when I look at it and think of my Apple Newton.
• I like the look of the text message system and how it’s like chat.
• I am amazed at how cool some of the apps are (iTunes Remote, Midomi) and how many good free ones there are.
• Proper mobile web browsing.
• Wifi and 3G. Surf wherever whenever.
• GPS geotags your photos, finds you on Google Maps, etc.
• Everything syncs up perfectly (so far). Just wish the calendar would link up with Google Calendar. But who needs an app when you have a fully featured (well, almost) web browser.

Unfortunately:

• O2 haven’t finished porting my number across yet, so I still can’t text.
• I haven’t got round to digging out my email passwords and setting that up, so no comment on email yet.
• What I’ve typed so far (mainly in apps) has been a bit error prone due to the lack of tactile feedback.
• The camera isn’t very impressive, I swear the 2MP looks as crappy as the 1.3MP on my Nokia phone. Don’t think I’ll get much use out of that.
• I wish there was an easy way of adding bookmarklets to Safari too (you can’t drag a link to the Favourites button to add).

Overall I’m pretty impressed. There are a few things that need improvement but on the whole, I’m not ready to send it back.

So far I’ve installed the following apps:

• Facebook
• Twitterific
• FriendFeed
• Google Mobile
• Google Earth
• Midomi
• Shazam
• Sudoku
• MMS
• WiFinder
• Remote
• Torch

Let me know what (preferably free) apps I’m missing that you can’t live without.

Related Posts

• Syncing multiple Google calendars with iPhone 4
• iPhone unlocked: AT&T loses iPhone exclusivity
• Hotmail users to receive 250MB storage space
• Special Offer on Web Site Hosting
• Google indexes one trillion unique pages (1,000,000,000,000)