September 09, 2007 I got an iPhone 
A few weeks back I was in NYC with my designer counterpart. With time to kill after the meeting we took the train down for, and before our train back, we headed up to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store.
I hadn’t touched an iPhone yet. As with the store (an Apple store under a big glass box), I thought it was nice, but I wasn’t blown away. The iPhone was nice, but not $600 nice.
As I’ve posted recently, though, I’ve become somewhat enamored by the prospects of developing for the iPhone, and after a meeting last Wednesday, I was offered the opportunity to be reimbursed for one to be able to do real-world testing of a project I’m pretty excited about.
I started hitting Engadget on my Sidekick II after the meeting, and saw all the new goodies, and the price drop on the iPhone. Thursday I headed into the Apple Store nearest me (North Shore Mall in Peabody, MA), where none of the new products were out. That was fine: 8gb and 4gb iPhones were $200 off, making my 8gb model $399, as promised. (You can actually get 4gb models for $299 while they last).
My intent was to bypass the activation process, documented days after its initial release, and just use it on wifi at home. It didn’t take long for me to decide to activate it, for the full experience, leaving my T-Mobile account active until my contract’s up in November.
So I’ve got one. And my verdict? It’s nice. A few things threw me off at first, but once I got everything set to sync how I wanted, it couldn’t be better.
- Mail: I started with all my accounts copied over and quickly turned them all off. I’m now down to a C77Studios.com account for when I want to send with that address and my Gmail account, which all my other accounts already forward into. I tried doing Gmail with POP first, wasn’t happy, and then used the built-in Gmail settings. That threw me off too. The Inbox doesn’t filter based on a cut-off date. It just shows 25, 50, 100, etc of your emails. The key is: “Use Recent Mode.” This grabs the latest email and pushes the others down. The 50th email is bumped out to make room for the 1st. You’re always viewing your most recent, and if you want to make room for more, you can Delete. You can’t empty your Trash, though, and you can’t move a message to another folder to keep it handy. That bothers me a bit.
- More on Gmail: I’ve seen some complaints that whenever you send Gmail, it ends up in your Inbox. This isn’t an iPhone issue. This is how POP with Gmail has always worked. It’s because Gmail treats all your mail as one big collection. The Inbox, Archive, and Sent views in the Gmail application are just views; they’re not distinct folders. It’s actually handy sometimes to have a sent message in your Inbox anyway.
- EDGE: Slow. Useful for iPhone-optimized sites. Checking email takes a minute.
- Mobile Safari: Awesome. I LOVE that I can have multiple “windows” open, which is a habit I’m used to on the desktop. Accessing Mint using the iPhone Pepper is swell. I use Camino and Firefox on my mac more than Safari, so I’m working on a process of migrating bookmarks into Safari for syncing using Bookdog and perhaps at some point Automator.
- iPhoto: I took some pictures, set the wallpaper. I synced. Every time I synced my phone, iPhoto opened again asking me to sync. iPhoto sees your phone as a digital camera; you have to treat it as one. Delete all the pics from the iPhone when you import. If you want them back on it, drop them in an album that you set to sync. You just can’t leave them in Camera Roll.
- YouTube: Phenomenal quality while on wifi. Haven’t tried it on EDGE.
- Google Maps: Crazy to be holding a pic of my building in my hand. Haven’t really used it to navigate yet.
- Contacts: This took a while. Zeldman described this well. The iPhone convinces you to abandon existing habits in favor of syncability. I’ve got email addresses in Gmail. I’ve got contacts in Highrise. I’ve got numbers on my old cell phone. I once downloaded all my LinkedIn contacts and imported them into Address Book. When I first synced my iPhone, it was full of people I’d never even call. I purged Address Book and started clean, manually entering and organizing friends, family and business contacts. I’m happy now. We’ll see how keeping up with it goes.
- Overall: It’s easy to use and despite the lock on features, it feels personal. I’ve done the ringtone hack, and redone it post-7.4.1 update. I’m not too intent on doing anything else to it yet (Installer hacks, etc). It is difficult to use in the car. I’m thrilled that I can use the Plantronics 510 Bluetooth headset I bought for my mac in the car now. (My Sidekick II doesn’t have Bluetooth.) But you can’t make a call on a non-tactile keypad without looking down. Voice activation?
- And the keyboard: I knew when I first saw it weeks ago I could make it work. I’m pretty quick and clean typing, but it’s one-fingered looking down for confirmation. That’s the drawback. With my Sidekick II flipped open, I could tell where I was on the keys just like on a traditional keyboard and could focus on what I was typing rather than how. It’s a great UI, but it’s going to take some getting used to. I’ll mention the lack of Keychain (or saved passwords) in this context too. Without that, you have to navigate form fields and reenter account info every time you visit a login site. Something to put on the nice-to-have list.
I’m still playing with it. I spent the better part of this evening importing music from my iMac into iTunes on my MacBook so I could sync some with the iPhone. I’m very pleased with it so far. Definitely $399 nice.
