iPhone Review

So, I finally bought an iPhone, or a “JesusPhone” like some people call it. There are literally thousands of reviews out there, but here are my two cents.

I’m like it, but not blown away. FYI, I’m moving from a Verizon Blackberry 8703e which I really have few complaints about.

Things I Hate:

• No contact search. Previously my blackberry used to let me type in the first few letters of a person’s name, last name, or company name and let me find the contact. This is tremendously useful. I have over 1300 contacts in my phone and I recall them in various ways. Many I don’t know their name and only their company and for others, only their last name. The iPhone makes it impossible to find them. Additionally, scrolling through 1300 contacts is a pain, regardless of how many cool flicking technologies they build into it.
• No copy and paste. If I’m on a website and I want to Google a particular phrase, or copy some of it to a notepad, I should be able to.
• I wish the default Google Search would link to the search page designed for the iPhone rather than the default (which requires zooming).
• POP3 and IMAP just don’t cut it. Its clear email suffered on this. I’ve configured IMAP access to my exchange server, but it’s nowhere nearly as good an emailing device as the blackberry. First, even if I could live without the “push” service (iPhone checks mail every 15), the sync is terrible. I can’t delete emails from my iPhone and watch them get deleted in my Inbox. I’m surprised Apple doesn’t build some custom system, like the BlackBerry Connect to allow push email to iPhones. Even if they don’t license Microsoft ActiveSync technology, there has to be a workaround.
• I don’t like that the built in browser (Safari) can’t play video and embedded media like Flash and Shockwave.
• Google Maps app has no GPS sensor. This is a plain smack in the face shortcoming. A phone with this hefty a pricetag, should have a GPS sensor. It already has mapping applications, all the phone needs to do is be able to figure out it’s current position and pass them to the Google Maps applications.
• That it’s locked. I’m going to unlock the device this weekend using something like jailbreak.
• YouTube application seems to have limited content. I’ll have to delve into this further, but a simple search didn’t result the same as youtube.com did. Many videos don’t show up as being listed, when they are clearly available on the website.
• No todo application. Using something like tadalist.com’s iphone application is a good solution, but having a native application that synced with your computer would be far superior. Tadalist.com requires having access to the internet. On wifi it’s no problem, but using it while driving on ATT’s EDGE data network isn’t fun.
• Why did they have to recess the 3.5mm stereo connection so far in?! I can’t use any of my standard headphones, and now I’m forced to buy a $10 tacky stereo cable adapter from Apple or the like.

Things I Like:

• Good camera phone. Some people complained about the quality considering some phones have 5-megapixel sensors in them already, but 2-megapixel is the better quality than my very first digital camera. I’m pretty satisfied with it and 2MP is plenty for most digital media that isn’t going to be printed.
• Safari is far superior to the in-built blackberry browser I’m used to. The zoom feature on the safari is awesome. I love that it can read content and html tags from websites perfectly.
• Wifi support is sweet but the range isn’t very good. (I get a pretty weak signal in my bedroom, while my laptop has a full signal).
• iPod and video support is awesome. It’s smooth, barely noticeable lag times.

I’m sure there are more things, and I’ll write a follow up post as I use the phone more.