My six year old Nokia 7650 has become too difficult to use. A single long call and it's dead, or a day without charging and it'll show full power right up until the moment I need it, when it'll just die. It needs only a battery but my cheap replacement from eBay is no better than the original (and also I imagine it will probably explode; it looks a legitimate Nokia item but at a price of £2.99 inc postage it's either fake or stolen).
I got a freebie Motorola Razr, which has unfortunately completely given up the ghost too (crashes after booting). Plus, it is awful. A truly terrible phone, from the GUI to the hardware and everything in-between. Who put those stupid unlockable buttons on the side? I walk around beeping and taking photos of the keys in my pocket!
Nokia phones remain great - a simple 6300 is light years ahead of the 7650 while offering the same features and more in a faster, tiny and more expandable unit. But if I'm going to the Carphonewarehouse there's only one phone I'm going to walk out with: the iPhone 3G. I've put it off due to the huge costs (£30 a month doubles my bill and reduces my free talk time by around 7 times). I'm also put off by it being with O2 - which I have been with since late 2000 and have learned to despise. I might write about my O2 experiences later, but suffice it to say that if you have a choice you should go elsewhere. No matter what they promise.
Anyway, this is the end of my first week of being an iPhone user. The phone really is as good as the hype. Email and web are great. It is intuitive - you don't need to be told how to use it, it just works as nature would have it - if nature produced hand-held microwave communication devices.
As an iPod, it's as good as the hype in this aspect too. Even the built-in speakers are 'good enough' to be truly usable in the real world. Video? Also good. YouTube works well but the interface lacks a lot of the youtube.com site - but you can use the real site in Safari, only jumping to the YouTube player when clicking on a video. It's also possible to import your own videos into iTunes to sync down to the iPhone - you just need to get the format right, e.g. using ffmpeg on a unix box:
ffmpeg -i SourceVideo.avi -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -maxrate 1000 -b 700 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 192 DestVideo.m4v
Is the iPhone a general purpose computer? Almost. There are lots of apps to download and at very cheap prices. You're not going to compile your own software or write your own scripts though.
Most apps are not free, but with the majority of those at 59p and almost all under £10 it is unreasonable to complain. If you do think 59p is too much to pay for weeks of someone's time to develop the software then I suggest you consider living in the Sahara as a nomad, which would perhaps fit better with your life views than western civilisation.
SSH and VNC apps make the iPhone a reasonable tool for a sysadmin.
There are even car performance apps that use the iPhone's accelerometer to replace hundreds of pounds of specialised in-car equipment to give 0-60 times and such like.
GPS is partly useful: I used a GPS monitoring app to report my speed at all points along my commute. Very cool, except for when I lost GPS in a tunnel and it told me I was doing 130MPH. I was actually doing 40 though roadworks. The navigation works as it does on Google maps, but it misses the one thing to make it usable: voice prompts. I suppose it isn't to be used as an in car sat-nav, as if you lose Internet (GPRS) then you lose your directions.
There are problems with the iPhone:
Safari stability:
When playing tunes in the iPod and browsing, Safari will bomb out regularly.
After a week or so heavy browsing, it starts to bomb out all the time.
This applies to all apps that use Safari - e.g. YouTube and Maps.
A reboot (power off, power on) fixes this. I rebooted this morning and it has remained stable for today.
The ringer button:
1. You only have two options: no sounds, or sounds. The Nokia flexibility for car mode, pager, loud, etc. is lost.
2. The button falls off. It's a metal button glued to a plastic switch. Mine did so after exactly a week. A quick look at Google reveals that it's very, very common, so I decided not to bother getting a replacement phone (which Apple will provide in 15 minutes, but who know what Carphonewarehouse would do...).
I decided to superglue it back into place. This is not without risks on a 7 day old iPhone: you might get glue on the screen, you might glue the switch into place so it is immovable. Etc., etc. Unlikely to covered by warranty.
Reception:
I have yet to see a 3G signal. A problem partly due to having changed jobs and now working in a very rural location. Hopefully I'll get into a bigger town sometime soon so that I can at least test it. My new employer doesn't even have wifi at the moment (and I should mention that phone reception is available only in the car park - for a major software company, I'm very disappointed by the infrastructure - regrets for another post..) so the phone is used almost exclusively at home right now.
Call notification:
Later Nokias have lights that flash every minute to alert you of calls or SMS that have been received while you have been away from the phone. For the iPhone, you need to switch the screen on. There is no other notification.
Anyway, beyond all that, I have to say it's the best toy I've bought in ages. In fact, thinking back over the last two years the full list of interesting new toys have been in the majority from Apple:
MacBook, iMac, PowerMac 12", iPod Nano, iPhone. Only perhaps my Linksys IP phone could be added to that list. This excludes non-tangibles such as Python and Django, two things I will praise in a future post.
