Current mood:	accomplished
Current music:	The Pillows - Little Busters
Entry tags:	iphone, reviews

Product Review: iPhone (and a little AT&T Wireless)
Thought I'd take a stab at this kinda thing since... well, since I feel like it.

So it's been one week since I got the iPhone, and I can say I am immensely satisfied but a bit disappointed at the same time. This is about right for a device with so much hype around it, and where the hype was built off of previous successes and simple yet impressive promises. It basically reaches most of its promises, but misses fairly widely and oddly on some others. These misses however are the type that could easily be fixed in a patch or change of policy rather than having to wait for another hardware revision, so the hope is still there. I'm going to go with a "The good, the bad, and the mediocre" model with this review, which is about the order these issues will hit one.

The Good (iPod features, standard phone features, interface, and internet):

This is my first iPod branded mp3 player, and now I understand why these things are so damn popular. The sound quality is the best I've ever heard, and the organization/ease of use of the navigation system is amazing as well (par for the course as I understand it though for iThings). Video/picture quality on the screen is amazing for not being as high resolution as some other devices/what I hoped (full VGA minimum next time plz). And while I had avoided it like the plague, I have to admit iTunes has grown on me, though I don't plan to buy any music/vids through it due to draconian DRM schemes/retarded having to rebuy if you need to download again. I am going nuts with subscribing to various audio/video podcasts though. As a media device, this is definitely almost everything I could want.

Along those same lines, the phone quality is also really good. Sound quality of calls is great for both ends (both for yourself and who your talking to), and while it could be louder, the speaker phone is fairly loud and incredibly clear. Contact organization and searching is easy, as is call waiting/conferencing, as well as texting (I'll get into that more in the interface section).

The interface is AMAZING, and was what sold me on getting this in the first place. It's slick and intuitive, as when I don't know how to do something, it almost always ends up being the first thing I try anyway. The touchscreen is awesome, though perhaps on the verge of being too sensitive. Barely touching the surface at all is instantly and accurately picked up, which is perfect for a gesture-based system (you'd kill the screen in both overworking and fingerprints if you had to sink into it and then pull across while sunk in like some other touchscreens). Multi touch works great as well, and allows for the most natural navigation and manipulation one could expect (have an app with 3D object manipulation that works very minority-report-ish). One thing I cannot stress enough is my happiness with the onscreen keyboard. I know it's a point of contention for some, but it's responsive and unbelievably accurate (that is, it's easy to be accurate despite what you think are the small keys). It's much easier to use than blackberry buttons (because you just have to touch the keys rather than squish the berries, so you can literally "touch type"), and using a standard keypad for texting over it is like comparing a console controller to a mouse and keyboard for FPS: Sure, you can get used the formers and get used to and decent at them, but you're always going to be handicapped compared to what you could do on the latters.

Finally in this section, the systems for the remaining functionality is pretty great as well. You get mostly full web-browsing (no flash, but everything else), which is like coming out of a coal mine and into an open field after using your standard "mobile web" types, even when you're on the somewhat slower EDGE network. Push email/calendar is a godsend (I'll never unknowingly miss another important meeting I wanted to attend again! And I'll know which days might be good days to call in sick without having to boot up and log in through my main rig). Given the chance I think it will convert quite a few business folks over, assuming they aren't the stuffy kind who would think having a nice interface and being able to do fun things on it are BAD things. Once again, the onscreen keyboard makes replying a pleasure more than it is work.

The Bad (App(le) pricing/openness/impressiveness, stability, 3G coverage):

So of course it's not all gumdrop houses on lollipop lane. There are some things I would call definite disappointments compared to what I/others had built up in my head. Sadly, the primary culprit is also the most promising part of the new firmware: Apps. The first issue is pricing, which I'm not sure Apple really has a say in (they approve apps that show up on the store, I'm not sure if they get to tell them what's reasonable or to overcharge or not). Yes, there's a lot of nifty little free apps, and they reflect their values (they're cool, but at best they're demos of things I'd pay to get full versions of), but when money comes into play, things are all over the place. $10 for Monkeyball or a Crash Kart racer which are somewhere between PSX and Dreamcast quality? Ok, I'll swallow that. $10 for 16-bit Bomberman? Ehhhh, you're losing me. $10 for Tetris or Pacman? Ok, you're fucking insane. And then there are all the apps that are a pittance, but should be free (like $1 for a units conversion tool, which if I bookmark it I can get for free using a website in the browser. or $3 for Sudoku, which likewise I can go anywhere but the app store and have people almost paying me to play their version of). Then there's the fact that like most Mac apps were last time I checked 5 years ago, there's a certain plateau of quality that is reached that they never quite get past without adding more than $50 to the price. This plateau is the level we in the PC universe know of as "shareware", whose equivalents are usually between $10 and $30 in the Apple world. There are several exceptions to this rule (which are HUGE exceptions like MotionX poker which seems to be worth every penny of the cost if not actually more), but they are few and far between the shovelware that seems to be out there just so they can say look at how many apps we have (and please don't count how many of them are solitaire). I also was unaware that there are apparently over 9000 clone versions of Myspace and Facebook out there (I knew/hoped there were like, 10), each of which has apparently created an app for integration directly with the phone. These make up (or clog up depending on how you look at it) a majority of the free apps, which I find disappointing as I'm not a huge social network person (keeping track of/being active on 1 at a time is exhausting enough for me).

Here's where ranting starts, feel free to skip this paragraph: I think part of this has to do with openness, which is directly opposed to apple's technological values despite their image (though knowing how conforming to various things you generally have to be to be considered a nonconformist, this actually makes sense in that "the system doesn't make sense, and thus this example of it not making sense does" way, if that's not too confusing for you). Essentially, if you want to develop applications for the iPhone, there are three steps you have to take. 1) Get a Mac, you can't create apps on any other platform (that's one way to win over developers). 2) Pay your $99 yearly fee for the right to be able to put your apps on your iPhone and publish them to the store (although as 3 will show, this is still not a guarantee). Funny, usually when I do programming and development to help someone's systems or platform, they'd pay me... Finally, 3) Have your application be approved by some judging group in Apple, who seem to have the opinions and aptitude of judges for American Idol. They also must have corporate lawyers sitting over their shoulders with electric buzzers wired up directly to their genitals considering that apparently nothing that even associates with a corporate product can go through (so if you make something that makes your iPhone a tivo remote, but you aren't tivo, no dice), and nothing that could possibly compete with Apple's own apps is allowed either (so don't look for firefox with flash support or a turn-by-turn GPS app that doesn't cost as much as the device itself to be there. And don't expect anyone to create 3rd party integration to improve these parts since apparently most of the fun stuff like integration with the camera or an existing app is entirely blocked within the SDK). Well, I could go on forever about this, but I have been so I'll go on.

Up next on the "bad" list: stability issues, which is something I could overlook except for 2 things. The first thing is that Mac smugness and "It just works (unlike PCs lolz)" mentality which drives us PC power users as mad as being a gear head who just had some kid tell him that having an automatic transmission makes his car better than ours because he never has to worry about grinding gears. However, this is all out the window with the iPhone, whose non-trivial apps will crash at least once a day (and that INCLUDES apples own provided Safari browser) which is really more annoying than anything. However, there are times (in comparison, a couple times a week) where these crashes or some unseen system crashes will actually crash the whole phone. At this point you have to wait a minute or so for it to reboot, during which you're greeted with that iconic Apple logo that lulled you into this false sense of security in the first place. Anyway, if not following their own hype is the first reason, the second reason goes back to one of the hindering factors of the app creation process: the approval part. So we're meant to believe that the primary reason for this approval process is to protect us from bad apps and to keep our user experience "smooth and consistent", when 90% of these apps have a 50% chance of crashing on you a minute into using them, and a good 50% of these applications have the kind of crashes that require you to reinstall them to be able to use them again? I'll tell you one thing Apple, you're lucky you have new users like me who could learn to deal with systems crashing once a day and not give up back in the windows 95 days, because you aren't going to win any "XP crashed on me once last year and I lost an email so I'm looking for a more stable system" users if their first experience with your company is like this.

Finally, it's more of an AT&T gripe, but 3G coverage. Oh, I can get 3G coverage. Just not on my side of my apartment complex (no biggie, I hook into my wifi). Or on my side of the building at work. However, when I drive away from both Baltimore and DC towards Germantown? no problem getting it. When I'm in the gym and even the locker room that blocked all phone service on my Verizon phone? Perfect 3G every time! But since we're all paying an extra $10/mo ($15 for real texters) due to this, I'd hope that their 3G coverage map for the country would cover at least 20% of it, and that if I'm smack dab in the center of one of the solid areas of coverage for their coverage maps, that I don't get/lose the service depending on which block I'm on. EDGE is not the end of the world, but it's not what we're all paying that premium for now.

The Mediocre (Missing features, missed pie-in-the-sky hopes, heavy-use battery life, media support):
So this is where I talk about all the things that I could complain about, but I either don't care enough or I realize it was kinda unreasonable. The first of these are the missing standard phone features, like MMS, or not having flash/video recording for the camera. On one hand, poop, no direct pushing a picture of someone's vomiting on someone elses breasts at a party out to a friend's phone who is trying to get some sleep before a big presentation the next morning or having dinner with their parents. On the other hand, I can wait until I get home and email it, or I think I can do that out of the phone with an actual email to that person's number(which is free-er than an MMS for me). Still odd it's not there, and the rare times I use it, annoying. As for the rest, flash on cellphones have always sucked (unless they're those ones that are meant to be as much camera as phone), and video quality was always crappy on those anyway as well, so it doesn't feel like a big loss there. Next up were the out-there hopes, namely that it would have a second lower-quality camera on the front that would support cellular video conferencing. I guess with no video support and limited 3G coverage (as well as who would you vid-conference with, just other iPhone users and people in Japan?), it was kinda out there on hopes. Finally of course is battery life, which is really not that bad at all. It's just if you use 3D/intensive apps, or 3G, you get pretty limited battery life. Not like laptop battery life, but "needs charging after 10 hours of intermittently heavy use over the day". And this can be easily gotten around by getting a car kit (which could consist of only a car-outlet to USB power converter really). Finally, the one that should have been obvious to me was the fact that for videos this only supports certain apple-approved formats (which basically means MP4s). This is mostly an annoyance since it means any things I happen to download/rip not through iTunes will 99% of the time require a conversion process which could take up to 30 minutes per item depending on quality changes and length (and having to have a secondary copy taking up space on my HD if I want to be able to take it on/off the iPhone at will). I could start buying things through iTunes, but that's a whole other rant right there.

Overall, to boil things down to a useless ratings scale, I'd say its a 9/10, but I feel like it really should have been a 10/10. I'm happy with no regrets, but I do eagerly await the next firmware release (or barring that, the will to go ahead and hack or potentially brick the device that is my primary connection to the rest of the world). Who am I kidding, I'll jailbreak this eventually, but only after I've done enough research to know how to back it up and unjailbreak it so I can go legit again if it becomes worth it (and unbrick it if it decides to crash mid firmware-flashing or such).