iPhone - day 1

So I went ahead and did it. And it's pretty spiffy, too. The line was a fun experience, and I picked up my allotment of two iPhones (one for me, one for a client). Setup was simple - I snapped a few unboxing photos with my iSight as I worked for the heck of it...


After that thrill was gone, I set up the new account (although they don't offer "business" account plans, I was able to work around that by using my business credit card for the account and reporting my office address), and then got cracking. Even though I live in Essex County (area code 978) I was still given a 508 phone number. Interesting. My old Cingular phone had a 978 number, and I was given choices of numbers during the manual process. That was the only strike, though - overall setup was far easier than traditional cell phone setup ever has been. iTunes rocks.

Initial sync took about 15 minutes, bringing over my iSync data, one playlist of about 200 songs (550MB) and my last 12 months' worth of iPhoto data (about a gigabyte when re-rezzed down). Re-rezzing took most of that time, and really strained the processor utilization - on my Santa Rosa MacBook Pro, it had the fans roaring for the first time since I bought this portable. Once sync was complete, I was able to pick it up and immediately be useful. E-mail setting synced automatically. In this initial release, IMAP push doesn't seem to work with non-Yahoo services, so I set timed sync for 15 minutes (the minimum). I haven't done too much yet other than experiment with the interface (slicker than I thought) and make some calls.

Voice quality is excellent - better than my previous GSM Treo 650 by far. The iPhone is almost impossibly slim (under a half-inch), but is about the same overall height and width as a Treo, but lighter as well. It feels very solid, unlike pretty much every cell phone I have ever used in my life. Because I'm paranoid, I bought some screen protectors and placed them on it almost immediately, but in the limited touching I did beforehand it didn't seem especially smudge-prone.

Bluetooth, unlike with my Treo, is a joy. My Jawbone paired immediately, and the connection has been rock-solid. In the few hours I've had it connected, my Treo would have already reset the Bluetooth connection several times. Score one for iPhone! I did have one glitch with iPhone, though - my first attempt to record my voicemail greeting hung the voicemail app - and trying to figure out how to unfreeze it I inadvertently rebooted the phone. Oops (turned out I pressed the wrong button combo - a different combo will reset an individual app, and I tested that later on purpose). The bright side, though, is that the iPhone rebooted in about 10 seconds to a fully operational state. The Treo 700p takes a minute or more.

Overall for now, this is a very spiffy little device. Quibbles - I'd like to see an LED that can be used to notify me of new e-mails without having to wake the phone up. Push support for non-Yahoo IMAP would be nice, too - my Kerio server supports it, so I want to use it. The mail client itself, though, is pretty good. The lack of copy/paste isn't a major problem so far, but I could maybe see that being an issue down the road. Also, my Jabra wired headset doesn't fit the recessed iPhone jack, and needs either an adapter to work or replacement. That's annoying. I don't really have too much else I can whine about yet, though I'm sure I'll find it - the nice thing is that given that it's Apple, there will probably be frequent software updates pushed via iTunes and most of these glitches will be addressed.

I'll probably write more about it in a week or so. For now, its nice to be off my accused Treo and on on something that actually works!