The northlondonhippy

Archive for July 20th, 2008

After all the whing­ing and com­plain­ing over the last week about my prob­lems get­ting my new iPhone 3G from O2, I thought I would share some of my ini­tial impres­sions of it.

Yes, that’s right…I’ve got my brand new, shiny, lick­able, 16gb black iPhone 3G. I exclu­sively revealed this excit­ing bit of news on Face­Book last Thurs­day when it was deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair.

And again, yes, you read that right, I posted it on my Face­Book pro­file, as a sta­tus update.

Sta­tus updates on Face­Book are a lot like Twit­ter posts. It’s another rea­son why you should be my Face­Book friend!

Even though it was 6 days later than expected, I was still very pleased to be receiv­ing iPhone 3G and couldn’t wait to unbox it and fire it up.

I didn’t buy the orig­i­nal iPhone, as it was only released offi­cially here in the UK around 8 months ago. My rea­son­ing was sound, or so I thought. As I expected a 2nd gen­er­a­tion of iPhone to come out around now, I didn’t want to be in a posi­tion of want­ing to buy it so soon after get­ting the 1st gen.

How was I to know that O2 were going to be hand­ing out cheap (or free) upgrades to exist­ing cus­tomers? Doh!

I was bit dis­ap­pointed that Apple left out a cou­ple of good­ies that shipped with the orig­i­nal iPhone — the dock and the microfi­bre cloth to wipe the screen. The lack of the microfi­bre cloth is a real silly miss, they can’t cost that much when you’re buy­ing a mil­lion of them.

The touch­screen does pick up a lot of fin­ger­prints, though they are only really notice­able when the the screen is off. When the screen is illu­mi­nated, its very bright and you really don’t see any.

The screen is actu­ally glo­ri­ously bright, extremely crisp and pin sharp. I could eas­ily watch a full length film or tele­vi­sion pro­gramme on it and prob­a­bly will. The multi-touch con­trol of the device is noth­ing short of astound­ing. It’s extremely intu­itive and very accurate.

The iPod func­tions are also impres­sive and it blows away my old 60gb 5th gen iPod with video.

I’ve also set up sev­eral email accounts on my iPhone. If you want to reach me when I am on the go, you can con­tact northlondonhippy@gmail.com or northlondonhippy@yahoo.co.uk and I’ll receive them pretty god­damn quickly! You might even get a mobile reply…

I’ve also got the Face­Book mobile appli­ca­tion, AIM for instant mes­sag­ing and I’ve been play­ing around on Twit­ter with that cool app called Twin­kle. I’m northlon­don­hippy on all of those ser­vices too, though Twit­ter reg­is­tered my user­name as n_londonhippy because they don’t give you enough char­ac­ters for my full online name.

Surf­ing the web on the iPhone is some­thing else I’ve spent a good deal of time doing and its the first hand-held device that gives you any sort of use­ful inter­net expe­ri­ence. I’ve accessed the net from var­i­ous mobile phones and an old Palm Pilot of mine and I’ve always found it sorely lack­ing. Spend ten min­utes doing the same on the iPhone 3G and you will won­der how you lived with­out it. I’ve used both wi-fi and the 3G net­work and pages load very quickly too.

I read that the new iPhone 3G has about as much com­put­ing power as a lap­top made in 2003; sim­i­lar pro­cess­ing power and stor­age is what I took that to mean. Think about it — I’m now car­ry­ing some­thing as pow­er­ful as a five-year-old lap­top in my pocket now. It blows my mind!

There really are only 2 major dif­fer­ences between the new iPhone 3G and the orig­i­nal iPhone (and yes, I know there are plenty of minor changes, just humour me, please). The inclu­sion of 3G net­work access and GPS.

The GPS is noth­ing short of amaz­ing. Even sit­ting here , deep inside my north Lon­don lair, not near any win­dows and it still knows where I am with fright­en­ing accu­racy. The map soft­ware lets you know how cer­tain it is of your loca­tion, by using var­i­ously sized cir­cles to indi­cate your approx­i­mate loca­tion, until it is cer­tain and then places a push-pin like marker where you are. Out­side with no obstruc­tions, when the iPhone can see the sky, you get a remark­ably accu­rate read­ing of your loca­tion, so much so that if you walk a bit, the blue dot adjusts to your new position.

The loca­tion data isn’t only utilised by the map appli­ca­tion, but any app can grab it. This includes geo-tagging of your pho­tos and with some Twit­ter apps, can include your loca­tion so you can track peo­ple nearby. Spooky!

Can some­one please release some turn-by-turn, good enough to work in my car, nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware? I’ve read that Tom­Tom have already writ­ten the app, so why can’t I buy it already? My old Tom­Tom is mas­sive, com­pared to my tiny, slim lit­tle iPhone, if I didn’t have to carry the Tom­Tom with me, it would be a real bonus and my pock­ets would thank you.

And while I’m at it with a wish­list, could some­one please design, man­u­fac­ture and sell the following:

A pow­ered dock for use in my car, that has a suction-cup wind­screen mount, so I can posi­tion the iPhone like a Sat­Nav, plus a built-in, sophis­ti­cated FM trans­mit­ter that scans to find the best fre­quency and then beams audio to my in-car stereo, in high quality.

My super-dooper in-car dock/transmitter/mount is not actu­ally such a big ask and it would sell like prover­bial hot­cakes. Bun­dle it with a code to get a nav­i­ga­tion app and you would prob­a­bly sell 500,000 of them in the first year alone. I’m giv­ing you a mul­ti­mil­lion pound idea here, for free, so if one of you do this, at least cut me in for a slice of the pie. Or just send me one of these cool in-car suction-cup, FM-transmitter thin­gies for free. It’s the least you could do!

There is a third thing that sep­a­rates the new iPhone 3G from its pre­de­ces­sor, though you can upgrade the orig­i­nal to the new 2.0 soft­ware and enjoy it as well. I’m talk­ing about third party appli­ca­tions which you can access via iTunes or on the iPhone itself. Some apps are free, oth­ers cost. So far, I’ve only installed the freebies.

I’m not being cheap, its just none of the pay apps have really appealed to me and the best ones seem to be games and I’m not that both­ered. When I see one I like the look of (nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware!!!!!), I’ll hap­pily part with my readies.

There are so many appli­ca­tions avail­able already that I’m not going to actu­ally talk about any of the spe­cific ones now, but I’d rather come back at another time to give them proper attention.

What can’t be denied is that this is the real game changer with the iPhone 3G, the abil­ity to do so many cool things with it. And that’s just today, who knows what tomorrow’s killer appli­ca­tion for the iPhone might be…perhaps one of you out there in inter­net­land is already work­ing on the next HUGE thing! Just whis­per it in my ear, before your start-up has its IPO, so I can get in on the ground floor and make a lit­tle dirty lucre too…!

The one thing no-one seems to ever men­tion when they write about the iPhone is the phone itself. I think that shows you how far we come with per­sonal tech­nol­ogy and gad­gets, that the voice-communication func­tion of some­thing with the word “phone” in its name, is taken for granted and doesn’t mat­ter that much.

It does to me and one of my con­cerns about the iPhone was how it per­formed as a basic mobile telephone.

It turns out I had noth­ing to fear, the iPhone is a very robust cell­phone. Calls over my net­work on 3G are clear and the con­nec­tion seems strong. The speak­er­phone func­tion really works too, dialling a con­tact or a phone num­ber is also very sim­ple and works very well.

What’s inter­est­ing about the iPhone is the many stan­dard mobile phone func­tions it DOESN’T do. There’s no MMS mes­sag­ing, so no send­ing pho­tos as text mes­sages. There’s no way to for­ward a text mes­sage either. The iPhone has Blue­Tooth, but the only thing it uses it for is to con­nect a wire­less head­set. You can’t send a photo to your com­puter, or to another phone, you can’t exchange con­tacts with another phone, you can’t even Blue­jack strangers!

I don’t really under­stand why Apple has locked these func­tions out. At the very least, let us send pho­tos over blue­tooth. And synch­ing notes from my Mac would be use­ful too!

Some­thing else I don’t under­stand is the lack of cut & paste. It couldn’t be that hard to get a clip­board like func­tion­al­ity run­ning on it. It’s sup­posed to be the same soft­ware that runs on Macs, so what’s the prob­lem? I know some Apple big-wig men­tioned that it was on their list of things to do and they just didn’t have time to get to it, but that comes off sound­ing lame. There’s got to be some mar­ket­ing rea­son for with­hold­ing this func­tion, I just haven’t a clue what it could be!

All of these cool things do come at a cost and I don’t mean your monthly bill, though they might sting a bit too. I mean bat­tery life, or the lack of it. Surf­ing the net, check­ing emails, play­ing with apps, all drain the bat­tery far faster than you would like and its very easy to see it drop 50% in a cou­ple of hours.

I could see car­ry­ing a spare dock cable and attach­ing it to the near­est PC at every oppor­tu­nity. It’s another rea­son why I want a pow­ered dock for the car. I don’t see how I would get through a full day of seri­ous usage with­out top­ping up the bat­tery a cou­ple of times.

So am I happy with my new iPhone?

What do you think? It’s eas­ily the coolest, most pow­er­ful device I’ve ever had the plea­sure of own­ing. I’m look­ing for­ward to 18 months of deliri­ous joy as I find new and fun things to do with it.

And at the end of 18 months, I can only imag­ine what sort of iPhone I will be upgrad­ing to then! It will prob­a­bly trans­port me to a vir­tual new real­ity where I’m the king of the uni­verse and every­one wor­ships me as a liv­ing god. Now, that’s a app I’d buy!