Obligatory iPhone post

[chipotle]

As tugrik mentioned, I did indeed get an iPhone.

It’s almost superfluous at this point to describe it, in part because so many people had their minds made up about the thing before it shipped. The best comment I’ve seen was this, from Michael Mulvey:

Why there’s an iPhone craze:

This is real simple and doesn’t require a long-winded explanation.

The iPhone is the floating car we imagined we’d be driving in the future.

The Jetsons, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Minority Report …the iPhone is that touchscreen gadget they all used (metaphorically speaking) to communicate with. As John Gruber points out (so obvious we all didn’t catch it), the iPhone is the first mobile device being promoted for its interface, not hardware.

Either that makes perfect sense to you, or it sounds nuts. Some people in the latter camp have moved to the former camp by actually using one. (I’ve heard from more than one person who really wasn’t interested in an iPhone until they had some time to play with it.)

I will tell you the most valid criticism, which contains many problems rolled into one observation: this is a version 1.0 product. It could be faster and cheaper, it could do more, it could do what it does better. There are a handful of poor design decisions, and a few long-solved problems have become unsolved by the new UI.

I will tell you the least valid criticism, too, because it is true yet misses the point entirely: there’s nothing the iPhone does that hasn’t been done by something else. The point is that there’s nothing else that does anything how the iPhone does it, and that’s been the focus all along.

I have an old smart phone and an old iPod and have been thinking about upgrading both of them as it is. For me, there wasn’t a lot of downside, save the timing financially. (It’s a fair amount of money to drop just before a convention.) But the price isn’t so out-of-line with getting a new iPod and a new smart phone.

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tugrik also mentioned I had some activation problems. When I first tried to activate the gadget, it told me, essentially, that with my credit approval I needed to go down to AT&T and pay a deposit. I went down to AT&T, where I was told the deposit was: $0. They had no idea why it didn’t go through.

There are a lot of news stories floating about right now talking about widespread activation problems. The thing is, AT&T’s credit process, transferring phone numbers, and the other minutae of activation doesn’t magically change with the “i”; 5% of activations are probably always harder to work through than usual. What’s changed is the method, sheer volume, and particularly media attention focused on these activations. It’d have been great if it’d all worked flawlessly, but that doesn’t happen much on this planet.

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Oh yes: Twitter Twitter Twitter. Thank you. (The iPhone doesn’t have instant messaging, but reading/sending “tweets” is very easy. Again, I’m “chipotlecoyote” there.)

Comments

[jakebe.livejournal.com]

Good points, all. :) Against my better judgement, I was wondering if I could play around with your iPhone before the writer's group tonight. I had never seen one in action and I'm really curious to see how it works.

That being said, I really think it'd be a good idea to wait for a next-gen iPhone to come along; it's not really worth paying the premium to get it first, and I'd like to see them fix a few of the problems before I plunk down over half a grand for it. ;)

-J

[ja-ren.livejournal.com]

Bah. None of the really cool wireless devices ever get Canadian carriers. :/

Carrier Locking

[(Anonymous)]

Unless Apple provides a mechanism for unlocking their phones, I have no interest in getting one purely for professional reasons. I work for Mighty Magenta (T-Mobile), and so I get my gadgetry at a fairly sharp company discount. The iPhone may indeed be the next great leap forward in terms of user interface, but if it doesn't work on my network it doesn't matter how great it is; I simply won't buy it.

Frankly, I think network-locking is one of the great crises of the cellular industry, and I expect there to be a lawsuit at some point in the future that says that locking a phone to a carrier is an anticompetitive practice in the same way that mandating that you use a Bell phone on the bell hardline system was. However, we're not there yet.

Kristy

[typographer.livejournal.com]

Yes, but will it improve my curling score?

[cerice.livejournal.com]

I just knew you would not be able to resist......

[tommicat.livejournal.com]

Hmm, would it make sense for me to sign up to Twitter? I'd only use it really to message with you as I hardly get internet access on a daily basis.