Review of Apple iPhone 3G

I have been waiting to write about this for a long time.

Stood 4 hours in line in front of Apple store to get my hands on one of these amazing new must-have devices. Excruciating… But once I got it, if you ask me in one word – “fabulous”.

UI : Never seen a better UI on any other phone. Hats off to Apple creativity. They know UI like nobody else does. UI means the pulse of the user – Apple knows what works for user.

Mail program : fantastic – push email from Yahoo and Outlook and pull from gmail. Awesome Awesome

Map program : Great – tells you current location and shows satellite views and map views from Google Maps. Shows Directions between any two locations.

SMS : Conversation style SMS UI. Looks good

YouTube, iPod Music, iTunes store – All great

AppStore – One of the best new features of iPhone. The AppStore and the iTunes ecosystem are the creme of the iPhone power. There are a zillion good apps on the AppStore now and this will only increase. I tried Facebook and am about to try loopt apps on AppStore. The games like SuperMonkey are popular and I intend to try them. Facebook access is beautiful and easy.

Photos – beautiful photo display with high resolution and a 2 Megapixel camera.

Sync capability – As soon as you plug the iPhone to your computer, photos, contacts, calendar all can synch. I was able to synch my Gmail contacts and photos on my PC. I did not use the calendar synch as I have a separate blackberry device for that one.

Keyboard – soft keyboard is hard to use initially but my speed of typing is increasing. Scrolling to get to particular letter in between a typed word or sentence is very interesting (drag over the word and highlight cursor to desire letter).

Enterprise Support – Apple has added MS Outlook support with iPhone 3G. This is possible if an org runs the MS ActiveSync program. We expect tremendous response in the enterprise as employees in various firms are clamoring for it. But Blackberry is far ahead in the enterprise and is not going anywhere soon.

Email delete function – Allows multiple emails to be selected and deleted.

Comparison to Blackberry – Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love my blackberry which was my email device so far. But Blackberry cannot compete with iPhone overall. Only categories which Blackberry can claim as better compared to iPhone are :-

email : Blackberry Enterprise server based email is amazing.

Keyboard : We are all expert in speed typing on Blackberry QWERTY keyboard.

Battery : Blackberry runs without a need to charge for many days. iPhone, on the other hand, runs out in 8-10 hours of heavy use.

Speaking of battery, let me come to iPhone’s battery issue (alas) :-

iPhone battery runs out in 6-112 hours under heavy use if you keep all its powerful features on. Some ideas to conserve battery : turn off 3G, Location Service, WiFi, Bluetooth, Fetch mail less often. Result – you are left with a plain GSM phone and one starts to wonder why I bought iPhone after all.

Regardless, breakthrough device. Kudos to Apple. I love it every bit (except for its battery). Here is a good one on iPhone :-

MT