Dusted Design Partners Limited

12.07.07

Jamie

Jamie and his magic iPhone

The iPhone finally went on sale here a couple of weeks ago, at last! I had been anticipating the launch since the announcement a few months back, at which point I was happy to hear that Apple were joining forces with AT&T, the network I had a contract with.

On launch day I called the Apple store in Knoxville, TN around 10pm and was surprised to hear that there were plenty left and no lines half-way round the mall… Great news! On hearing this, I rushed over there to see the Apple staff giving customers the two minute walk-through they had just been trained to do. They seemed to know what they were talking about, which wasn’t surprising since they had to sit an iPhone exam in order to prepare.

Some interesting information I found out during the walk-through was that I could switch out the SIM in Europe after the phone had been activated in the states, this was great news as I travel to London pretty often! I didn’t need much selling and ended up buying a 8gb iPhone but thought i’d hold off on buying accessories until I was happy with the performance.

I finally got home and dock’d the phone, which incidentally comes with the iPhone unike the iPod. The package also includes the headset with mic. For those of you that are interested, existing AT&T customers have to add $20 to their calling plans which includes unlimited email and internet on the Edge network.

I’m guessing that most people tried to activate their phones immediately via iTunes but I was tired from traveling and went straight to bed. I woke up early on the Saturday in order to activate the phone which didn’t turn out too well. Basically, the activation came grinding to a halt for thousands of people and I had to wait until Sunday afternoon for it to go through. I won’t bore you with the details but a couple of phone calls to the activation desk sorted out the problem.

Matt and Dave were the first to get texts as they both love Apple and I knew it would make them even more jealous than they already were. After that, I spent a while checking out the sync features, adding contacts, taking photo’s, personalising the voicemail and generally messing around. A few hours later my wife Crystal gave me a good talking to and my new toy was put to bed for the night!

I have been using the iPhone for nearly two weeks now and my overall impression is that it is an awesome device! The highlight is the touch screen and super cool interface. Most applications allow you to use your finger to drag, scroll and zoom….It really is impressively smooth.
I quickly got the hang of the touch screen keyboard and I’m now regularly checking my emails and browsing online using a wireless connections or the Edge network. Some other cool features include the SMS conversation format (like IM), Google maps, stock checker and weather widget. It is also smart to see the callers picture pop-up on screen, view the list of voicemails and drag through the iPod library album art.

The only problems I have experienced, other than the activation, are related to syncing with my Vista laptop. I cannot sync the iPhone with the folder on my laptop which contains all of my photos. In order to get it to work I have had to create a sub folder and copy my photos to this new location. My best guess is that it has something to do with iPhone capacity, it may think I am trying to copy all the images (> 10gb) even if I only select a handful of folders. I originally though it was a permissions problem as the Phone needs to create cache folders, but I have ruled that out after testing.

The other syncing issue is that if you don’t use Outlook you are pretty much out of luck. I use Firefox, Thunderibird and Sunbird to manage my bookmarks, email and calendar but iPhone will not sync with these applications. I’m still thinking about the best way forward, probably will end up importing my data into Outlook and then Syncing, although this is a total pain in the…

Overall impression is great, problem I have now is that the Crystal wants one!

Design, Technology
apple, browser, interface, iphone, itunes, mobile, touch-screen, Usability

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