I got my iPhone 3g one week ago, and so I thought I’d blog a bit about my experience so far.
3G
I’m not sure if it’s just where I live, but the 3G service has been unexceptional so far. Or maybe I should just go ahead and call it “lousy.” I’m almost always auto-switched to the Edge band by the device itself when I’m at home, simply because I’m getting no bars of 3G. I had thought that AT&T had blanketed our nation’s capitol w/ helpful 3G service, but it appears not to be the case in my neck of the woods. Unfortunately, my office is also in a place with no decent coverage. Annapolis, MD isn’t on AT&T’s list of cities covered in Maryland, but it gets some residual 3G I guess from being close to Baltimore and DC.
GPS
This has been seriously cool for the most part, although it seems to work best with the 3G turned on, which I frequently don’t have — either for battery life or service reasons. I can see why it’s not “turn-by-turn” ready, but if you have a destination/route mapped out and you’re just trying to follow it, this works pretty well. It’s generally been just a few seconds behind my actual location.
Bigger Capacity
I bought the 16GB, and after my year of having the 4GB model, this extra capacity is sort of boggling my mind. I need to start adding some videos just to fill it out.
Case
I sort of feel like I liked the heavier metal version of the phone a little bit better, but the curved case is going a long way toward making me a believer in the new form factor. It does seem a bit more cheaply made though — I suppose that’s only natural when you drop the price point and ramp production up enough to have 40 million before the end of the year. I can see tiny inconsistencies in the way the light comes off the metal on the edges. I’m thinking of it as sort of a “brush blemish.”
App Store
Nothing out of here has really blown my mind yet, but I appreciate all the stuff that I’ve used so far. OmniFocus for the iPhone has been pretty disappointing on both this device and the old one, but they’re still working on it, so I’m going to give it some time before I start really dissing the experience.
I’m a fan so far of:
- New York Times reader
- Trism
- Break
- Twitterific
- Bank of America Mobile Banking
Jury’s out on:
- Where (especially the Buddy Beacon thing)
- UrbanSpoon
- GPSTwit (bad interface)
Apple needs to get hip to the fact that the AppStore is something that people need to like and trust. Pulling apps from the store with no explanation isn’t going to endear you to iPhone users, nor is the inclusion of a “kill switch.” The more people use the store, the more they’re going to expect that Apple act like the the benevolent, permissive distribution mechanism that Jobs’ promised at WWDC 2008.
Hacking/Jailbraking/Pwnage
I decided to wait on implementing the Pwnage tool for a little while. Until AppInstaller is ready for the 2.01 firmware, what you’ve mostly got available is a bunch of developer tools that I really don’t care about right now.
Summary
I like the thing a lot. I had been thinking that it wasn’t as cool as the last one, btu then I realized that the novelty factor w/ the first gen release simply wasn’t going to be topped; no subsequent iPhone experience was ever going to live up to the thrill of having/using one for the very first time. It was unfair to expect that level of cool from what was for me, basically an upgrade.
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iPhone 3G is a great phone but i wish that they could drop the price,*;