OK, now that I’ve got just about everything on the site put back together, let’s have an update on that nasty AT&T business, shall we?
So, I finally received my iPhone, three weeks after I ordered it. Wes’s phone rolled in 3 days after that. My iPhone case rolled in about 3 days more after that.
AT&T did make some concessions after all the crap and misinformation that we received. They’re giving us 2 months free, plus 1000 rollover minutes, plus that $24 back that I was overcharged.
The ECO iPhone case that AT&T sells does NOT fit the iPhone. It’s WAY too tight. Also, don’t be fooled, there’s no belt loop on the back. It’s just a slip cover. I ended up giving it to Wes for her iPod touch instead. Trying to squeeze the iPhone in and out of there was a hell of a chore, but the iPod Touch fits just right.
Wes is “Okay” with her phone overall. I need to get a microSD card so I can save some custome ringtones to it for her, but overall she seems to like it well enough. She really hasn’t said much about it. I think she’s just still steamed at AT&T for their bullshit.
So how about that iPhone? I’d give it 4 stars out of 5. The flexibility is awesome. The apps are great. The user interface is the standard by which all other phones should be judged. There’s just some nagging things that kinda irk me.
The compass in the 3Gs is pretty much useless in a car, or near anything made of metal. When it’s working, it’s GREAT. When it’s not, it’ll do strange things like show you going the opposite direction of reality on a street, or show the map skewed by 90 degrees.
The phone has frozen up on me a few times. Two or three times while “sleeping”, and occasionally after running a app that uses a lot of graphics or a “heavy” web page.
There are some odd compatibility bugs with some apps. Palringo, for instance. Palringo works just fine on Wes’s 1st gen touch, but refused to pop up push notifications on my iPhone and would scramble conversations from multiple users.
The YouTube upload function of the camera has two stupid bugs; 1) if the phone goes to sleep while uploading, it kills the upload. 2) it always defaults to categorizing videos as “comedy”. This doesn’t even make sense. It *should* remember whatever the last selected category is, and use that. It would be understandable if it defaulted to the first item in the list. Comedy is the second item on the list though, why the hell does it default to that?
There should be a way to actually hide icons you don’t plan on using, aside from just banishing them to the last page of app icons.
The antenna in the 3Gs sucks. Lance has a 3G, and he regularly gets 4 bars and 3G at his desk, right next to mine. I get 2 bars, maybe, and edge. Sometimes shutting down and restarting the phone helps, but most of the time it’s just got crap for reception.
The camera lacks any kind of controls. Even my wife’s old Virgin Mobile phone AND her new Motorola free-phone have neat functions like exposure compensation and preset white balance settings. Not having that in this phone is STUPID, especially seeing as those are strictly software driven items. You put hundreds of thousands of manhours into designing the best touch-based UI man has ever seen, but you forget to add an exposure slider and a simple pull down for daylight/incandescent/fluorescent white balance? WTF?
Lastly, the headphone jack placement. I can understand that there’s not much room for it, but the bottom would be a much better place for the cord to be jutting out. Seriously. I hate the jack being at the top.
All of that said though, I don’t think I’d trade this thing for the world right now. It does so many damn things that I never knew I was missing. The ability to have what basically amounts to a location-aware, always-connected computer in the palm of your hand is incredible. Not to mention I’ve taken up posting to my flickr photostream and youtube much more since I have a camera in my pocket at all times. I’ve even opened a twitter account because of this damn thing.
So, what apps am I using? Lots of free ones. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a card-carrying charter member of the Cheap Bastards Association. Some of the apps I’m using the most are…
- Echofon – free twitter app that includes automated insertion of Google maps links, photos, and videos. Also automatically shortens URLs. Pretty damn sweet for something that’s free.
- Bump – Contact/image/video transfer between iPhone OS devices. Think old-school palmOS “beam” functionality, but without the hassle of IR transmissions and with the addition of fist bumping. This should be standard software on every iPhone OS device. Apple needs to buy this company, and make this part of the iPhone OS. Seriously.
- AT&T myWireless – AT&T account monitoring and management. Pretty much a no-duh thing to have for an iPhone.
- fring – the all-in-one IM/Skype/video conferenceing app. My only gripe is that you can’t get rid of the damn “Fring Test Call” buddy listing.
- Pandora Radio – This is the most awesome thing ever. Screw both terrestrial and satellite radio.
- I Can Has Cheezburger – You’ve gotta have LOLcats. This is not optional.
- Flickr – The Flickr app is another no-brainer. Honestly, this should be part of the camera app, the same way that Youtube is in the camera app for video.
- PS Mobile – Photoshop… ON YOUR PHONE.
- Naturespace – …zzzZZZzzz… …zzzZZZzzz… *drool* *snort* Oh hey, was I supposed to write something here?
- Pic2Shop – Barcode scanner, with amazon and froogle integration. Pretty damn cool.
- 3D Camera Lite – Makes AWESOME stereographic images, either anaglyphs or cross/parallel image pairs.
- Ping Lite – Awesome little network scanning tool.
- Words With Friends Free – Scrabble, over the Internet. A1W4E1S1O1M4E1.
- Fandango – Finds theaters near you, and displays showtimes. Pretty cool.
I also have a home screen link to Wunderground’s iPhone optimized site on my main screen, the url is http://i.wund.com and the fullscreen wundermap on that page is great.
In conclusion, I still hate AT&T’s customer service, but I’m willing to suffer their idiodicy for this phone.
