Looking Back At The iPhone

I've been using my iPhone for a week now and thought doing a review would be interesting. On the whole I'm loving the entire experience, it feels so polished and well rounded. I especially love the looks of interest and envy it invites from everyone! But passions aside, here is my "objective" analysis of the various +ves and -ves of the iPhone:

+ves:
1. The best part has to be the UI. The pages just seem to skim under your fingers and the landscape view is very useful, for both photo viewing and browsing.
2. One concern I had before buying the iPhone was how fast would I be able to type on it. I felt the lack of feedback from the keypad would be a major issue. But I found the clicking sound and the enlarged keys good enough feedback. The size of the keypad is small, so you do make some mistakes but here is where I feel apple really hit the nail on it's head. The text editor has an inbuilt correction system that keeps correcting your words as you type. It's much different from the T9 dictionary found on other phones as this uses placing of alphabets on the keypad and sentence context to come up with corrections which in most cases I found very accurate. It also learns your address book names and other new words you keep typing regularly.
3. The safari browser on the iPhone, unlike any other mobile browser on any platform, is tabbed. You can open upto 8 tabs and easily navigate through them using the flick of your finger. The browsing experience in all is very good for a mobile device, almost as good as a desktop.
4. Apple just seems to get the small thing that matter right. The touchscreen display is turned off by ambient sensors when you are on a call to prevent spurious input from your cheek and ear touching it!
5. The built in accelerometer and multitouch along with wifi make for am excellent gaming platform. I'm so excited just looking at the present games like asphalt and can't wait for future games to really tap into this excellent platform. I'm really awaiting the Star Wars app :).
6. Finally, given apple's core USP, the cool design was expected but feeling the curves of this powerful device on your hand really makes you feel that you are onto something revolutionary :).

-ves:
1. I'd surely go with the low battery life if I have to choose one negative. With gps/wifi/3g on, the battery really drains and you might have to charge it twice a day. Even without those, I sometimes have to charge every night.
2. The Microsoft Exchange support is good. But the support could she been extended beyond the bare minimum that is presently there. I can't invite people to events I create from the phone. Also it would have been great to have some version of office running so you could edit files, along with the currently supported read-only mode.
3. The absense of copy paste is a big pain point and I hope apple fixes that soon.
4. Bluetooth support is limited to connecting with headsets only. You can't sync with other phones or computers and the stereo output profile A2DP is not supported yet.
5. Only one 3rd party app can be running at a time. This really restricts the usability of some apps like a gps tracker or other background apps.

That's my "objective" analysis of my new iPhone. Despite the present shortcomings, which I'm sure will get fixed in firmware updates over the next few months, i'm confident this is the way for the future and that the iPhone is to mobiles what the original mac was to computers :)

And btw, I wrote this entry and posted it from my iPhone in 25 minutes!

Posted with LifeCast