bygjohn's blog

Well, after months of agonizing, I've finally made up my mind and bought a new phone. I'd had my previous one, a SonyEricsson p910i, for about 4 years and it was showing signs of age and infirmity. For a long time I was planning on a Nokia N95, then heard about the black one, so waited. Then came the rumours of a new iPhone so I waited again, and here I am with one.

It's very pleasing in many ways, and yet has some glaring omissions that were almost deal breakers. For instance, you'd think that by now Apple would have added MMS and enabled video recording, considering that there are already apps available for both on jailbroken phones. They've also managed to botch up the launch of the MobileMe service, which was one of the things which swung me towards it. So far I've steered clear and will continue to do so until they fix it.

So why an iPhone?

• I wanted something which would work well with my Mac: the p910 was OK, but there were some problems, eg silent alarms and partial sync of birthdays. That said, as the p910 seems to be at least partially broken, the problems might have been down to that.
• I liked the idea of being able to back the phone up like I used to do with my old phone when I used a Windows PC.
• MobileMe still sounds like it'll be great once they've sorted it out.
• I like the build quality of Apple's kit.
• The things it doesn't do are things I don't use much. There's an easy solution to receiving MMSs (a web app with a nice front end for O2's web MMS inbox), and with a bit of luck the MMS and video recorder apps may make it into the App Store at some point. I can live with the limited Bluetooth.
• It's a joy to use. The user interface is excellent, I've added apps for essential functions (eg password safe, file viewer), and there are some wonderfully daft free or cheap games/demo programs such as iPint and Koi Pond for those moments when you just have to succumb to the urge to show off!

There are irritations:

• I had no perceptible crashes in the three days I had the original firmware, now Safari (web browser) has crashed about 4 times, once badly enough to need a restart.
• I've held off updating iTunes to 7.7.1 as some people have had major problems with it. Not good, though I dare say it'll be sorted soon - there was a duff one in the 7.6s and the next release fixed it.
• The bizarre omission of any kind of clipboard functionality isn't missed that much, but when it is missed it's really annoying.
• The absence of voice dialing is annoying if you're using a hands free and is a major disincentive to contemplating in-car use. Which will probably please the safety nuts I guess. Heaven help us.
• The inability to sync to-dos and notes to Mail and iCal is weird and not a little annoying. It's no accident that the App Store is overflowing with replacement apps for these two functions, but so far I haven't seen any I like. Dumb omission.