.Dust

Yes, just before Christ­mas I was able to grab a 3G iPhone and since then I am using it as my pri­mary mobile phone.

iPhone Appli­ca­tions

I think that pretty much eev­ery­thing has been writ­ten on the pros and cons of this device and I sim­ply want to tell my own per­sonal experience.

First of all it is worth to say that I usu­ally bring with me two devices. A Black­Berry bold that I use mainly to keep me in touch with my busi­ness inbox and another mobile phone for voice call, tex­ting, etc. Def­i­nitely I am not the typ­i­cal user. I do not really need any access to my cor­po­rate stuff since there is the Black­Berry for that purpose.

I have now spent sev­eral weeks with the iPhone and I have to say that I am really impressed and I think I will keep it as my pri­mary phone for at least some months.

There are only a few fea­tures that are impor­tant to me and that are not present today:

• Cut and Paste between applications.
• The abil­ity to for­ward an SMS.
• The abil­ity to send a con­tact as a vcard using an SMS.

Actu­ally these are things that have been there for ages and they are quite sim­ple to imple­ment from a tech­nol­ogy stand­point. I do not really see why they are miss­ing on this high end device.

Apart from this I am really happy with.

I have installed a bunch of appli­ca­tions, and I have actu­ally spent a good amount of money on the AppStore.

Cur­rently there are the appli­ca­tions I have on it:

• Shozu
• iXpen­seIt
• X-​Plane
• Tum­ble Pro
• Face­book
• SyncML
• Now Play­ing
• CoolIris
• Stanza
• Mobile­Files
• Google Earth
• Frotz
• Rogue
• Sead­ragon
• Shazam
• Net­NewsWire
• Twit­te­la­tor
• Nambu
• VNC Lite
• LinkedIn
• Word­Press
• AccuWeather
• 1Password

Yes, it is a quite long appli­ca­tion list but there are actu­ally three or four appli­ca­tions that makes me not even turn my Per­sonal Com­puter on while at home.

• Nambu. A fan­tas­tic Twit­ter and Friend­Feed client. I am def­i­nitely addicted to these two ser­vices and I love to browse these two ser­vices with my iPhone. I also love Twit­te­la­tor but it sup­ports Twit­ter only.
• Stanza. Fan­tas­tic e-​book reader. I found myself read­ing a bunch of free e-​books dur­ing the hol­i­days and I have to admit that even if I was skep­ti­cal about e-​book on iPhone, Stanza proved to be very usable and enjoy­able. Def­i­nitely some­thing to have.
• Face­book. A lit­tle bit less addicted to this but quite use­ful when I am hit­ting the road.
• VNC Lite.
• SyncML. I use this to sync my con­tacts to any 3^rd party SyncML provider out there. Actu­ally Zyb is still my favourite.
• Net­NewsWire. Not a per­fect user expe­ri­ence in mobil­ity but still valu­able to look at your news feeds.

While using the iPhone I still some incon­sis­ten­cies in the User Inte­farce in native Apple appli­ca­tions but this is def­i­nitely some­thing I can live with.

I was very impressed by the loca­tion ser­vices. Fast and accurate.

I did not test any of the push tech­nol­ogy since I do not really need them since I am using my Black­Berry Bold for this purpose.

I also found myself play­ing a few games on the device and even if I had some con­cerns on the usabil­ity I have to say that the iPhone may def­i­nitely be con­sid­ered as a gam­ing plat­form. I was a great fan of X-​Plane, the best of breed flight sim­u­la­tor on Mac OS X, and see­ing it run on this device was absolutely amazing.

A short anec­tode. I left my phone on the table and it was grabbed by my two years old son. I found him sit­ting on the sofa play­ing with his favourite appli­ca­tion, Sounds of the Jun­gle. I was think­ing it had been my wife to unlock the phone and launch the appli­ca­tion. I asked my wife and I ws sur­prised to hear that she had not done any­thing on the phone.

I then took the phone from my son and locked it again and I was aston­ished while look­ing at him unock­ing the device in one sim­ple touch, nav­i­gate to the tab with the Sounds of the Jun­gle appli­ca­tion and launch it. More­over the appli­ca­tion has a mall “I” icon that gives infor­ma­tions about the appli­ca­tion itself when pressed. You have to dis­miss the dia­log box before con­tin­u­ing to use the appli­ca­tion and I found that my son also found the way to dis­miss that dia­log box and go back to the application.

I under­stand that being a dig­i­tal native is some­thing but there should be also some excel­lent design in what Apple did on the iPhone.

I think I will use the iPhone as my pri­mary phone for quite a long time.

Related posts:

1. The iPhone Effect
2. iPhone, My Impres­sions After One Week
3. iPhone Sight­ings
4. iPhone Was Not Designed To Do This
5. Shall we write about iPhone ? Well, yes!