.Dust

I have been using an 8Gb iPhone for the last week and I have some impres­sions I would like to share with our readers.

First of all I have to say that this is the typ­i­cal prod­uct that you need to touch with your hands before being able to say any­thing. Sev­eral assump­tions I made before touch­ing it proved to be wrong.

What I like

• It’s sur­pris­ingly fast. And when I mean fast I mean really fast. Prob­a­bly one of the fastest hand­sets I have ever had in my hands.
• The User Inter­face is fan­tas­tic. Full stop. (Even if, hon­estly I found some incon­sis­ten­cies across applications)
• The vir­tual key­board is really usable and error cor­rec­tion is amazing.
• Weight and size are accept­able even if they make the hand­set sit between the biggest.
• The response of the touch screen is very accurate.
• The screen is one of the best screens I have ever seen on and handset.
• The use of the accelerom­e­ter is very smart and con­sis­tent across application.
• iPod inter­face. Fantastic.
• Pho­tos appli­ca­tion. I would buy one just for this application.
• Bat­tery life is very good.
• Cam­era qual­ity is very good and the cam­era appli­ca­tion is quite fast. (Ani­ma­tions are fan­tas­tic, just try to delete a photo and ver­ify what I mean)
• gMaps. You have to try it to under­stand that the touch inter­face is the per­fect match for this application.

What I don’t like

• The hand­set does not even know any­thing about the SIM you put in. I admit that if you will fol­low a stan­dard pro­ce­dure you will get an empty SIM by def­i­n­i­tion but this is annoying.
• I miss MMS, def­i­nitely. I can under­stand that in the US they are not used too much but, at least in Europe, I think we need this feature.
• You can­not shoot videos. Just won­der why.
• You can­not install third party applications.
• You can­not install your own ring­tones with­out pay­ing a fee to the iTunes store.
• You do not have an equiv­a­lent of the task man­ager. (Just think at what you can find on Sym­bian S60 handsets).
• YouTube is not really usable under EDGE coverage.
• SMS appli­ca­tion. I per­son­ally hate this con­ver­sa­tion approach. More­over, I do not like the fact that the SMS alert dis­plays the text message.
• You can­not see you iPhone as an exter­nal drive on your PC.
• No exter­nal memory.
• No access to the iPhone bat­tery. If you will ever need to change it you will need to send it to the ser­vice center.
• No sup­port for Microsoft Office files. No Pre­view like appli­ca­tion on board.
• 2 Megapixel cam­era is a lit­tle bit too low for today standards.
• No 3G.

So, Would I buy one with my own money?

The answer is: maybe. I think that some of the thing I like the most will be avail­able on the iPod Touch.

Actu­ally if it was a 3G device with sup­port for third party appli­ca­tion, MMS and Video record­ing sup­port I would be already queu­ing at the store.

Why do I blog this? Just wanted to update some of my old writ­ing after hav­ing one of these in my hands.

Related posts:

1. iPhone Sight­ings
2. Shall we write about iPhone ? Well, yes!
3. iPhone. Yes. Again!
4. iPhone spec­u­la­tions
5. The iPhone Is On Sale