iPhone 3G the good, the bad, the ugly

Apple iPhone in all its (unavailable) glory

A day after I wrote my spiteful rant of Apple’s marketing strategy, my better half offered to stand in line for the iPhone. As long as I did not have to, I did not mind and so I am the happy owner of a brand spanking new iPhone 3G (actually it is already a week old now). I was excited like a child getting a new toy and I spent half of my first night in the Apps store trying out a myriad of new applications.

I am sure tons of reviews reciting all the features or non-features of the phone with the half eaten apple logo have already overloaded your neuron receptors. Therefore I am just giving a quick snapshot of useful and crappy stuff and since I am a cynical person I will start with the bad things:

The Ugly

Am I kidding? Apple always puts form before function. The phone looks like a jewel prompting spontaneous protective case and screen cover buys. We both went for the $69 2-year protection plan after glimpsing at the sparkling phone.

The Bad

Battery lifetime really blows. Apple crammed so many functional units in this thing, no wonder there isn’t much room for batteries. I would be fine with this, if I could replace the battery with a spare, but there is no such thing.

Safari (the browser), although being the best mobile browser I have ever seen, is quite crash prone. Open up 3 websites (in it’s tabs) each requiring authorization and the thing will just die. I guess I have to learn patience.

The meager 2Megapixel Camera could have used a flash, but maybe that wasn’t in the battery budget.

The thing gets quite warm after some 3G-ing around or some WiFideling.

There is no freaking copy and paste functionality. How can I email someone a cool website I am looking at?

This Phone is addictive.

The SDK only runs on Macintosh computers, I guess I won’t develop any software for it.

I cannot simply upload some pdf and view it without some application. Basically you cannot upload anything without hacking your iPhone first. This sucks somewhat, as I was hoping to install a VT100 terminal application.

No turn by turn directions. You can see yourself as a blue dot on the google maps application, but it doesn’t seem to scroll with your location and you don’t get the same comfort you might be used to from your GPS unit.

The Good

Apple did such a great job on the software it is just a joy to use the phone.

3G works better than I thought and the speed is impressive. Watching news video feeds or streaming music to my car’s iPod connected radio is just a dream.

Bypassing my Companies firewalls and streaming music directly to my ears or browsing all these juicy forbidden websites makes it all worth it.

Finding stuff in my neighborhood, finding cheap gas, events or anything else you can dream of is easy with all the little applications. Traveling will never be the same again.

There is even a wordpress application for blogging, but since it doesn’t support tagging, I am writing this post on my computer.