One week done and it’s time to share some thoughts. In no particular order:
- The iPhone 3G uses a lot of battery. For the first few days I had to recharge daily. However with some careful management that seems to be stretching to two days now. The biggest difference for me was made by managing 3G and wi-fi networks. At home I use wi-fi, elsewhere I use 3G/Edge. So at home i switch off 3G, outside home I switch off wi-fi and only switch on 3G when I actually want to use faster access. Management of these settings has made the biggest difference to the battery life.
- The on screen keyboard is really good. Much faster than I imagined and great for texts, e-mails, tweets although I’m sure a long blog post/document creation would be pretty painful.
- iPod is great. Coverflow really works well on a screen this size. Music sounds much better than my old iPod.
- Some of the AppStore app’s have been pretty buggy. I guess that’s to be expected but it’s still annoying when you launch an app and it either repeatedly crashes or, worse, requires an iPhone reset.
- Call quality is excellent and taking phone calls while listening to iPod works well.
- Twinkle appeared on the app store yesterday and is a great Twitter client. Looks good and has a nice location based feature where people in 10, 25 mile radius to you can see your tweets and easily respond. For me it’s work so much better than Twitterrific which is buggy and allow in comparison.
- App’s launch quickly and it’s easy to move between sending a text, getting mail, browsing and then back to some video’s or music.
- When I’ve been typing I occasionally notice some lag. It’s like the key’s are taking a half second or so to register and then appear. Nothing to bad but there are reports on the net than some people are seeing scary 20 second delays in typing. Hopefully these issues are firmware fixable.
- Love the text’s layout. Just makes so much sense when you see then laid out as an iChat sesion.
Great phone and despite it’s shortcomings it’s the best I’ve owned. It’s easy to do and does so much more than other phone’s despite it having inferior hardware.
Glad you’re enjoying it. I still use my iTouch daily as a surfing machine in the house. Occasionally get that typing issue if it’s running out of memory or something when I’ve been using the browser. Very occasionally. As to battery life, a day or two would suit me fine. The last few Nokias we’ve used with 3G can struggle to last a couple of hours. Seriously, the last one I used drained the battery in under an hour if it couldn’t find a 3G signal.