Stephen Groom Taking a shot at becoming a Poker Pro

iPhone 4 – First impressions

Well after waiting since the 26th of June when I ordered, TNT arrived yesterday to deliver the most expensive 82 cubic centimetres I may ever purchase for the rest of my life.

Having never had an iPhone throughout the past 4 reincarnations of the original, this is all very new to me.  My last phone was a Nokia N96 which was marketed as a "Smartphone" but upon purchasing it, I quickly realised that it was not very "Smart" and even SMS messaging and phone calls were troublesome.

This little toy cost £599.  That is £7 per fingertip sized portion of iphone, or cubic centimeter.  To compare, a Ferrari Enzo purchased new clocks in at a far more affordable £0.04 per cubic centimeter!

So, having spent the largest sum of money per centimeter you ever will again, what do you have?

What Stands Out?

• Size - The phone is larger than I was used to, but after 10 minutes of use, you quickly get used to it and it feels about right.  The screen is 3.5 inches which is more than ample, and I feel that any larger would have made the phone obscenely large.
  The phone neatly fits into the palm of my hand and can be used with one hand easily.  That being said though, I am quite large and I can imagine people with smaller hands (particularly girls) may have trouble getting to grips with the device.
• Weight - The phone is heavy, 137 grams infact, but this is of little concern and is not in my opinion a negative trait.  Conversely, I think that the weight of the phone makes it feel more robust and well-built.
• Design - The minimalistic, industrial design may not be to everybody's taste but I personally love it.  Nothing is included that wasn't absolutely necessary and whatever is included has been rigorously  stylized and engineered so that it does not blemish the looks at all.

Useability

As mentioned above, I have never owned an iPhone before, or for that matter a touchscreen phone.  The iPhone has fulfilled it's design objectives in this department IMO as the phone was easy to pick up and use almost immediately.

The onscreen keyboard was difficult to use at first for my fat, clumsy fingers but in no time at all I was typing text and an "almost" productive speed.

Navigation is great, and everything just seems to make sense.  Similarly to the first time I used Mac OSX on a desktop, after stepping back and thinking for a second, everything just seems to fall into place and it is very difficult to end up anywhere other than where you intended to be.

Setup and Install

I was quite disappointed that you needed to connect the phone to iTunes before you could use it, but the process was simple enough.  Within two days I've managed to sync my music, address book and email accounts.

EDIT-- The paragraph below transpired to be untrue.  Read the truth in this post

My gripe in this area was the importing of contacts.  Apple does not support sim-card contacts so I had to go through the lengthy process of exporting them into Windows Contacts and then synchronizing via iTunes.  This is a huge inconvenience if you are used to simply plugging in your sim card and being able to access all of your contacts.  My particular contact list was about 5 years old and was invaluable.

Browsing

Now, IMO one of the main things that makes a smartphone smart is web browsing.  On my old phone, browsing a website was almost as difficult as creating it in the first place and the iPhone has ran circles around it in this area.

The touch screen interface feels very good and I found quite quickly how to browse, enter text, zoom and copy/paste just by playing around.

Site-specific apps such as Facebook and Twitter make it very easy to network on the move also.  The interface of the Facebook application for example allows use of almost all features and in my opinion feels alot better than facebook.com as it is less cluttered and better designed.

I also found that web forms are well designed and easy to interact with.  Far more than my old phone.

Apps

I have to admit that it was the app store that sold the iPhone for me.  As soon as I got the phone open, the first thing I did was browse the app store to download Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, Facebook, Skype, Sky News, Metro, XE, Google Earth, eBay and AroundMe.

The total cost was around £1.50 and the added value to the phone is incredible.  Already with about 10 or 20 minutes of app downloading my phone can find local amenities, show a full world map, convert currencies at current market rates, perform most of my daily browsing and provide hours of entertainment with games.

So far there are no negative comments from me regarding apps and I think that this is the best feature of the iPhone by far.

Death Grip Debunked

Anyone who hasn't heard the controversy regarding dropped calls and lost signal has been living under a rock frankly.  I do not need to discuss here what the problem is but rather state that it has been blown out of all proportion.

The first thing I did with the phone upon using it was grip it to attempt to recreate the problem reported in the media.  Sure enough, the signal dropped and I lost connection to my network.  I was disappointed, but having watched apple's press release and doing some research of my own during shipping, I was not too concerned.

I tested some real life scenarios and have never once lost signal/connection while:

• Browsing
• Speaker Phone Call
• To-Ear Phone call

I would like to express my anger to Consumer Reports or whoever it was that started this outrage in the media for worrying me about my recent purchase and assure everybody who has ordered an iPhone or is considering doing so in the future not to worry.

Conclusion

The £599 price tag is very steep and difficult to justify.  I am still not convinced that this device is worth such a gargantuan sum of money.  That being said, I am delighted with the product and do not regret purchasing it at all.  I have spent worse £600's.

I would say though, I am very disappointed with the time it took to arrive (around 4 weeks).  To me a £600 purchase is a large amount of my cash and I personally expect to achieve better service than that.  eg.  If I buy something for 10x less, say £59 from eBay.  I would be complaining about a seller long before 4 weeks had passed.

Thanks for reading
Stephen Groom