The Best Things Come To Those Who Wait
By 
Even knowing that the 3g iPhone announcement was imminent I decided that £169 was too good resist and I was the first customer of the day in my local store on the day that Apple reduced the price. And I have been very pleased with that decision – it’s just incredible!
The interface is fantastic and the best feature for me is the browser. It is by far and away the best mobile browser I have ever used. Compared to Safari on the Nokia E90 it is a completely different world. The way the iPhone’s Safari handles scrolling and zooming is fantastic and the speed to load is like nothing I’ve experienced on a mobile device before.
Where my E90 will often fall down and fail to get me into certain web sites, my hosting control panel for instance, the iPhone sails through and loads the pages perfectly and quickly. I don’t think I’ve come across a single website that the iPhone can’t handle and in terms of speed the iPhone on GPRS will give the E90 a run for its money on HSDPA when loading a heavy website.
Text input on the iPhone is also superb, which is really surprising considering the absence of any kind of hardware keyboard! The on screen keyboard is very well done and the auto-correcting software is the really clever part – this allows me to type on the iPhone really very quickly. Coming from a die-hard QWERTY-keyboard-phone guy (who has owned every Nokia Communicator since the 9000, and a load of Windows Mobile QWERTY phones), that might be surprising!
There are, though, a couple of areas where it shows that this is Apple’s first attempt at a phone.
It’s not that anything thatís there is broken or badly written, it’s just that the iPhone is missing a few things that I’ve come to expect from a phone these days. 3G – 3.5G HSDPA in fact, Copy and Paste, Exchange ActiveSync, VoIP SIP client, Bluetooth stereo headset profile, and Bluetooth keyboard profile are my main issues.
Some of those issues will be fixed in the v2.0 firmware/ 3G hardware and I hope more will be ticked off the list as time goes by, either by Apple or the legions of enterprising 3rd party developers out there.
Everyone seems to see the potential of the iPhone and is developing for it like Iíve never seen before. That is the most exciting part of the iPhone hype for me. My bank has launched a special iPhone version of their online banking platform, my VoIP provider has announced an iPhone VoIP client, ebay is producing a native app, Google has a fabulous version of their GoogleReader for iPhone which gets better all the time – I’ve certainly never seen such universal acceptance for another mobile phone platform.
The iPhone is a very different device to my usual mobile (the Nokia E90) but, apart from a few small items that the new firmware and the new hardware will go some way towards fixing, I think that Apple has unceremoniously finished my affair with Nokia. And I won’t be going back to Windows Mobile any time soon either.
I’m actually iPhone-less at the moment. I sold my 8gb G1 iPhone a couple of days before the 11th of June announcement in readiness for a new model, and Mr Jobs has got me waiting a whole month! I guess they do say that the best things come to those who wait.
