iPhone observations

I've had my iPhone for just over three weeks now and as expected, I love it. More than I thought I would actually. As my wife likes to tell people, it's pretty much an extension of my arm.

I'm not going to bother doing a full review, it's been around long enough for thousands of those to have already been written, but I thought I would offer up a few observations from my time with it.

I use it a lot

Yes, this seems like a silly thing to say but I really do use it a lot. Mostly for surfing the web, reading my RSS feeds in Google Reader (which is awesome on the iPhone by the way) and email. I seem to get between 5 and 6 hours of mixed usage out of it, which actually means it needs charging almost every day because it won't last 2 full days with that level of usage. I use it much more than any other mobile device I've ever owned.

People love it

Everyone I've shown it to also thinks it's awesome. It's one of those things that you don't fully appreciate until you see it in real life and play with it. They seem to be particularly impressed by photos and videos (my wedding video has been watched a lot!). People just love flicking through photos with the multi-touch screen.

My Google Reader stats have tripled

Or maybe even quadrupled! Since I have it with me all the time, any spare moment I get I find I'm checking my feeds. I've gone from reading less than 100 items a day on average to reading somewhere in the order or 2 or 3 hundred items a day with peaks of 4 or 5 hundred! Below you can see my Google Reader trends graph showing usage in the last 30 days, the first week being pre-iPhone.


I recommend an anti-glare screen protector

I got a Power Support anti-glare protector and I much prefer it to the normal glossy screen. This gives a nice feel with more traction and also doesn't show greasy finger marks at all.

Using the touch keyboard is fine

It takes a little bit of getting used to but once you do, you'll be typing pretty much as fast as on a Blackberry or other QWERTY mobile device. The auto-correct and other clever things sort out most of your typos.

I don't need 3G

I'm happy with EDGE and where that's not available, GPRS is actually not too bad either. As long as you're not using heavy sites they'll load just fine with a little patience. I use Google Reader a lot on GPRS and as it's optimised for mobile, it loads in a reasonable time. Wi-fi is obviously the best connection though and is fantastic when you have it.

There are loads of iPhone optimised sites

A surprising number of sites have iPhone optimised interfaces and look great. I love Facebook, Google Reader and BBC iPlayer in particular. Expect a more in depth post about the best web apps.

Sometimes it replaces my laptop

I don't need my laptop with me nearly as much as I did before. I can do my email and keep up to date on my feeds, facebook and loads of other things perfectly well from the iPhone. There are even good IM apps.

A few frustrations

Not everything's perfect in iPhone land, there are a few frustrations. For example, you can't use landscape mode in every application. It would be particularly nice to be able to compose email and text messages in landscape so you get the wider keyboard. It would also be nice to have a signal in my office (!) but that's more of an o2 issue and the fact that we're in an old building with thick walls I think. My old phone didn't work in the office either. I'd also like to be able to view a unified email inbox and be able to switch between them more quickly rather than trudging through the hierarchy of my mail accounts. These are fairly minor niggles to be honest.

It's amazing

Generally, it's an amazingly well thought out and extremely usable device. It's leagues ahead of anything else and if you do truly want a multi-functional, multi-media, all-in-one device then this is for you. Don't even bother looking at anything else because it won't match up. Put it this way, almost everyone I've shown it to wants one, even non-techie, non-geeky people. Very, very glad I finally got one.