A few people have asked me how I like my new 3G iPhone, and since I don't have any fibery progress to report I thought I'd tell you a little about it, since I'm bored at work.
1) I really, really like it. I guess I have partaken a little bit of the Apple koolaid, but I just do.
2) The battery life is horrible. I am hard pressed to get 4.5 HOURS OF STANDBY out of it! Not talk time. Standby. This is shockingly awful and they will have to fix it, and I bet they do in the next iteration of the iPhone. If I am going to be away from my charger (if I don't want to carry a cable plus or minus wall charger around with me) for more than a couple of hours, I am going to need a car charger. I hope my bloke picked one up for me today! My old charger/FM transmitter doesn't work with the 3G phone.
I learned from a video clip on CNet that you can prolong your battery life by turning off Bluetooth, WiFi, and 3G- kind of obvious (and kind of funny- hey I just turned my 3G iPhone into an old iPhone! yay!) But what I did not know was that when you are in an area with patchy mobile phone coverage, your phone expends a lot of energy trying to achieve a good connection. So- if you're in an area where reception is poor, you can go into 'flight mode' to save your battery. That really helps. And YAY! You just turned your 3G iPhone into an iTouch! But seriously. The battery life is a major downer- the only one really.
3) No copy and paste Everyone complains about this, so I'll spare you. Surely they will patch this soon?
3a) No MMS I never used MMS before so I don't miss it- on a GSM phone it never worked properly anyway. People do say they miss this, though.
4) No background processes Apple have been really cagey in the rules they have imposed on Application Developers. One of the big ones is that apps can't run processes concurrently. My husband, who is an application developer for another line of handheld devices says that this is just good sense- a badly written app makes everyone say your device is crap. Concurrent processes eventually bring a device to its knees, and Apple wants its devices to look good- they refuse to let other Apps compromise the phone- and I can tell you from using a Pocket PC phone the last few years- THEY DO. However! I have a gripe that any app that uses SOUND won't let you play a game that also uses sound! that stinks. App developers, please make your games so that they can run at the same time as I listen to an audiobook/podcast. I miss the Klondike solitaire on the nano SO MUCH.
5) Many of the apps in the app store are crap. Why, I do not know since Apple is supposedly vetting each one? Obviously they're not vetting them for not being crap. Why can't I get a decent QRCode reader fro instance? Browsing the app store each day, the number of apps with really horrible reviews just keeps growing. Is the Australian App store extra crappy?
6) Here are some good apps:
Stanza is a really nice ebook reader. The only alternative available in the crappy AU app store is EReader which is fine if you want to buy your books from eReader. If you have access to thousands of books in many formats, including .pdb and .lit, and you refuse to buy DRM'ed content, then Stanza is awesome. And right now it's free- I think once out of beta they intend to charge, but it will be worth it.
Twitterific is a nice twitter client, cool in many ways but extra cool in that if there is wifi, it sends your tweets that way rather than using up a txt message.
Bejewelled is still the funnest game ever except WHY NO CUMULATIVE STATS, Popcap?
Apps I would like:
a Klondike solitaire with no sounds (so I can listen to something while I play it), and cumulative stats.
a decent ebay scraper/client (international please)
a tv guide scraper (for AU)
7) the camera is surprisingly nice! My old digital camera is a 5 year old Sony Cybershot with a whopping 3 megapixels. The camera in the iPhone is 2 Mp, but has a HUGE depth of field and a corespondingly wide aperture, so it takes pretty awesome happy snaps in available light, even indoors. Since it's always with me, I'm really pleased about that. Since I am 5.
