So, as of about 6 hours ago, I’ve had my iPhone for a week now. I figured I’d post my usages so far, my likes and dislikes, etc.
Check after the jump for details.
Battery:
I had the phone charged to 100% around 9:30am. With some light to moderate usage ( it recorded 2 hrs of usages and 10 hours of standby ) it shows a battery of 57% left. That was mostly spent fiddling around with different apps, posting a few things on facebook, exploring a bit on the web and a considerable amount of text messaging. With 12 hours passed and still 1/2 the battery, I’m pretty happy so far. I’m going to leave it over night to see how far down I can get it and use my Incase Power Slider tomorrow while I’m at Brooke’s for most the day. Overall I’m pretty pleased with the battery life, and watching it take nearly a full day of moderate usage to drain.
Keyboard:
I’m still getting used to the auto-correcting of the keyboard. It’s fairly difficult for me to not want to instantly go back to fix a mistake I notice. I know I’m getting better at typing on it, but I don’t think I’ll ever have the accuracy of typing on a real keyboard and when I’m texting I am losing my signature *action_here* because the asterisk symbol is just difficult to get to.
Ringtones:
I have a hard time being willing to pay for ringtones, especially when I have already paid for songs or entire ablums. I’ve found it quite easy to make ringtones to put on my iPhone and have a few custom ones already. The hard part if finding the right ringtone for the right person.
Applications:
This is both the biggest strength and the greatest weakness of the iPhone. Apple has done a wonderful job making it easy to make applications for the iPhone. What they haven’t made easy is getting the application approved for sale in the store. The approval process is cloaked in mystery and now, any application that pulls data from the internet ( think like a browser ) will be tagged 17+ and that it may contain indecent material. I wonder if the Barnes and Noble app was tagged that way, or if companies have enough pull they can get Apple to look the other way ( like how Trent Reznor got his app approval re-evaluated when it was initially declined with some very harsh posts on twitter and his own website ).
If you ignore the approval process though, the App Store is an amazing source of fun. It’s almost like YouTube, where you can start searching for something and suddenly find yourself having spent an hour or two just looking at nothing. People will mock the Apple App Store for having a pletora of Fart Apps, but when you really dig into it, there are a lot of very worth while applications, not all of which cost money, many very solid apps are free.
Mail:
I never thought I would use email on a phone as much as I have in the last week. I only have it checking mail every 15 minutes and I could probably drop that down to 30 minutes if I wanted to save the battery a bit more, but as I’m not hurting for battery I’m not all that worried. The email client ( while not perfect ) is VERY usable, and I’m quite pleased with it’s implementation.
What’s Lacking:
I do wish the iPhone had some kind of LED that could blink, or flash or something when there was something that “required” your attention ( which could be modified by preferences ). I’d like to know when I have an unread sms, or missed call, or voicemail, while I don’t need to know immediately about IMs or emails for example. While the phone does vibrate or chirp when a message comes in, it only does so three times ( once for the inital alert and then twice more over the course of a few minutes ) and after that you aren’t alerted again. If I’m in the shower, chances are I’m going to miss this, and I’d really like the ability to glance at my phone from across the room and know if I have something that requires my attention.
The phone could use a flash, but it’s far from a real need for me. If I’m going to take that many pictures I’ll get my digital camera out.
Syncing to multiple computers. Like most people, I have a computer at work and at home. While I don’t need, nor even WANT to sync my music/videos at home and work, I DO have the want to sync my contacts, applications, calendars, ringtones, etc between the two. I’d love to have a backup of my sync’d information at work in case my home machine dies ( or vice versa ). I spend between 40 and 50 hours on a normal week at the office, which is about 1/3 to 1/4 of the total hours in a calendar week. That’s a lot of time. I’d really like the option to sync against 2 computers.
Profiles. I’d like to be able to set different profiles for my phone. When I have it plugged in, I don’t care if the screen is at it’s brightest vs my normal dimmer setting for saving battery consumption. I do like the vibrate switch on the side, making it VERY easy to turn the phone silent, but I’d also like the option for NO vibration that easily too.
Settings easier to get access. This is one thing that can be a pain. When I need to toggle my bluetooth on/off it takes no less than 4 taps, and that’s being generous and assuming the phone is not asleep and/or locked.
A Today Screen. On the lock screen I would love to have a brief over view of things on my device. Appointments I have today and perhaps coming up in the next day or two, number of missed calls or voicemails, number of missed text messages, number of unread emails. It would be quite nice to just turn on the screen, give it a quick look over and see if I really needed to swipe to unlock or could just turn the screen off and go back to whatever I was doing.
While I have gone on about things I think that the iPhone is lacking, that by NO means is to give the impression that I do not really like the phone. I’ve been VERY pleased with my coverage, my speed and the general quality of the phone.