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iPhone 3G Reviews and Impressions

TwinCities Dan said:
Thanks for this! :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I know you were being sarcastic and apparently he's a Windowsguy (his name) but I really agree with him for the most part. Granted, his personal attack on Jobs is irrelevent and overtly flaming trollish... but I, a 1 gen iphone owner, saw really no reason to upgrade to iphone 3G. Now, for those on the fence about getting one at all - the price alone probably swayed 99% of those on the fence.

I love the new 3rd party apps.

Mobileme (I have it)... meh.

Push.... meh.

I dig the 2.0 But a new slightly new shaped, faster (if your lucky to be in 3g - I'm not) ain't enough.

That said, outside of firmware and apps, I'm not really sure what could be done to make the actual form significantly better outside of a few speed bumps and memory increases. I feel it's nearly a perfect structure (of course I'll be proved wrong tomorrow :) )

The only thing I could complain about is the fact that in my area, I specifically checked for coverage at my house before I bought the iphone original and the site indicated "good coverage". I'm constantly only at 1 bar or no service. And since I work at home this has become troublesome... anyone have any advice here? Would contacting apple or at&t possibly pay off in any way? I'm not looking to abuse the situation, just to get some sort of even compensation for dropped/missed calls and voicemails.
 
TalkAboutApple said:
My wife's screen has a speck of dust (actually not a small speck, either), on the inside of the glass.

She was bummed about it, and felt bad...but a half hour later discovered a red pixel in the middle of the screen of mine.

We'll get this sorted out, but guys you should take a look at your screens. I only can see the hot red pixel with a black background showing.
Click to expand...

You aren't the only one. Unfortunately, it appears this might be a widespread problem. I have the bad pixel towards the middle of the screen as well. You can see it very clearly on the home screen if you go to a mostly blank page. Against the black background it sticks out like a sore thumb. Apple is going to need to address this.
 
Atrocious service at the Apple Store

I stood in line towards the end of the day at the apple store at La Cantera in San Antonio. Got in line at 9:20pm and the store closed at 11:00pm. There were about 60-70 people in line and in the store. From 9:20 to 10:20 I saw Apple store clerks taking smoke breaks, generally lollygagging, leaving for the day, etc.

At 10:30, there were 12 people left in line, including myself. We were not yet allowed in the store. I would guess there were 40 customers in the store. An apple clerk came out to us and said we would not get in and to come back tomorrow. So close.

What really irked me were the lazy clerks just doing nothing while they could have been pushing customers through the AT&T wickets. According to the rep, the bottleneck was explaining to new iphone customers the ins and outs of AT&T service, 3G coverage, plans, etc. I wasn't one of these customers, but a 1st generation iPhone owner. I didn't need to hear the plans and all that.

Not letting 12 people in at the end if the day is just silly and downright poor customer service.
 
o2 contingency

Just on another note:

For all those o2 customers who managed to get an iPhone yesterday and aren't yet getting service, I just spoke to o2 and they are still in contingency. The hope to have the system up by mid afternoon and only then they can start entering the applications into their system.

Those who have given pac codes are likely to have numbers transferred by next Wednesday/Thursday.

All worth it though!
 
Well, I guess concerns (my own included) were overrated about Apple being overzealous about excluding things from their store.

In fact, the opposite has come true. SOME of the apps are true junk. And, even ones that Steve demoed (AIM) has serious issues- as in, it won't even run on my phone. It ran once but now it crashes every time it starts.

I've had other apps I downloaded crash as well.

I'll take it though. 1, I'm a big boy and can weed out the trash. If an app is called "flashlight" and promises to turn my phone into a flashlight, I don't need it. Nor do I need something that promises to turn my phone into a beer. See how easy it is to parse out the stuff you don't need? I also question the programming skills of people who came up with some of this, and would rather not run the stuff they wrote, even if Apple says it is OK.

2, the app sandbox seems to be pretty solid. To spite apps crashing, it didn't affect the rest of the OS (that I can tell.)
 
jasonbuzz said:
I stood in line towards the end of the day at the apple store at La Cantera in San Antonio. Got in line at 9:20pm and the store closed at 11:00pm. There were about 60-70 people in line and in the store. From 9:20 to 10:20 I saw Apple store clerks taking smoke breaks, generally lollygagging, leaving for the day, etc.

At 10:30, there were 12 people left in line, including myself. We were not yet allowed in the store. I would guess there were 40 customers in the store. An apple clerk came out to us and said we would not get in and to come back tomorrow. So close.

What really irked me were the lazy clerks just doing nothing while they could have been pushing customers through the AT&T wickets. According to the rep, the bottleneck was explaining to new iphone customers the ins and outs of AT&T service, 3G coverage, plans, etc. I wasn't one of these customers, but a 1st generation iPhone owner. I didn't need to hear the plans and all that.

Not letting 12 people in at the end if the day is just silly and downright poor customer service.
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they dont bloody give a damn thing anyway since there are many other ppl waiting to get a piece of iphone 3g
 
Auctor said:
Does anyone have a guess as to whether you could use turn by turn GPS in an app AND play music at the same time? I'm thinking of a scenario where you're on the highway using the GPS, but also using the iPhone connected to your car stereo. Since each application closes when a new one launched, won't that be a huge pain in the butt?
Click to expand...

That's not strictly true, Apple's own apps are allowed to run in the background, so the iPod app keeps playing whilst you do other things, Mail keps checking in the background etc.

The vision I had for an iPhone GPS SatNav was one which uses audio ducking whenever it needed to say anything, so you can use the iPhone plugged into your car stereo, and the directions come out over the stereo too, but you can still hear them over the music.
 
O2 estimating iPhone shortage in UK will last weeks

O2 is predicting that the shortage of iPhones in the UK will last several weeks due to the massive demand (as opposed to the relatively poor sales performance of the original iPhone in the UK)

O2 said they'd been using the pre-registration info and pre-order data to support their orders for more iPhones from Apple, but Apple has only supplied a small portion of the demand.

And yet you have iPhones for sale in US cities without decent 3G coverage, and you have a city like London with near blanket 3G coverage sitting with massive under-supply.


Bloody frustrating!
 
extraextra said:
Initial impressions of battery life? I'm hearing that it's quite low! :(
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I must have a problem with mine. I unplugged my phone from the charger at 5:30am this morning, checked a few emails, a couple of websites, all with 3G turned off. Not a single phone call and it's now 4 hours later and my indicator is at the halfway mark. My wife has the first gen and I don't think it's down a bar plus she's made some calls. Off to the ATT store in 15 minutes. I also notice that the back of the phone is warm to the touch.
 
upgrade my jailbroken, anysim edge iphone? i don't think so!

NOBODY in his/her right mind will upgrade to 2.0 and lose the freedom of the installer for what? the freakin app store? there is still so much missing like cut and paste, voicedial that i will not 'castrate' myself with an unnecessary 'upgrade'
 
i love it

What a long few days!

I am a 1st gen owner and downloaded the unofficial software release on Thursday. I didn't do damn thing at work... I brought my MBP to work and worked on my iPhone to get it up and running. The first time I synced/downloaded the firmware update, everything worked great. So then I thought to myself, "hey, why not try to sell your phone online to get the new one?" So I did! $180. :) I took that money and went to the Apple Store during lunch and the line was ridiculously long. I came back after work and waited in line for about an hour and a half.. got the phone and went to my second job. I woke up this morning and activated it with no problems. :) I wanted to start fresh so I didn't restore my old phone.

So far, I love the feel of it. I am completely impressed with the speed of the 3g, I don't really notice the difference in signal strength though, which is kind of discouraging.. :-( AT&T says where I am located is covered in 3G.

MAPS - WOW! It pinpointed me without any problem. It was so ridiculous!

APPS - Wow again. Some of these apps are so wonderful and some of them are just stupid, i.e. flashlight, yes/no, light saber... but we can get over them.

OVERALL - I am happy with my purchase. I am thankful I have not had the yellow screen or dead pixels or even problems with activation.

Let's go Appllllleeee!!
 
Critical typing flaw on new 3G

One major flaw I noticed immediately is a change in the autofill typing - or whatever it is called. I had the original iPhone where, as you typed, it would guess the word just as the 3G does. However, on the original, the word would be displayed in the little bubble above the text. With the 3G, it is displayed below, causing interference with the keyboard. Often, the "bubble" it exactly where I need to type on the keyboard. No, the bubble doesn't actually cover any keys, but it won't let you enter the key below it. When I try to tap the key below the bubble, it cancels the bubble and does not register the key, no matter how careful I am not to touch the bubble at all.

So, this means you have to stop and go back to that key and tap it again for it to register, a task that is particularly irritating when the bubble reappears once you backspace after you realize the key didn't register. Then, because you cancelled the bubble in order to press the key you needed, if you make a typo, it is no longer going to guess and fix it for you on that word.

This must be fixed!

The bubble needs to appear ABOVE the text again so that it stops interfering!
 
processor speed

I have not seen any reports on speed of the phone's processor. It the iPhone 3G any snappier? Does it hang up slightly or delay in displaying calendar entries for 2-3 seconds like the old iPhone did?
 
Couple of thoughts from an original iPhone owner:

Will I upgrade? Eh......My current iPhone service plan is free through my company (I had to buy the hardware though). To-date I have no idea if I can get the new one on my work plan. However, I'm definitely not paying over $200 just for 3G, so it would need to be subsidized and I doubt this will be possible on corporate plans. The GPS feature is nice, but it seems pretty useless at the moment. I'll wait for TomTom or Garmin or whoever to release an app.

How about the new firmware? It's cool, though still lacking in several areas, specifically:
1. No landscape keyboard in email. That's crazy.
2. Although Exchange push works nicely, some critical business user features are still missing. Example: I can't schedule a meeting and invite people to it from my iphone. You can do this with a blackberry.
3. Of the 500+ apps released so far, my interest rate seems to be just over one percent because I've looked at just about every app and currently have I think six of them installed. Pandora and Remote seem far and away the best.
4. Similarly, I'm told that the SDK is so limited that we shouldn't expect a VNC or terminal client. So I can access my corporate VPN now, but I can't connect to my work desktop. Looks like I'll be jailbreaking again.
5. Instant messenger is almost useless until the notification system comes in September. Even then, does anyone actually understand how it'll work?
6. No MMS after a whole year is unacceptable. I received an MMS message from a friend just this morning. The "viewmymessage" site was down (as it usually is), making it impossible to view.
7. So will we continue to be unable to upload an iPhone photo to a website? I know the new facebook app allows you to take a new picture and send it to the site, but oddly enough it seems impossible to upload a previously taken picture. Maybe I'm missing something here?
8. No file manager. I obviously didn't expect this with the new firmware (because it wasnt announced). But I'm surprised more people aren't upset about the fact that you can't save files on the iPhone.

Don't get me wrong, still the best phone I've ever had. But it's very far from perfect IMO.
 
Perrumpo said:
One major flaw I noticed immediately is a change in the autofill typing - or whatever it is called. I had the original iPhone where, as you typed, it would guess the word just as the 3G does. However, on the original, the word would be displayed in the little bubble above the text. With the 3G, it is displayed below, causing interference with the keyboard. Often, the "bubble" it exactly where I need to type on the keyboard. No, the bubble doesn't actually cover any keys, but it won't let you enter the key below it. When I try to tap the key below the bubble, it cancels the bubble and does not register the key, no matter how careful I am not to touch the bubble at all.

So, this means you have to stop and go back to that key and tap it again for it to register, a task that is particularly irritating when the bubble reappears once you backspace after you realize the key didn't register. Then, because you cancelled the bubble in order to press the key you needed, if you make a typo, it is no longer going to guess and fix it for you on that word.

This must be fixed!

The bubble needs to appear ABOVE the text again so that it stops interfering!
Click to expand...

I don't know what you're going on about. The auto correct has always been below the text.
 
Cousin Dirk said:
I don't know what you're going on about. The auto correct has always been below the text.
Click to expand...

It hasn't:

linux-iphone.JPG
 
aperry said:
Couple of thoughts from an original iPhone owner:

2. Although Exchange push works nicely, some critical business user features are still missing. Example: I can't schedule a meeting and invite people to it from my iphone. You can do this with a blackberry.
Click to expand...

Do you have the Business Plan? Does push to Exchange actually work with the standard plans? I have a friend that got it to connect with Exchange, but didn't receive any email and thought it was due to being on a standard plan.

There's been very little discussion about Exchange/Entourage sync here so far. Are there any business users here that can share their experiences yet?

Thanks
 
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