It’s been awhile since I impulsively bought an iPod touch and subsequently exchanged it for an iPhone. After carrying it around in my pocket for two months, I feel like I can finally give an honest assessment on its usefulness and value. (1)
The verdict comes down to: get an iPhone if you’re looking to carry around an iPod in your pocket all the time as a phone, with simple PDA functionality and the ups and downs of a touch screen interface.
I can’t really even comment on the phone aspect of the iPhone (still stuck in a lengthy and painful Verizon contract), but online impressions and personal testimonies say it works pretty much like any other cell phone, with decent to good voice quality, a forgettable gimmick in Visual Voicemail, and a challenge in operating the tactile-less keypad in a moving vehicle.
The iPod on the phone is its best feature; smart playlists in iTunes and frequent syncing (necessitated by battery life) overcome the miserly 8GB’s of disk space. The interface is beautiful but not particularly useful – Cover Flow is not an efficient way to browse through music – and the sound quality is of iPod quality as long as I pair the phone with a rumbling set of headphones plus an extra adapter. Video is also quite pretty, but impractical with the space limitations and sadly only seems to integrate only with material purchased off the iTunes Store; my own videos have been rejected repeatedly despite my efforts to convert them to a compatible format.
The internet communication stuff – Youtube, Google Maps, Mail, Safari – are nicely integrated with the rest of the phone, and straddle feature-wise between mobile and desktop applications. It’s telling that I found myself wishing the iPhone had the processing might of a full laptop, as it frequently only met me halfway and chugged in trying to render mildly complicated site or crash at the hint of keeping 4-5 pages open at once. A calculator, calendar, clock + alarm, stocks widget, weather widget, and camera + photos round out the package, but these are pretty standard PDA features, often wrapped in Apple’s own pretentious interface.
Then there’s the hacking. Once they got access to the underlying file system, iPhone hackers have installed their own apps against Apple’s “use web applications in our buggy browser!” mandate and have added everything from SSH to a pedometer to games and most famously a way to break AT&T’s SIM lock to allow the use of any SIM card on the iPhone. The vast majority of the development efforts on the phone are free, but they’re clearly amateurish and most end-user software end up being toys rather than productive applications, save for a few very nice system utilities (e.g., the ability to customize the theme). It’ll probably take the official iPhone SDK to create marginally useful addons.
The iPhone isn’t everyone, despite Apple’s commercials and market hype: it’s expensive, heavily locked down with a little ragtag hacking, and to its greatest detriment has pitifully little storage to show off its great music and video capabilities. Beyond the admittedly spiffy interface, it contains a decent phone, great MP3 player, and above average web capabilities, but I feel like its greatest achievement will be forcing all mobile phone companies to improve on their derivative and crappy phones (e.g., Open Handset Alliance). Or at least import those cool-looking ones from Japan and Korea.
- I had previously written five (!) draft posts spanning a month’s worth of reading, but fortunately recognized the zzzz-inducing prose before it went to press and stripped away most of the zzz-ness, although your mileage may vary. (↩)