As almost anyone that knows me knows, I really don’t like Apple. In fact, it’s safe to say that I hate Apple. One of the few companies I hate more than Apple is AT&T. So it is probably very surprising to learn that I went out and bought an iPhone and switched to AT&T.
First, I should give a quick background. I’ve been a Sprint customer for almost a decade. They were who I got my first cell phone with, and I just stuck with them. I have loved every phone I’ve had on their network, never had any problems with coverage, and have had pretty decent customer service from them. I have almost always paid my bill on time, and have never asked them for anything (as many people tend to do). I had a fairly high monthly bill, at about $160, which included three lines. All in all, I was a pretty ideal customer. The most recent phone I had, which I’ll talk about in a minute, fell out of its holster earlier this week, and the screen broke on it. The phone still worked, but without the screen it wasn’t very useful for anything else. I had the phone for about a year, so I only qualified for a $75 credit towards a new phone. That’s the extent of what I could get. To give you an idea, the crappy phone that you can get for free when signing up would cost me about $100. This just wouldn’t work, expecially since I had been looking at upgrading to a PDA stype smartphone, like the Treo or BlackBerry. The Treo 800w just recently came out for Sprint, and it pretty much had everything I was looking for. The price for a new customer would be about $250. The price I would have to pay was $500. Obviously, that’s a pretty big difference. So I decided to call up the Sprint customer retention people and see if they could help me out. I’m a long time customer with a good history, so surely they could do something for me, right? When I called them they made several mentions of how amazed they were that I’m such an old customer, and that most of the people that call in are only customers of about 3 years. They then told me that the best they could do for me was to offer me the phone for $350. I pointed out to them that at that price, it was actually cheaper for me to leave them for someone else than it was for me to stay. They responded by saying that they hope I wouldn’t. Needless to say, I wasn’t happy. All those years of being a good customer, and they wouldn’t give the same treatment to me that they would give someone off the street. I wasn’t asking for a major discount, I just wanted to pay the same price that a new customer would. That doesn’t seem to be terribly unreasonable in my mind, given the history. They pretty much just pissed me off, though, and I decided to jump ship, and take my three lines with me.
At this point, I have to decide where I’m going, and what I’m going to get. First, though, let me tell you about the phone that broke so you have an idea of what I’m used to in a phone. The most recent phone I had, I got about a year ago. It was the LG 550, or Fusic. This was a really great phone. I could do all sorts of stuff with it, including a pretty decent internet browsing through the Opera browser. I also had turn by turn GPS support on it with the Sprint Navigation application. This included both visual and audio cues, and would accept both typed in and spoken commands. The phone also had good Bluetooth support. It was on Sprint’s EVDO network, so I would do a lot of media streaming, including streaming video and audio from my home PC via Orb. I also would tether the phone to my computer and use it as a modem in places that I did not have access to the internet. It also had a fairly basic media player, and accepted microSD cards so I occasionaly used it as an MP3 player. All in all, it was a pretty good phone, that had some good features. I was looking at upgrading to a PDA, though, and since I was already used to all of these features, I had to get something that would really wow me. I started looking at the other Treos because I planned on using this phone for work as well. The thing was, though, all of these phones were in the $200 range (give or take) and while I was going to spend that much for the 800w, I didn’t want to spend that much for the 750. I decided that for that much money, I’d just get a stupid iPhone because I really liked some of its features, and I really loved the app store. I decided I’d suck it up, and move over to the Dark Side.
Now that I have all of the backstory behind why I’m using an iPhone now, let me talk about the phone itself. There are things about it that I love, and things that I hate. There are things I knew about it going in, and things I’ve learned since buying one. I’m trying to be fairly objective, insofar as not holding my opinions about Apple against the phone.
The Unchangable
First are the things that are going to stay the same no matter what. There’s really nothing they can do to make these better or worse because it’s just the physical phone. The obvious one is the lack of a physical keypad. This drives me nuts. I have gotten pretty good already at typing on the touchscreen keyboard, and they do an awesome job on the autocorrect, but there’s still something to be said about not having to look at your phone to type. This is not always that I’m driving and trying to text someone, but just being able to do things on your phone, while paying attention to something else, is very handy. I don’t really hate the on screen keyboard, as much as I just wish there was a physical one.
The battery is another limited thing. The battery life is hardly impressive. My usage of the iPhone is honestly pretty darn similar to my usage of my old phone. The experience is just nicer. But I don’t necessarily do more internet browsing, more talking, or more mapping. In fact, since getting the iPhone, I’ve done less talking that I normally do. However, the phone doesn’t even make it a full day without a charge. My old phone could go days without charging. People, including Apple, say to turn off 3G, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth to extend the battery life. Well, that’s just stupid. Why the heck am I going to turn all that stuff off, when those are the things that I’m using on the phone? The only one that I keep turned off for the majority of the day is the Wi-Fi. That’s just because when I’m at the office, I don’t get on the network there. Personally, I think that they should have just lived with the added space and weight, and stuck a decent battery in there. I’m not asking to be able to go days without charging, but I’d at least like to make it 16 hours since I can be away from my house that long.
The screen on the iPhone is easily the most beautiful screen I’ve ever seen on a phone. The quality of it is just amazing, and it is very, very clear. Not only that, but the physical glass part of the screen is just great. The thing is crazy scratch resistant. You honestly can scrape it with your keys and it doesn’t even leave a mark. They definitely did a wonderful job on the screen.
The Good
In addition to the great screen, there are a few other things that I just love about this phone. Just about everyone and their dog has already heard all the great things about this phone. Sometimes, though, people got just a little too excited for things. I’ll go over the things that I do like, but without all the creaming.
The user experience really is top notch. I can very easily navigate through things, and everything is very simple and easy to use. Things usually work exactly as expected, and they did a good job dealing with a lack of physical keys.
The app store is one of, if not the, best thing this phone has going for it. I know that you can get apps for a lot of phones out there, but for some reason it doesn’t seem like there’s quite the collection of professionaly done apps on all phones. The Google app, the Facebook app, the Pandora app. These are all free, and are just great. I love Pandora, and to be able to have it on my phone without the monthly fee they charge for their other mobile apps is awesome. So far I’ve only tried out free apps, but I know that there are a whole swath of things that are pretty cheap and really cool. I really hope that based on how well the apps take off for the iPhone, that more developers will start to look at creating apps for many mobile devices.
The Bad
Of course, there are things on this phone that I don’t really like. I pretty much knew this stuff going in, but having to deal with it is a different matter.
This phone is basically like a computer. And like a computer, it crashes and it lags. I never experienced lagginess or a program crashing on any phone I’ve had in the past. Given how much Apple touts their things to just work, I’d expect better. Just so you don’t think that I’m doing something to cause the crashes, here’s a run down of what I have installed and what I’ve had crash. I only have 8 additional things installed. Facebook, Google, Pandora, Apple Remote, Urban Spoon, Twitterific, Jott, and DizzyBeeFree (come on, I need at least one game). The programs I’ve had crash on me: Safari, Google Maps, Twitterific, iTunes. Why is it that only one of my 3rd party apps have crashed, but I’ve had a lot of Apple loaded progams crash? I have a feeling that Apple just did some shoddy work on their programming, and that this might get fixed. Still, to tout the thing as being so amazing, but have your own stuff crash is just dumb.
The lack of tethering is very annoying. Given the NetShare issue, I think it’s clear that AT&T is to blame for not allowing tethering. Why they will allow it on other phones on their network, but not the iPhone, I do not know. More importantly, though, is why should I have to buy an app to do something on my $200 phone that a freebie phone will do out of the box? This brings up a whole other issue of things that are left off of this phone that should have been there from Day 1. MMS support is a big one. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t use MMS that often, but to just not even support it is incredibly stupid. Not everyone has a phone that can receive emails, but lots of people have phones that can receive a picture message. I’m guessing Steve Jobs has never used MMS so he decided that no one else needed it either. Another thing that’s lacking that you’ve heard all about is the copy/paste. Is this something that is a huge deal? Not really. It still should have been included, though, just given that every other smartphone on the market supports it.
The Unacceptable
In addition to some things that I don’t like about the phone, there are things that I find completely unacceptable to be lacking. I call these the, “Apple hates it when people talk on the phone while driving,” things. First and foremost is the lack of voice dialing. I’ve basically used voice dialing for all of my calling for about a year now. I simply tap a button on my headset, say, “Call so-and-so,” and that person is dialed. I haven’t actually touched my phone to dial a number in a long time. The lack of voice dialing coupled with the lack of a physical keypad means that if you are going to make a phone call while driving, it is going to suck. You have to hold the phone, and you have to look at the phone. If the phone is in your pocket, you have to awkwardly pull it out, unluck it (which if you’re using a security code like you should be adds an extra step), hit the phone button, find the person you’re going to call, and tap their name. This is opposed to being able to quickly tap a button on a headset and speaking someone’s name. One involves a lot of work, one lets you never move your eyes, and just briefly move your hand. To argue that voice dialing is unneccesary is just plain stupid. The car is the obvious example, but I used it to dial the phone even when I was just sitting at my desk. And don’t try to tell me that I can use an app, or pay $5 a month to use AT&T’s voice thing that doesn’t even match up with your contacts and still requires you to dial a number. The iPhone needs native voice dial support that does not require me to touch the phone. Even if you don’t use this, to not see that it’s needed is to be dense.
The other thing that just baffles me to leave out, and that I feel is something of a requirement, is the fact that I can’t set any Bluetooth privacy settings. If I turn BT on, it is just on. The alternative is to just have it off. My old phone I could turn it on, but keep myself in “private” which means that it was invisible and refused any BT connection from anything it was not already paired with. This is a big security thing, and to leave it out doesn’t make any sense at all.
Pretty much everything that I have a complaint about with this phone can be fixed via a software update. My hope is that Apple will come through with these more major things, and get them fixed fairly soon. I can stand living with them for a while, but if they aren’t fixed, I’ll probably look at getting a different phone.
I know that there are a bajillion other iPhone reviews out there, but I thought I’d offer my thoughts just given that I’m someone that hates Apple and AT&T, but does own an iPhone. Let me know what you think about it, and if you have any suggestions or thoughts.