iPhone Second Impressions
When I first got my iPhone, I wrote up my first impressions. I was in Maine most of this week, on the beach. I wasn’t on vacation, though… I was working. But the house where I was staying had no wifi. But it did have a shitty EDGE connection. So, I hammered on the iPhone. A LOT.
First of all, here’s why the EDGE was weak. This is where I was using it from… literally the end of the country.
If I drove downtown, the EDGE was much better. So, using it on the beach was an exercise in patience. But, I just wanted to share some more thoughts after using it more and more.
- I found myself wishing for copy/paste about once every hour. Or even just to select a large amount of text. I repeatedly wanted to reply to a long email, but only quote part of it. Forget about it… unless you want to hit that delete button 759 times.
- Not too many application crashes, but still some.
- I would like an Apple-created IM application that works a lot like the SMS one. I’d also like an Apple-esque RSS reader. Newshutch just isn’t working for me anymore on the iPhone. A shame because I love it on the desktop, but I need to use the same on both.
- Imagine my shock when a Word doc was attached, and I could click to open it. I can only view it (not edit), but that’s all I needed to do. I don’t remember Apple mentioning this, so it was a nice surprise. Opens PDFs the same way. Supposed to open an Excel sheet, but the only one I tried it with made the phone crash and burn. A rare restart was required.
- Using GMail isn’t all that smooth. I know you can “Add an Account” to Mail and use GMail through that interface, but you need to enable POP in your GMail account. Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t that mean it won’t be synced on all my machines/devices anymore?
- I love Mail for my IMAP work account though.
- It is a bit too easy to delete an email in Mail. It saves it to a Trash folder on the iPhone, but I still have yet to find this folder. I’ve put a couple emails in there I’d like to get back.
- I put about two hours of video of Ella on there. Gorgeous. She enjoys being able to see herself when she was Nolan’s age! So cute to see a two year old walking around with an iPhone showing it to everyone.
- Notes is pretty cool. But would be great to sync that with my Mac somewhere. Say you already have a lot of text on your MacBook you want to email. That way you can drop it in a note, bypass the copy/paste issue.
- Or, they could just implement copy/paste.
- I’d like to be able to attach files to emails that I put on the iPhone in disk mode (wait, does it do disk mode?)
- Okay, lack of Flash is a bit more annoying than I thought. For Flash Video purposes only.
- Wow, you get used to this keyboard really quickly. I’ve sent a LOT of email from this thing.
- I’m still shocked by the camera (see below):
And the one thing I’m almost afraid to admit…
I was looking in the rear view mirror to see if Nolan was asleep in his car seat. I reached up towards the mirror to do a two-fingered flick to zoom in. That’s almost like reaching for command-Z when you spill something.
I’m eagerly awaiting software version 1.1 (to get it a bit more stable—and can I get me some copy/paste?), but man, this thing is great.
…something tells me you would appreciate being able to copy and paste?
Know what? That *would* be handy.
The photo is fantastic. I heard nothing but dread from people talking about the iPhones ability to capture images prior to its release. I have note heard anything else about it. I guess that was not the case.
I gotta say, the camera is probably my most-used feature on it. Then email and web browsing. Heck, I sometimes forget it’s an iPod and (yes) a phone.