I was excited for the 3G - not excited enough to wait in a 4+ hour line, but excited enough to call 3 different stores every couple days to see what inventory and crowd control looked like.
I ended up getting an 8GB version after waiting for about 45 minutes 5 days ago. My first impressions were VERY positive. I am a power user of a blackberry for 7 years+ (when it used to look like a pager) and I have been in wireless for over 10 years so I have seen every phone imaginable.
The iPhone bests them ALL - hands down. The interface, the intelligence of where things are and how they work together, the great screen and how everything seems optimized to work with the screen real estate and the interface. The keyboard worries me a bit, but I think I can get comfortable with it. The battery life is mediocre at best (for the regular consumer, they will have no problem) but for a power user - expect to be charging it at lunch). The GPS needs an update - it is not turn by turn and there is no copy and paste (WTF?).
But all of those - did not remove my excitement for my phone. This was the first phone I was excited to buy since the Tilt - (HSPDA, GPS, wifi, keyboard) - but that was a turd.
But then - I started really using the phone and I realized that this phone is just not ready for prime time. It feels like Apple rushed the product out the door. They should have held onto this for another couple months - still made the holiday rush and come out with a better product. I expect most of the issues can and will be fixed with a firmware upgrade - but this is Apple, not Microsoft. Since when did Apple start playing in the ‘beta economy’.
No A2DP - meaning, I can use a bluetooth headset to talk but NOT listen to music. This should be standard with an iPhone - hello - people like listening to music on their iPhone. This is shocking to me.
Exchange Support - The set-up process was very easy and sync was incredibly fast - but there are some serious issues. My contact ‘note fields’ which I use extensively seems to have a word limit on them - so when I was traveling I did not have my frequent flyer numbers that I keep at the bottom of my contact info’. I can not seem to highlight a number when I am invited to a calendar entry and dial from within the application (which is a selling point in the Apple literature - dial a number from almost anywhere…. accept when you have a conf call scheduled and the number is in your calendar; something a businessman is apt to do at least a couple times a day. The big issue though is speed. Granted I have 3800 contacts (I know people with much more) but my blackberry - and I have an OLD ONE - has no issue while the iPhone crawls. With no exaggeration - from home screen to finding a number (clicking on the phonebook, the search box, and dialing in the first 5-8 letters) takes at 30 seconds. At each step the application hangs for a bit - this is horrendous.
I am finding lots of crashes - My device has reset itself 4 times in 5 days. Unacceptable - it’s a phone not a PC.
Within applications, they seem to crash. True story - I am driving using GPS and the screen flickers and then goes to my home screen - by the time I get back to GPS I missed my turn.
Safari crashes on me at least a couple of times a day.
I emailed a bunch of friends (power users) and unfortunately they are experiencing the same issues. I think Apple needs to get back to basics and fix this phone fast if they want to make inroads into the corporate market. If they can’t keep me as a customer - and I REALLY LOVE APPLE PRODUCTS - they will have problems keeping other power users happy.
