On a cold day in November 2007, I was hanging out with Julia Roy and had just found that I’d gotten a nice bonus from my job at Jazkarta that day. At the time I was using a Palm Treo 650, which was getting rather unfashionable, buggy, incompetent and old. I had been playing with her iPhone all day, and once she found about my bonus she said, “That’s it, we’re going to the Apple Store”. We actually went to the AT&T store instead, as the Boylston Apple store was not yet opened. I was really excited to have the iPhone and finally join the club. I still have the phone (first gen), and it hasn’t broke on me yet, despite my fears about its durability due to the cost. Yet, I don’t love the iPhone.
The iPhone is slow. What you see on the commercials and demos is all sped up, with the weird little glitches and pauses taken out. The typing isn’t bad, but if you’re in an overloaded website, then all of a sudden the response becomes dismal.
The earpiece is horrid. Maybe this is because some asshole dropped mine in ketchsup at one point, but it wasn’t ever loud enough. If you don’t use the headphones, then it really isn’t a great device to talk on. I’m constantly asking people to repeat themselves.
The nonstandard recessed headphone jack on the original one, which has since been fixed, is annoying as hell. I don’t honestly know what they were thinking. It’s not like this was the first device that had headphones that Apple had produced. They should have known better.
Some UI stuff is annoying. You should be able to adjust the screen brightness from the side button. And there should be some way to fix the screen orientation so it doesn’t keep shifting when you’re laying down and reading. Aside from some games doing the simple left/right tilt, I haven’t seen the tilt sensor used to its fullest.
The Wifi access sucks, or maybe Safari is just slow as hell on here. I don’t care about the lack of Flash, but even when I’m at home viewing and loading sites, stuff takes forever if it’s not been iPhone optimized.
Programs crash. Safari does this way too often and is one of the worst offenders. Apple doesn’t seem to want Opera or Firefox on the iPhone however, so we don’t have many options that I know of. The Mail and SMS programs are poorly executed and switching between all applications takes too long. The camera has a huge delay on taking photos, and we regressed compared with other phones in not allowing video to be captured, or Multimedia SMS’s (MMS) to be sent, or received properly. AT&T has some screwed up way for you to sometimes get the MMS’s using another computer, but its clunky and doesn’t really work well.
Making an iPhone app can be relatively easy and quick. Yet, most of the iPhone applications are totally useless and suck. Even moreso with the 1st generation phone.
It’s the best phone I’ve owned, but let’s face it… we aren’t there yet and Apple could have done better in many ways. I can’t wait to get whatever they put out next, but I disbelieve most rumors I hear in the Apple community these days. Why its taking them so long to allow different screen orientation on the SMS for example, is beyond me. Several gestural researchers have figured out good ways to do cut/paste, but Apple is slow to implement. Rather unfortunate.
