Follow Up to Monday's iPhone Hands-On Review
The phone portion of iPhone is absolutely terrific. It is so unbelievably easy to open contacts and make a call or use Maps to search for a service, call them, get directions on Map and a traffic report on Map as well. These simple integrated features work so well that they alone would sell me the iPhone over any other phone on the market.
The Mail application is almost as good as working on a Mac and light years ahead of anything we've seen on any other smart phone. The only feature that we really miss is an integrated inbox for our several IMAP email accounts. We also have several POP email accounts which we haven't elected to sync yet--we're making sure we don't delete downloaded email from the POP server.
Web browsing with Safari is a little less easy than using Mail but not difficult, particularly if we stick to our bookmarks and links. We checked our itineraries and made a reservation at United.com. We also checked our bank accounts with no problem. Popup menus are cool--when tapped the menu pops up from the bottom with selections that are large enough to see well and tap.
The iPod functions just as well as our iPod with video.
Some follow-ups:
Battery drain during sleep when connected to a Mac. We learned from an overnight experiment that if we turn the iPhone completely off while it is connected by USB to our Mac, then putting the Mac to sleep does not allow the iPhone's battery to drain but it actually charges it to full capacity.
Belkin makes an adapter to use almost any headphones, including our Bose QuietComfort 3's, with the iPhone. We ordered one for $10.95 but they may be in stores that carry a large selection of Belkin products.
Incase makes a black leather iPhone case that works horizontally with a belt clip or strap. However, it does not have a headphones compartment or pouch. The Leather Folio is $39.95.
Some interesting iPhone tidbits from analyst Gene Munster:
Sales estimates range from 500,000 to 700,000
An unexpectedly large share of iPhone purchasers, maybe half, are switching to AT&T from other services. This is a major cause of activation delays.
The AT&T/Apple iTunes activation process had only a 2% error rate when more than 10% is common for a new item.
Most people are opting for the 8GB model as we did.
One-third of iPhone buyers replaced a Motorola cell phone as we did.
In addition, iPhones can't sync with PCs using the 64-bit version of Windows Vista. More....
[Bill Fox & Dana Baggett]
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