The “Break it Down” Blog

• iPhone Review, Part 1 of 3
• iPhone Review, Part 2 of 3
• iPhone Review, Part 3 of 3

I’ve had my iPhone for 2 weeks or so, and while it’s a really nice device, if I were not a mobile-media guy I would strongly suggest a BlackBerry Curve to you or even a Pearl if you aren’t a super-mobile-computer person (SMS, Email, Browsing, etc).

If you are a technical person and you like it when devices act the way you want them to, and you expect a lot of access and functionality to your device, BlackBerry all the way. I’m tending to be more of a “hands off” type of guy, but even I think the iPhone is locked down a bit too much. However, if you want mobile media (like watching TV shows during a bus ride, etc.) or are a design whore to a fault, you’ll really like the iPhone.

I’m going to do a 3-part post of Gripes, Praise, Conclusion that will be my official (and therefor most accurate on the web) review of the iPhone, or as Ted Regulski calls it “Jesus Phone”.

My iPhone Gripes

• EDGE is slow… so goddamn slow. You have heard people bitch about it, and while you were on your BlackBerry you thought “it’s not THAT bad”… at least I did. But the real problem is a side effect of the iPhone actually being too functional… because Safari is a real browser, you don’t load a chopped-down mobile web page, you load the actual entire web page… all over EDGE
  • You will be surprised that a lot of the sites you read can be almost 1MB just to load the home page, on the iPhone/EDGE that’s fucking brutal.
  • Have fun with YouTube
• No copy-and-paste… actually no *select*, so that kills off any chances of copy and paste. Did someone email you someone else’s contact information that you want to put into a contact? That’s nice, go get a pen an paper.
• “iPhone Application” versions of real web apps (GOOGLE) tend to only be viewers of the website, forget editing them or using them on the fly. For example Google Calendar is just a useless viewing program with Quick Add that you can’t edit or change. This doesn’t apply to all iPhone apps… just a lot I seem to be using.
• Touch-screen keyboard does not replace the tactile feedback you get from a physical keyboard like on a BlackBerry. I’m sorry, it doesn’t and you are wrong if you think it does. Go replace your entire keyboard with a giant flat piece of glass, let me know how that goes.
• Screen Rotating support is not universal. You can do it while web browser… but no where else from where I can tell. You can’t write emails widescreen, you can’t browse music in LIST mode widescreen… you can’t use your home screen wide screen… this is only annoying to me during email because I like the wider keyboard layout while typing.
• Quite a few times while I was browsing the web or playing a video the touch screen has stopped responding to my sensual touch. I ended up needing to hit the Home button (bottom center) to get things going again.
• Opening a web link from Mail doesn’t understand the # character… you know, the one used to delimit ANCHORS… so annoying.
• There seems to be no caching or state to Safari. What I mean there is if you open a new browser page, all the other ones unload, to swapping back to them reloads the page.
• Seems to be no shortcut to jumping to a position of a page, or the end of it. So for really long pages, like a forum thread, you need to do the finger-flick thing 72x to get to the bottom.
• Contacts are not a top-level entity, they are under “Phone”, yet you use them for Mail as well.
  • The only reason I noticed this is because on a BlackBerry, the contacts (Address Book) is a central starting place. You find your contact first then decide if you want to SMS, Call, Email, Map, etc.
• Google Maps integration is… confusing. On first use you are like “OMG nice”, and it is… but as soon as you want to try and get directions FROM somewhere or TO somewhere or maybe change how the map looks, or maybe make a bookmark or drop a pin, I guarantee that you will spend some time cycling through the UI and get lost/confused as to what you are doing.
• The goddamn “Tab” control is not a tab, it’s a toggle. Look at Google Maps or Phone > Recent. That tab-looking thing at the top does not act like a tab, you don’t press on the tab you want, it just toggles back and forth. Really freaking confusing, especially since there aren’t 3 or more widgets to tell which state (Light or Dark?) is the selected state and which state is the unselected state. I was really surprised to see this retardation in a Mac UI

Just as a reminder, I’m starting off the review with my gripes first. Don’t read this and think “Oh he hates the phone”, I don’t, but it’s also not perfect either. I will continue to expand on these details with parts 2 and 3.