who's got a iphone?

[bobdea]

what do you think of the 2.0 software?

gripes?

I have one of the 3g phones and my feeling I think is different than most other people's I was not bedazled at first by the interface like others have been but now that I've been using one for awhile I'm falling in love with it.

Compared to other phones that do more I was thinking that the iphone was my cheapest way to get some functionality(and not have to use a pen or something to work a mini keyboard) that I want and I do generally like apple products. But what I've found is that the damn thing is dead simple in what it does and does it all very well. I have not tried to figure out features and gotten fustrated like I have with crackberries and the high end nokias.

What I hate about the phone: no cut and paste, WTF is that about?

Safari on all platforms not just the iphone has trouble with javascript, no idea why but Apple friggin' dropped the ball on this one a long time ago and has yet to deal with it.

I have to use software to use the damn thing as a hard disk, ipods had this option out of the box way back and it would make the thing so much more useful. I used to carry a copy of OS X on a ipod to troubleshoot sick macs and keep other stuff on.

the speaker is complete ****, hard to hear the thing ringing if anything obscures the little hole it resides in.

No video camera, this one is minor but would be nice, I mean a motorola razr has that.

anyway, tell me what you think of yours

[cail]

i have one... it was ok at first... but now with 2.0 it's much better... just waiting for more apps to become available from older cracked versions.

i agree with the speaker. i never hear it ringing, and speakerphone isn't the greatest.

you can store stuff on it, but you need to connect through Terminal or something like CyberDuck to access the files and make folders. kind of a pain, but not a huge problem.

they need to make bluetooth available for more than just a headset, or car speakers.

i don't have the 3G one (i dont have a data plan so that isn't necessary for me). isn't the back of that one plastic?

[bobdea]

yes, not as cool but if it's decent plastic it might be more durable

[pebu]

The ipods and iphones use technology that my company has a patent on. That's the capacitive sensor interface. Unfortunately we're just a small company in michigan and apple is... well, a little bit bigger than we are... I wish I knew more about what is going on with that, but I'm just an engineer and they don't tell me anything.

[kjl]

I have one of the 3G phones. I'd been holding off on getting an iPhone because I knew once I got one I'd need a "smart" phone for the rest of my life, and now that I have it, I'm totally addicted.

Yeah, the speaker sucks if you happen to have your thumb on it.

No cut and paste sucks - I think they couldn't figure out what gesture to use for highlighting (all the combinations of holding or sliding with one or two fingers are already used)

I like the brain-dead interface and the fact that apps seem consistent in how they behave (upper left goes "back" and the home button exits the app, etc.). The spell-correction is amazing - I can type a billion words a minute and if I watch the screen the letters are maybe 95% gibberish and it for the most part just deciphers it perfectly.

Googlemaps + GPS + Safari + Yelp on your phone is just the best thing ever; find a nearby (or faraway) restaurant, check out reviews, call them with a click, find directions to it from wherever you happen to be standing, see traffic along the way, etc., all within a minute or so. Pretty amazing. I'm not sure what people mean when they say it doesn't have "turn by turn" because it seems like you can step through each turn that you'll have to make, and you can also see the dot representing you move around on the map as you walk/drive around.

One of my favorites is the Pandora app. Listen to my custom music stations streaming over 3G while I bike to work. Super awesome.

The thing I am using it the most for is checking wind conditions for kiting.

My only real gripe is that there seem to be little delays all over the thing. Bring up the contact list and you can see the contacts but you can't click or scroll around for a few seconds (same with any other program it looks like). Sometimes text entry (like email or SMS) will pause 2-3 seconds in between each letter typed and require a reboot to fix. I used to get some crashing when I was first using it, but I ditched some of the crappy apps, and now it hasn't crashed in a week or so.

[carverchick]

I don't have the 3G phone, but I do have the 1st generation one. I'm totally addicted to my phone. I like having the GPS feature, more room for more music and the other applications. My only gripes are the speakerphone option is crappy and I hate typing on the small keyboard. I've learned to work around that which is fine by me. Other than that I love my phone!

[queequeg]

Ive had the iphone for about a year now. I haven't upgraded to the 3G version yet but I have the 2.0 software, and I probably won't until my current phone breaks which I doubt will happen anytime soon. I find the phone to be very well designed, and extremely useful.

Most of the complaints that people have about the iPhone don't make much sense to me.

I agree it could be louder, and that the voice quality could be better on calls (from what I understand the new phone is improved in this regard).

cut and paste is not a huge issue to me, It would occasionally be handy but I see the advantages this phone has over others as dwarfing this issue. I think the reason they haven't implemented cut and paste probably has to do with they way they have sand boxed all the apps to isolate them from one another and from the system, from what I understand about what's going on under the hood, implementing cut and paste in any useful way would not be a simple thing due to the way the apps (and app data) are isolated from one another. -- It's not a matter of working out the ui/gesture for select/copy/paste - it is a matter of having a system-wide clipboard that gets written and read by all apps despite the fact that the apps are designed to not share data (although It probably wouldn't be that hard because sms/phone DO seem to share a bit of data).

Safari has problems with javascript? Are you sure you know what you are talking about? I earn my living writing javascript, and I can assure you that safari/webkit has an excellent javascript interpreter (and actually, it is primed for additionaly dramatic improvement in the very near future when they integrate the squirrelmonkey interpreter http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/).

I think the beauty of the iphone is that it does the vast majority things the vast majority of people want to do, and no compromises have been made to permit it to do the bazillion other things that the remaining one percent of the population would like it to do. Too many phones and devices are overloaded with bull**** features that are poorly implemented and borderline useless. With software, you are always better off designing something to perform a limited number of tasks well, than perform a multitude of tasks poorly. IF they had tried to slap every concievable doohikey on the phone that they possibly could, they would have spread their work too thin and ended up with the same crappy product everyone else is pimping these days. By limiting their tasks to designing something that mostly satisfies most of the people, most of the time, they ended up with an excellent product.

[queequeg]

isn't the back of that one plastic?

I think the plastic back will actually improve the durability of the new phone. they had problems with the gen1 version losing screen sensitivity when the metal back got dented/dinged as there are a bunch of ribbons that get routed along the back and apparently it screws things up when they get kinked/crushed against internal components over a period of time.

[Steve Dold]

I'm hoping the plastic back might also help the RF coverage, I've heard a lot of complaints about this on the old phone. My Motorola flip phone often has coverage in marginal areas when iPhones don't.

I didn't get the 1st gen iPhone but I want to buy a 3G. Problem is I'm not "Eligible" for a phone upgrade from AT&T until the end of this month. Supposedly that's the only way to get the $199/$299 price, but a friend of mine went into an Apple store on the 11th and they gave him that price even though he wasn't "Eligible" yet WTF?

[bobdea]

java script, I may be mistaken but I was assuming the radio buttons, menus and other little tidbits that work in Mozilla and IE were javascript but yet in safari do not work.

Generally safari is good but it has more issues with cheesy code compared to IE and firefox in my experience.

maybe it's not javascript but it does have issues with many pages often if I fire up firefox and go to the same page it looks fine.

that said, safari for the iphone just blows away all the other browsers on any phone I've seen.

[bobdea]

I'm hoping the plastic back might also help the RF coverage, I've heard a lot of complaints about this on the old phone. My Motorola flip phone often has coverage in marginal areas when iPhones don't.

I didn't get the 1st gen iPhone but I want to buy a 3G. Problem is I'm not "Eligible" for a phone upgrade from AT&T until the end of this month. Supposedly that's the only way to get the $199/$299 price, but a friend of mine went into an Apple store on the 11th and they gave him that price even though he wasn't "Eligible" yet WTF?

you know I've heard the same thing from other people, I was eligible though so this is not from personal experience

[Steve Dold]

Does anyone here use Google Earth with the iPhone? That's one of the main things I wanted to use, but I better find out if it works. I don't know if it's Java.

[bobdea]

Does anyone here use Google Earth with the iPhone? That's one of the main things I wanted to use, but I better find out if it works. I don't know if it's Java.

google MAPS works

[Steve Dold]

That's cool. Is that what it uses with the GPS display? Can you have a street map and a satellite view?

I guess since Google Earth is a Windows app, it wouldn't be something you could run on the iPhone. I forgot about that.

[bobdea]

That's cool. Is that what it uses with the GPS display? Can you have a street map and a satellite view?

I guess since Google Earth is a Windows app, it wouldn't be something you could run on the iPhone. I forgot about that.

yes, you can switch to sat view, not sure if the roads show up in that view though

[kjl]

That's cool. Is that what it uses with the GPS display? Can you have a street map and a satellite view?

Yeah, I have mine with a street map and satellite view at the same time (it might have even defaulted to that). It also defaults to overlaying color-coded traffic on the highways (green/yellow/red), and if you plot out directions it takes into account traffic speed when calculating estimated time. Really slick.

When you step through the step-by-step directions it jumps to the different turns you have to make, also with street/satellite/traffic view, and also shows the current location of your car via GPS.

I am pretty sold on the whole idea. Today I needed replacement pigtails for my kite, and it was ~6:40 pm, and somebody told me there was a nearby kitesurfing shop that closed at 7:00. I googled "kitesurfing", and it automatically showed me the closest shop to my current location, clicked it, clicked on the phone number, asked them what time they closed, clicked back and plotted the route, got there in 10 minutes; never been in that town before. Pretty awesome.

[chinchillaman]

Dude... one word...JailBreak... makes the iphone so much nicer.... I've had my iphone since october and love it. updated to 2.0, jailbreaked it to 3g... really not much faster... only thing better is i can use it for geocaching now. you can solve all your problems like cut and paste, three second videos with "beer goggles" app, and always have service via verizon, att, and sprint. The only risky thing is that when using jailbreak, iphone can access all your data and turn it into an iBrick... wich sucked. I got bricked the third day I had it and had to go buy another. But I love the phone, hopefully apple will relize why we jack the software, and eventually incorperate a video camera and other goods into the stock phone.

[cail]

I got bricked the third day I had it and had to go buy another.

what did you use to jailbreak yours?

[bobdea]

yeah, I had done the same with the original phones but I kept none for personal use, as well as unlocked them

I'm not sure of the legalities so I'm going to stop but it was nice when you did not have to sign up for a contract to get a phone and everyone else in the world wanted one but was either locked into another companies plan or outside of the US.

[chinchillaman]

Jail Break is an application you can find on the internet. You use it and it "unlocks" it. Sometimes if at&t sees that you have a lot of calls on other companies towers, the will brick your phone. So jailbreak doesn't unbrick the phone, it unlocks it for roaming freedom and 80% customization.

[cail]

didnt know about JailBreak... i used PWNAGE to unlock, jailbreak, and activate mine (probably the best out there). iLiberty is supposed to be good too. JUST DONT USE ZIPHONE. it's unstable.

i dont think apple purposely bricks phones anymore... too much backlash. plus they dont need to with the new rules. att is making out money on the new deal. and apple cant complain too much.

[queequeg]

java script, I may be mistaken but I was assuming the radio buttons, menus and other little tidbits that work in Mozilla and IE were javascript but yet in safari do not work. Generally safari is good but it has more issues with cheesy code compared to IE and firefox in my experience. maybe it's not javascript but it does have issues with many pages often if I fire up firefox and go to the same page it looks fine.

that said, safari for the iphone just blows away all the other browsers on any phone I've seen.

Javascript is a scripting language. Its most common uses are to provide behavioral characteristics to web pages. Radio buttons menus and such, are HTML form elements, they have nothing to do with javascript. Sometimes javascript is used to manipulate/validate form fields prior to form submission, but these are still entirely different things.

Although there are standards set for how javascript is supposed to interact with web page documents, document elements and form data, these standards are very loosely implemented in various browsers. Safari and Firefox generally have better standards compliance than Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is an absolute abomination.

A good web developer can and does develop their web pages to work identically on all web broswers ... these days, this is not difficult to do, but there are a lot of guys out there who just don't know how to do it right or don't care to. Many web developers don't really know what they are doing and just target IE, or IE and firefox because they don't know any better.

In my experience, it is actually much easier to support firefox and safari and opera than it is support IE, but we still have to because ie is still a very big part of the market. For example: most of the more complicated projects I work on could probably cut their (front-end/client-side) development budgets by 30% if we did not have to support IE.

To my mind, it would take extra effort to make things work in firefox and not in safari as they are both quite standards friendly ... but I believe I know where this type of situation this comes from.

1) company develops website, and site only works in MSIE since it was built in the dark ages when 99.9% of users used IE only, and as such, the code is a mess in terms of standards adherence and just doesn't work on modern, standards-based browsers. It is coded with proprietary microsoft-api's in mind and it only works in IE. Good sites are designed for standards based implementations, but have exceptions built in for IE, such that it also works in standards-challenged browsers.

2) Firefox and safari begin to gain marketshare, and company realizes that it has to be more friendly to standards based browsers. They ignore safari since it is still only about 6% of the market by browser and just target firefox. Firefox is somewhat forgiving of crap code (helps its marketshare, because forgiving the non-standard MSDN crowd their laziness means that more sites will work in firefox).

3) client retrofits gecko support in, but misses places where webkit and other standards based browsers (like opera) do not forgive non-standard stuff, and so you end up with a site that works in IE and Gecko, but not Webkit.

Lotus notes's (always a great example of software horrifically wrong) webmail client site is a good example. It works in IE and Firefox but not Webkit. It used to only work in IE, I think they just slapped a bit of code in there to help it with firefox but didn't do a very good job.

So to some extent yes - webkit is less forgiving of nonstandard sloppiness than other browsers, but that's not to say its javascript performance is poor (quite the opposite in my experience). Good sites developed by pro developers who keep their **** tight, will work well in most decent browsers. In terms of actual javascript performance, Safari burns down firefox and IE in my experience. Although there are a few things that IE is faster with. Gecko tends to be the real dog in terms of JS performance in my experience.

One of the funny things about all of this is that Webkit/Safari is quickly becoming the most popular rendering engine for mobile applications (among people who actually use their mobile web browser--opera has a higher penetration rate but nobody uses the web browser on most other cellphones). Its desktop adoption rate is rising rapidly as well, now that Apple is beginning to grow its marketshare, so a lot of these companies that have taken the nonstandard approach will probably feel it in the tush later on. I think people will continue to migrate away from IE slowly but surely as they have been over the last few years, because it is really just an aging, poorly built, and wildly insecure browser. The only reason 90% of people who use IE do, is because it's what their computer came with and they don't know that there are better alternatives or don't care (and have gotten used to it). One of the more interesting statistics out there is that if you look at web users demographically by browser, the more web saavy ones tend to be users of alternate browsers (not ie) which is another reason companies are starting to pay more attention to standards based browsers.

Bascially my feeling is this: if a site doesn't work in one of the major browsers, its the site not working; It's not the browser. Web development demands that your product be interpreted identically by a variety of different browsers, and you have to approach your work with that in mind. If you don't you're producing a crappy product, plain and simple. Standards-based browsers speak in a clearly defined articulate dialect, some websites are coded in a poorly articulated pidgin-creole. Those websites don't work, because they arent' telling the browser clearly and articulately what it needs to do. The browser isn't broken, it's just that the sites suck.

That said: getting back on topic, I do have a big complaint against the iPhone 2.0 software, and that is: I find it very unreliable. Lots of missing clicks from the ui, and apps crashing. From what I have heard, it was a big push for them to get this out at time and at release time, it just wasn't ready. Supposedly there is a forthcoming update that will improve reliability but for right now, I think I wouldn't mind being back at 1.0 despite all the amazing apps.

[Steve Dold]

I got mine yesterday and so far so good on the radio coverage. I get about the same amount of "picket fencing" as my Motorola flip phone in the bad areas between towns, and my friend gets dropped in the same areas on his 1st gen iPhone.

One thing that really surprised me was the sensitivity of the GPS receiver and how quickly it gets a good position. It's faster than my Garmin 60 Csx and way more sensitive than my E-trex Legend. It's irritating that I can't see my Lat/Lon, but most people don't need that.

So far I like this thing a lot. I haven't had anything crash yet.

[Terryw]

I too have become one of the devoted fans of the iphone. I got it just before going to Utah for a family reunion last week. Was so glad I had it. Amazing to be able to navigate the web when I was bored. My biggest complaint is the lack of memory on the phone. Don't know why there is not a 32 gig version of the iphone. They could have also given us the ability to read memory cards like most other phones allready do.

[bobdea]

I just got done playing a couple games for the thing and I just realized that this phone is one hell of a gaming console.

phone games usually suck, even the phones specifically for games sucked but the input is so bad ass on this thing, super monkey ball will seriosly test your motor skill