Dial A For Apple
Aug 24, 2008 · 3 minute readI’ve now had an iPhone for a week. This picture roughly shows how I feel. Admittedly, part of this is probably because my previous phone couldn’t even send text messages in capital letters, but it feels like it should come with a jetpack. It’s the future, right there in your hand. A communicator out of every science fiction movie, except this one screams “Yeah! Yeah!” every time somebody calls (Davo, Lolly, I’m truly sorry). It’s the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, except it plays music whilst you’re checking to see if Earth is being demolished this week or next. Other phones are crammed with buttons; the iPhone makes them look as outmoded as a rotary dial; instead, your fingers swish over the screen and make it dance.
Shiny. But, just as with the jetpacks and lasers, it’s not quite there just yet. There are a few things which make you remember that the future is still a little way off:- The camera. Actually, I don’t mind the 2 megapixel aspect of the camera, as the sensor is small enough that cramming more pixels probably won’t help improve the image quality too much. It is a shame that it doesn’t allow you to record video clips, however. There’s an application available for the jailbroken phone, so this seems to be an Apple restriction rather than a problem with the camera itself. It’s also a bit awkward having to unlock the phone, press the camera icon, wait for it to power up, and then to take the picture, in comparison to a normal camera. But then normal cameras don’t tag photos with GPS information and upload them to flickr.
- I haven’t hard too many problems with 3G/Edge connectivity problems, but did find that I couldn’t get a signal in the middle of Oxford, which is a tad worrying (though that may have been down to me - I’ll be trying it out again next week).
- The keyboard does take quite a bit of getting used to, and it’ll never be as comfortable as a proper set of buttons, I think. However, you do find yourself typing away quite happily most of the time with only a few errors. I’ve been answering work emails on it all week!
- The App Store bothers me a little. It’s very nice to have a central place to go and find all the interesting things people have written for the device (at the moment, I’m using Twinkle, Mobile Fotos, and LondonTube, as well as stalwarts like NetNewsWire, Facebook and Google), I find it disturbing that all this work exists solely at the pleasure of Apple. At any time, they can pull your application with no warning and no recourse. There’s no way to put your program on anybody else’s iPhone without going through iTunes. If Microsoft tried to pull this, we’d be up in arms, and rightly so.