My iPhone Initiation

Santa came early this year for me. On Tuesday (16th Dec) my girlfriend came home from work and presented me with a brand new iPhone. After some messing around with sim cards and pixels I've had a good two days of use with this slick device and thought I would capture my impressions.

The phone came home without a 3G sim card. Apparently the sales chick forgot to give us one. I didn't mind too much and postponed opening the packaging of the phone until the following day. On the Wednesday night I released the phone from its cardboard and cellophane prison and slapped the new sim in. Two more problems, the sim didn't work (my number didn't transfer nor was the sim activated on the network) and the phone itself had two dodgy pixels. I googled dead pixels and came to the conclusion that they were likely 'hot' or 'stuck' (brighter than the rest of the screen under all conditions), and tried various methods of flashing colors to wake them up, getting nowhere.

I stormed back to the phone store on the third day, got a new (and this time working) sim card and was bounced to the Apple store at Chadstone to get the replacement handset. I'd never been to the one and only apple store in my city and was surprised when I was told I needed an appointment (WTF?). I spent my 15 minute wait chatting to some other random worker about his iPhone. I interrogated him about cases and cool applications and he eventually sold me a Power Support Air Jacket for iPhone 3G for $40AUD. He had apparently been through three different cases, arriving on the clear version of this case with the crystal rather than glare resistant film. I chose the black backing for the more grippy feel, the clear and naked iPhone felt way too slippery to me. Anyway, I saw the 'genius' tech support guy who immediately switched out my phone leaving me a fully functional iPhone 3G, finally.

I was pretty ignorant about the device when I got it, so naturally I did some research reading iPhone on Wikipedia, the Apple propaganda page and videos, the PDF user guides some of which came with the phone, and the technical support page with some general information on specifications, resetting, and battery management.

Some details of this pocket computer: It is a black 16GB model (contrasted to the 8GB model) with a 9cm liquid crystal display with a resolution of 320x240. It runs a 620MHz CPU supposedly underclocked to 412MHz and has 128MB of RAM. The touchscreen is capacitive meaning it is requires human skin to operate (no glove or stylus). It has a 16GB flash drive (not a HDD), runs an iPhone OS (a derivative of OS X), use a powerVR 3D graphics chipset and has a 2 mega pixel camera. The Chadstone store gave me a 3 month warranty on the device, and Apple has a one year limited warranty.

Compared to the first generation iPhone, this second generation device has the addition of a plastic backing for improved reception, support for 3G connectivity for voice and broadband, and has built in assisted GPS. Some common criticisms of the device include: the lack of flash and Java in the web browser, crippled bluetooth, no video, no MMS, no cut/copy/paste functionality, and the low resolution camera with no flash, zoom, or autofocus.

The carrier is Optus who have good 3G coverage in major cities. The handset is apparently sim locked to the carrier, although Optus will remove this lock for free if requested. I'm on a 12 month contract with 100MB data and $50 of calls per month with a minimum of $19 of calls and a $65 contribution to the cost of the phone per month. Specifically: $0 up front, phone cost (12*$65=$780), min call costs (12*$19=$228), totalling ($780+$228=$1008) over the next 12 months. Call costs are step at 47c per 30 seconds, 35c flag fall, and 25c per text all in AUD.

Physically the phone is big. It fills my jeans pocket and is too big for my jacket pocket. I feel like a dick in public clumsily retrieving it from my pocket to change songs or answer a call because it is so big. I presume I'll get over this. The battery has been fine so far, giving me about a day of goofing around installing applications, listening to music, calling people, and playing games. About what I'd expect given heavy usage.

The interface is slick. I love the flick gestures for lists, and I love touching buttons and controls rather than using a disjoint keyboard and mouse. Mail hooked into my GMail account just fine, and AppStore is simple and intuitive to use. I've had applications crash on me a few times making me think a lot about how the OS is managing application serialization when I press the home key and later reinitialization. I had a situation where no third party application would open no matter what I did. I tried resetting, force restarting, and clearing settings all with no luck. I eventually restored the phone (basically a format) which initially pissed me off, although iTunes is set up to cache all the data I care about on the phone meaning after the restore and the subsequent transfer the phone was back to the way I had set it up - now with working third party apps. I had installed a lot of apps in 2 days (about 2 1/2 screens or about 40) and i suspect one of the apps wrote some data where it shouldn't have, stuffing things up for all the other apps.

I went to a dinner party the other night and an interesting situation occurred where almost everyone there had an iPhone. Almost all second generation, although there was one first generation phone. We all sat around playing on our phones, chatting about what cool applications we had tried or heard of recently, and playing games. Anti-social yet social. I got a lot of suggestions for cool apps and use cases for when device had proven useful in life situations (time tables and guides mostly). I was interested in the first gen phone. It was jail broken, meaning it had a modified firmware installed that allowed unsigned applications to be installed, much like modded xbox's (a domain I'm familiar with). He had a lot more flexibility with the phone, still accessing standard applications, as well as home brew apps like emulators and the array of games they provide.

The device is a computer in my eyes, and phone and mp3 features are secondary. I'm interested in applications, and more specifically applications that can exploit the features of the device such as multi-touch interface, 3-axis accelerometer, camera, GPS, and 2G/3G/wifi/bluetooth communication. Two days of app sampling is not long, but a few standouts so far include:

• Google Mobile App - for the voice search where you hold the device to your ear and mouth like a phone and vocalize a search query. It just works.
• Midomi - where you hum or sing a tune and it guesses what song and/or artist it is.
• Topple - simple block game. I like it for the cool graphics, music, and use of multi-touch for block rotation. It was the first game I came across that gave me an impression of what this device could do. In fact, the few games I've tried by ngmoco:) have been impressive.
  
• Aurora Feint - An RPG/puzzle game with great graphics, music and gameplay. Really quite immerse for such a simple game.

I use Fring for IM and skype, Twinkle for twitter, and the built in Mail for my GMail. I'm not too interested in reading my RSS feeds on the device yet, I'm guessing it may be too small. Photo's are geocoded by default, and so are my twitter messages. Besides those two cases, I haven't seen many good uses of the GPS or the mobility/portability of the device. A 'help me find Apple in Chadstone' app would have been useful. I can never interpret shopping center maps accurately - I think it's the scale.

I'm on the lookout for a public transport trip planner like Metlink Melbourne, a local TV guide application (don't watch all that much TV really), and a good movie trailers app (youtube is good, but there is lots of crap on there). The following are some applications that have been recommended to me from more than one source that I'm contemplating buying, mostly games to test the limits of the device:

• Spore Origins - graphics, music, and game play are meant to be great, although it looks expensive.
• Moto Chaser - this is the motorbike game advertised on the TV where the accelerometer is used to control the bike.
• Iron Man: Aerial Assault - looks ok to me, but this 'guy flying around' game was recommended as being lots of fun
• Cro-Mag Rally - cave man driving game, I think it was on the iPhone TV add as well.
• Enigmo - similar in nature to The Incredible Machine although with water
  
• Metro Melbourne - public transport timetables in Melbourne with time/location filtering for convenience
• App Sniper - monitor free applications and changes in price, great for finding app store bargains (the apple store guy loved this app!)
• Ocarina - blow into the microphone and use the device like a musical instrument - seems interesting
• Oz Weather - for useful weather information (yahoo is crap) from the Australian BOM
  

I am trying to postpone app purchases until I understand more about the scope of the free applications out there. As a computer it is about as powerful as something I had 6-8 or so years ago, and I'd expect the apps to reflect that. Where is doom or quake? Where is the old classics like lemmings or the original incredible machine? Where is the Optus usage monitor application so I can see how many calls and how much data I have left for the month (I have to infer from general statistics in the phone).

Apparently there are about 13 million of these devices out there (both generations), and the development platform has been available for about a year now. I suspect the applications will only get better and better, and hopefully more innovative. Going forward I'm going to try lots more apps. I'm also going to further investigate jail breaking the phone and the home brew scene. Finally, I'm interested in getting into some iPhone development. I have a few ideas, although my old PPC iBook G4 and Tiger OS X are not immediately compatible with the iPhone development platform. I'm looking into some workarounds.