In Search of Lost Time

Now that I’ve had a my iPhone for a couple of weeks a few realities have set it. Firstly, although I may have blocked out any memories from my mind I am now confronted with the horrors of iTunes once again. The first prompt I was faced with asked me if I would like to sync applications downloaded to my phone with the iTunes library. My initial thought was no as I was only trying out half of them and didn’t see the point in backing up, however as I was about to click “Don’t transfer” I noticed the small print: “If you do not transfer these purchased items to your iTunes library, they will be removed from the iPhone”. What!? The madness continues when I decide to start using my Mac rather than my Windows PC: the first thing iTunes wants to do is delete all the music from the iPhone. I’m sure there is some rationale behind treating my music in this way but personally I prefer my applications to be designed for me rather than to placate some record industry megacorp. I eagerly await the day that Amarok supports my new phone.

I mentioned most of the obvious niceties in my previous post and to add to that I have discovered the nice Facebook, Last.fm, Bloomberg and Wordpress applications. In addition there are quite a few enjoyable games available for free: Aurora Feint, Cube Runner, Morocco and Moonlight Mahjong are my current favourites. I still think the App Store could be made easier to browse and it would be nice if I could filter the ever growing number of pointless apps from my view. Also the delay in UK releases of some applications is a little frustrating; I’m still waiting to try out Jott. Outside native apps the iPhone versions of Google Reader and Google Mail are very slick and I even find myself reading most of my RSS feeds from my phone in the morning rather than bothering to turn on my laptop.

On the negative side for the actual phone my modestly sized contact list is rather slow to load and I have managed to crash Safari a few times. I am also slightly disappointed that I cannot grant applications the ability to run in the background which seems to rule out a useful port of adium/pidgin ever coming to the iPhone, it also means that when I answer an incoming call the current applications quits cancelling what it was doing. Finally the lack of any search functionality in the mail client seems like a major oversight on Apple’s part. However my email usage on the phone is mainly reading new mails that arrive while I’m away from a computer so I haven’t been greatly impacted by this.

My contract with Orange ends this month which happily coincides with the launch of the iPhone 3G on Friday. I decided to pop down to the local O2 (the exclusive iPhone carrier in the UK) store and pick one up. Somewhat naively I expected it to be “busy” but in actual fact I ended up queueing for well over and hour and after finally getting my phone it was not activated for a further day and a half! While the queueing is perhaps normal for such things I am rather disappointed in O2 in that my first experience with them is this somewhat botched launch.

The phone however is my favourite new toy and a welcome replacement for my buggy as hell Nokia N73. I’m greatly impressed with the email and calendaring which make use of the Microsoft Exchange server in my office, notifying me of mail and meeting invites as they arrive, and the web browser is easy to use and actually makes it worthwhile to use the web on the go. The bundled applications are good but the selection of extra ones on the “App Store” seems a little limited at the moment. Hopefully that will improve with time.

For someone who has always been frustrated with the quality of mobile devices the iPhone just seems incredibly polished down to the little details. For instance today I noticed that the screen blanks when I have the phone to my ear during a call but then immediately comes back on when I move the handset away from my ear. The rendering of SMS messages as a conversation and the way the calculator becomes a scientific one when I change the orientation of the screen all add up to a pleasant user experience. I also appreciate the “visual voicemail”, as I believe it’s called, which lets me browse the messages that have been left and rewind while listening to one; finally I have escaped those horrible “press one for new messages” interfaces.