Dr Deviant

So, whats the hype and was it worth it? well, it seems I have a bit too much iMoney to burn and felt the need to belong to an iQueue for an iHour… It was a cold November night, but the chick in front had a great butt.

summary

Basically, if you like the ipod nano, and you like the idea of getting phone calls as well, then this product is probably for you, assuming you don’t mind forking out the dosh. The interface is Apples usual lush, human sensitive, pretty attempt and some of the gimmiky bits like rotating screen transition and ‘flick’ scrolling are soooooo nice. But what about the hard core.

plug that bad-boy in

Well, first thing you’re gonna notice is syncing your stuff… on windows it is really pants. If you have Outlook 2003 (and I guess the fact you can afford an iPhone means you can afford a legit copy of Office as well) then you are pretty sorted. If you have windows address book, or outlook express then you can sync contacts… calendars though… forget it. Even if you download ical for windows, or want to snyc with google calendars then forget it for now. The google calendars integration though would seem like a shoe in given the unlimited data and the amount of google integration already in maps, search, mail etc.

connectivity

So you want to connect it to stuff… well, you have wireless… but most Apple iPoints don’t require WEP, WPA, or well, any security… probably why you get to enter the 26 hex digit string into a password field with bullets to indicate characters. Oh, and cut and paste… well, I’m still laughing. I have seen the Edge symbol in use in one place in the UK, or else you’re stuck with GPRS..thingy. It does for most things though.

GPS???? nope. the integation with google maps would basically kill the TomTom, Garmin and zumo worlds overnight.

My favourite… Bluetooth. Apple really screwed this one. The are 2 profiles suported: Headset and Hands Free. Given this is a media player, its missing 2 key profiles, A2DP and AVRCP allowing music playing and ipod control, but simple things like sending images around or ‘beaming’ contacts would be a step… maybe the second generation. Oh, and the ipod Touch doesn’t have bluetooth at all, so at least its not crippled by this lack of anything useful

The dock connecter is also a really sore issue. Basically I have only seen it perform ‘as expected’ once in about 9 attempts to connect it to a car stereo. I know halfords are craap, but even the Griffin iTrip with the dock connector doesn’t work at all – you need the special edition with the 3.5mm jack attachement, but this was not made by Apple, both leads stem from the radio dongle and not the dock connector which makes hunting for the cables in the dark a new fun game.

The apple bluetooth headset is really sweet though. It is tiny for one thing, but plug it and the iPhone into the base that comes with the earpiece and pairing is dome magically for you.

the software

I have shown this product to people and I have made grown men moist… that didn’t sound as good here as it seemed to in my head. Apple have done a blinding job with the interface. The ‘flick’ scrolling has to be one of my favourite things, setting alarms with the huge rotary dials can take as much as 5 minutes

The rotating screen is also really neat. In the iPod album mode you can whizz though your album art and it is really cool. Although there is a really funky bug. I have Jo Dee Mesina’s Greatest Hits as well as The Pretenters Greatest Hits. The album list shows only Jo Dee Mesina’s cover art, and clicking on it shows The Pretenders song list.

Gesture zooming is pretty as well, google maps is at such high resolution in places now you can zoom down to see people walking across zebra crossings.

Safari? Well, given it is marketed as a fully spec’d browser it’s interesting that it does not seem to support animated gifs in any way. Other than this it seems to perform well. It also supports RSS and ATOM via the macreader website.

application installation? Apple have announced that developers will not be allowed to install software yet. While this will not stop people breaking in, it will stop the platform being used as a serious developer tool. This is fine for the closed market of music playing, however the genre that the iPhone is aimed will not tolerate this for long or else the iPhone will die. that said, you do have unlimited data on most on the O2 plans, so web apps seem like a good way to go. You can’t take them offline, but the world is so connected now this shouldn’t be too much ofa compromise.

MSN, AIM, ICQ, Google Chat?? Oh yes. You cannot install anything, but check out http://www.beejive.com/ there is an iphone interface that will connect with the main ones.

Is Apple software so much more robust than windows CE? well, you can’t ‘close’ applications.. they just sit there till the memory is needed and then close automatically. start-up is so fast though you don’t even notice.

my iPackage

It’s slimline, pretty, stylish… yep, that’s the phone. No stylus though, intially used to the HP ipac and O2 XDA windows devices the lack of a stylus got me at first. The touch screen is sooooo nice though. It is remarkably sensitive given I use half a leg of lamb as a finger, and get the right letter most of the time. and it is finally so nice to not worry about LCD ’squidge’ where the screen changes colour under pressure – the screen is rather solid as well so I don’t tend to feel so paranoid about it all the time.

The screen real-estate is also awesome.

the doctors opinion

Well, this has to be the single best gizmo of 2007/8, but there are some pretty serious flaws that mean this will never replace my Nokia 6310i. The cost also means you will be stuck with a brick when they fianlly release the working bluetooth, GPS enabled 16 or 32GB versions next year. This has replaced my 60GB ipod for now, despite the lack of connectifity in my car. The large screen size also displays porn pretty well.