iPhone

I am still about a month away from the one year anniversary of getting my iPhone, but I have been thinking about my thoughts a year later and thought I would share.

Biggest Hits

Web Browser

The web browsing experience on the iPhone is phenomenal. It topples any phone I have ever used and makes my Treo 650 look horrible. I love that I can access any webpage (unless they rely on Flash for everything) from anywhere. Occasionally you will find a site that doesn’t work so well, but nothing like my last phone.

The Apps

The app store has lived up to it’s potential so far. I don’t have a ton of apps, and only a couple of which are paid apps, but there are apps for everything. Some of the apps are just amazing. My favorites are The Weather Channel, Things, Facebook, Sportacular, Wikipanion, Shazam, Weightbot, and Lock ‘n’ Roll. Other than the last one on that list I haven’t really played a lot of games. Some of them are priced too high, but for the most part I just get bored to fast with most games and only play them on occasion. Last time we visited Heather’s parents I downloaded Lock ‘n’ Roll and played the crap out of it. Now I play it about once a week. I think when going on trips and stuff it’s useful, maybe on an airplane but I can’t get into the games.

Best iPod ever

Steve Jobs said this at some point and I chuckled. In fact, for the first 3 months I had my phone I didn’t even use the iPod functionality. It was when we went to San Fran in May that I decided I didn’t want to bring a separate device. Since then, I have been hooked. In 2.2 they finally fixed podcast sorting and added over the air downloads. I listen to podcasts in the car all the time now.

Google Maps

I know that the G1 and other phones do this now, but having my phone find my location on Google Maps is just awesome. It makes it so easy to get directions and find places. When we are in downtown Chicago it has been helpful on multiple occasions.

Visual Voicemail

I honestly don’t talk on my phone all the much, but man Visual Voicemail is a handy feature. It’s nice to jump to any message, or any part of any message.

Biggest Misses

No physical keyboard

I know that Apple loves to control stuff, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why they haven’t made an external keyboard (or allowed someone to make one). I suspect this is stubborn Steve Jobs saying that the virtual keyboard is enough. There are times when I am at work and would love to hammer out a long e-mail that is just too much for the built-in keyboard. Apple could make so much money off of this. Personally I would put the sweet spot at $50 or less, but I can see people willing to spend $75 for something like this.

No global inbox

One of the nice features about Mail.app on OS X is that you can view your Inbox for all of the e-mail accounts you have setup. This is a nice consolidated view of all your e-mail. For whatever reason, Apple left this feature off of the iPhone. Personally I think this is the place it was needed most. If I am in the Inbox for once account, I have to click 4 times to get to the Inbox of another account. This is particularly annoying if I exit Mail while in one Inbox, then receive an e-mail and click on the Mail icon only to find it’s a different account and have to navigate back.

Can’t save passwords in Safari

Luckily nowadays most websites let you stay logged in, but at times I would like to save login information, especially for websites where I don’t really care about security.

Conclusion

I am very glad I got an iPhone. I slightly regret not waiting for 3G, more because of the $200 I would have saved than anything. Maybe next year I will upgrade. I suspect Apple will release a new phone sometime in the next 18 months.