Valhalla Island

It was never the plan to buy iPhone 3G the day it was released but the excitement around the App Store and MobileMe going live was irresistible. I walked into the Optus store at midday and waited behind just one customer (that wasn’t buying an iPhone). Mine is the 8GB, they were all out of 16s, not that I wanted one. The plan I chose was the $59 cap, $350 worth of calls and text, 500MB of data per month. I’ve been convinced that this will be enough but I’ll talk about it more further down. I haven’t yet paid a cent for the phone — repayments are $2 a month over 24 months. After almost 24 hours of use, playing and real world, these are my thoughts.

As the iPhone is completely new to Australia I’ll be going over things that aren’t just new in the 2.0 software or new to the iPhone 3G.

Hooking it up and getting it running was easy. The most difficult part was the tedious process at the Optus store. Very quickly all my mail accounts, calendars and bookmarks were on the phone. Apps that I’d bought and downloaded the night before were on the phone before I’d even thought about moving them over.

It’s much heavier than previous Nokias I’ve used. I like it, it feels solid and dense. It feels like it’s worth something.

Using it, the first thing I noticed was in certain places the UI isn’t as snappy or responsive as I expected it to be. When rotating the phone to view Safari in landscape the visual rotation on screen is far from smooth and only happens after a too long delay. When browsing the address book, selecting the search field completely locks the system for a second or two and is very slow to get going. There are more examples of this kind of lag and unresponsiveness but apart from a few specific scenarios the interface is extremely fast and reacts immediately. This is refreshing if you’ve ever used any other mobile phone.

Mobile Safari is fantastic, perfect even as a mobile web browser. I would much rather use a dedicated application equivalent where it suits over a desktop style website viewed in Mobile Safari but if forced to use Safari it’s far from a painful experience like other mobile web browsers.

I’m a big SMS user. Previously I was using BluePhoneElite 2 on my Mac exclusively for sending text messages. The iPhone’s SMS application is better than BluePhoneElite which itself is better than every other SMS application I’ve used on other phones. One thing I would prefer is your SMS inbox as the default screen instead of your latest message thread. This convention is consistent with other applications which try to guess what you want rather than always taking you to the app’s home screen. It often results in me backing up to the app’s home screen before actually doing anything with the app. Mail, Notes and NetNewsWire all act this way and I’d prefer it if they all didn’t. I haven’t found a preference to change this behaviour.

Despite Marker Felt I love the Notes application and until YoJimbo comes along for the iPhone (and syncs) I can see myself using it often.

I’m already comfortable with the keyboard after a slow start. The trick is definitely to just let it flow, type as fast as you can. The auto correction is very good and at full flight you barely see it working. I’m also growing used to other iPhone conventions like reversing your way out of applications. The “back” button is always in the top left, once that disappears you’re at the home screen of the application and the way out is the home button.

There is a lot of useless rubbish in the App Store — Abacus is a good example. There’s a million shitty to do lists and entire applications dedicated to a single public domain eBook title. I thought the Apple approval process was supposed to filter out that kind of junk. That said, there’s also a lot of great applications.

Twitterific Premium was my first purchase and is everything it promised to be. MySpace Mobile is highly polished and beautifully functional, the complete opposite to the real MySpace. Facebook’s app is also a joy to use.

Exposure has been raved about but I much prefer Mobile Flickr which has an upload facility, something else I hope to be using often. At the moment it’s uploading photos upside down, that’ll hopefully be fixed with a free update soon.

Other apps I’m using are NetNewsWire, Remote and Light. All are fantastic, Light is especially clever and has already come in handy.

Applications I’m disappointed aren’t there yet are YoJimbo, MarsEdit, Dictionary, Adium and a version of Things that syncs with my desktop library. Cultured Code have announced that syncing is on the way but until then Things for iPhone is useless to me. I can only hope that YoJimbo, MarsEdit and Adium are in development.

Automattic is building an open source WordPress application that I can’t wait to get my hands on.

There’s only so much a screenshot can tell you. This was obvious after buying the popular Super Monkey Ball and not loving it. The lack of playable/usable demos for many applications as well as the too high rubbish to quality ratio makes finding the right one difficult.

I haven’t had a chance to test the speed of Optus’s 3G network because everywhere I’ve been the phone has automatically picked up a WiFi signal and started silently using it. This pleases me with only 500MB of 3G data a month.

The saleswoman at the Optus store asked if I’d like to purchase more data per month. I wasn’t aware that it was an option and was interested to hear what I could upgrade to. The options: An extra $6 for 10MB, $15 for 30MB or $25 for 200MB. Those aren’t typos and I’m not kidding. Further evidence of the joke that is internet in Australia.

I played briefly with Maps and was impressed with it’s speed and accuracy. Applications like the Camera and Twitterific want to use GPS but I don’t see the value in it. I can’t see myself regularly using Maps or the GPS at all.