Mobile Mike Hands On: iPhone 3.0 A Week Later
Mobile Mike’s iPhone 3.0 Impressions
With the announcement of the iPhone 3.0 a lot of “new” features and capabilities were unveiled. In my opinion the real winner is the 1000 APIs that Apple has opened up to developers. This means we will start to see some really robust and more functional apps. Of course, everyone is more concerned with the new end user features. I have had 3.0 installed for a week now, and have ran it through my daily use tests. So what I am going to do is break down my impressions feature by feature. Now these are strictly my opinions, and what I use daily, I am sure will vary from what others use. So lets get into 3.0!
Cut/Copy/Paste
Of all of the features that users have asked Apple to include in iPhone updates, cut/copy/paste is probably the most requested feature out of them all. With an all touch interface it is a pain to have some info and need to place it somewhere else. Well Apple has FINALLY given in to user’s requests. With iPhone 3.0, the most profound end user feature has to be cut/copy/paste. I am not going to go into how it works because it has been beat to death by everyone else already, but I will go into how well it works. Long story short it works pretty well. I have to be honest though, I do like Windows Mobile’s implementation of cut/copy/past better. It feels more “natural” than Apple’s effort, but hey, its there and that’s all that matters. Right?
MMS
The second most requested feature is MMS. Why Apple left this out even boggles my mind. Almost all phones have MMS and Apple decided it wasn’t a feature the iPhone needed. At first this was no big deal, than you get a MMS and realize you have to type this long and odd user name/password combo into a webpage. Would’t be so bad if there was, GASP, copy/paste! Well those days are over! We now have MMS and it looks great on the iPhone! It shows the picture within the threaded conversation just like a text. Unfortunately I have not been able to test it extensively, as it is not completely activated yet. I am really happy to see Apple finally put this in the update, as a media phone its pretty sad the iPhone did not launch with MMS.
Stereo Bluetooth
Thank you Apple!!! This is one feature I use a lot! I think AD2P is highly underrated and I am so happy it will be in 3.0. I have tested it for both music and videos and it works very well. There is no lag in videos from the video to the audio, and the sound quality is great with my Moto S9 headset. Being the media giant the iPhone is, it is only natural it would have stereo Bluetooth. Of course this does take a toll on your battery, and I noticed I hit 20% pretty quickly. Maybe this will be improved with the public release of 3.0, but for now I definitely need to charge it after AD2P use.
Spotlight Search
Those who use a Mac will be very familiar with this feature. It is a universal search that will pull up contacts, calendar entries, iPod, and a few others categories. You access this by swiping the home screen to the right, you than have search bar that will search all over your iPhone very quickly. This is great if you need to find a contact quickly or anything else right from the home screen without having to go into the app. Its a nice touch and being a Mac users, it feels very natural to use.
Other tid bits and updates
The call log has now been updated to show some extra info for each call. The call log now shows mobile, home, work, etc for each call. If the number is not in your phone book, it will show what city and state the call comes from. From what I have found, there is still no way to delete just one call from the log (sorry Ray). The SMS icon has changed and it is now messages obviously since it now supports MMS as well as SMS. Another nice addition to messaging and email, is the ability to turn the phone and use the keyboard in landscape mode. This makes the buttons a little bigger and easier to type. The transitions are smooth and work very well. There also is a hint that you will be able to track your iPhone’s location via Mobile Me. I do not have a Mobile Me account, so I can not speak to weather this works yet or not. As far as I can tell that is pretty much all I have found in the last week using iPhone 3.0.
Final thoughts
The features 3.0 will bring to users is a nice addition to the iPhone. Is it anything revolutionary? No it is not, but it will make those that complained about missing features happy to have the them now. In its current state 3.0 is NOT ready for prime time. It is very buggy, freezes and crashes quite a bit. Also battery life seems to tank extremely fast while using stereo bluetooth. I am sure by June these issues will be resolved as Apple will be receiving tons of feedback from developers and users that have gotten a hold of 3.0. If you are not a developer or you use your iPhone as your daily driver, DO NOT install 3.0 yet. It will just frustrate you and there is not an easy way to go back to 2.2.1. With that said, once it is ready for the public, iPhone nay sayers will have even less ammunition to fire at Apple and the iPhone.
