iGeek: iPhone impressions from a Nokia 6620 user...

Okay, I admit it.  I'm a geek.  A Nyerd.  I actually bought an iPhone.  The funny part is, someone else stood in line for it and then called me the night they were released and asked me if I wanted one because they had bought two.  I said yes, went to his house the next day and wrote a check for $648.42 for the 8 GB model and carried it around with me all day while my friend and I were shopping in the Haight and various other places, looking for melodicas and other unusual, money loser musical instruments.

When I got home, I couldn't resist launching the new version of iTunes [7.3] to see how the activation process would progress.  For me, it was painless and without a single glitch.  Within 10 minutes of me syncing the Nokia to my computer's AddressBook app, I was up and running making calls with the iPhone with all of the numbers from my Nokia on my iPhone without even so much as a single hiccup.

I really like the phone but carrying around a piece of equipment that has an orientation sensor and a myriad of other sensitive pieces and parts, you get kinda nervous about dropping it.  I bought a couple of cases and decided on the Contour clear case that covers the iPhone and includes a belt clip that the sheathed phone clicks into.  You have to be careful when you, ahem, pull your pants down with the phone clip in your pocket or belt as the clip will find it's way out of your pocket and the case and phone go crashing to the floor;  Hopefully, from not too high of a perch but still, dropping a $650 dollar phone is not a good idea, even if there are videos that show how sturdy the iPhone is on PCWorld's website.

So, the iPhone is awesome.  Seriously.  It is.  Unfortunately, it's also a first generation phone [well, second if you count that Razor thing] and Apple still has the option to revamp the entire interface if they want to since it's a phone with only one button on the face, two on the side and one switch.  But seriously, there are some features that a more mature phone company like Nokia have included on their higher-end phones for some time now.

Some of the missing features include video and audio recording, customizable mp3 ringtones, the lack of a Salling Clicker remote control widget that allows me to control all of my computer's iTunes track selection, volume and playback controls from my phone [one of the coolest apps for a phone ever] in addition to providing support for a crapload of other features like iPhoto slideshow controls, Keynote presentation slide controls, iTunes muting/pausing when the phone rings and setting my status in iChat to Away when I move out of Bluetooth range.

Other items that are not supported now but might be in the future include voice dialing, although, this feature was always a pain in the arse on my Nokia.  There was some special mode that had to be entered via some secret key combination before I could bark commands at my phone and even then, the recognition of my voice was not always spot on.

I really liked the fact that the alarm clock feature on my Nokia would tell you how long it was until the alarm would go off from when you set it [such as 7 hours 56 minutes until 8:30AM].  At one point I had a crapload of games on my Nokia but the MMC cards [thinner than SD Cards] kept getting corrupted and there's no easy way to back up the Nokia to my disk.  The Nokia did have built-in memory and an MMC card slot for adding sounds and photos.

I do have to be fair and say that the video recording on the Nokia was terrible and almost unwatchable but I have seen some phones with fairly good quality recording capabilities.  I hope Apple gets on the video recording feature soon.  When making calls, the keypad and pause buttons were really nice.  Having a speaker phone is great too but the marge calls button; that's new and nifty.  My Nokia has a speaker phone feature too.

Visual Voice Mail is kinda neat but I don't get that many phone calls so I don't usually have a lot of voice messages.  I also noticed some minor artifacts in the audio recording that sounded like low bit rate or compression in the voice message playback.  Compression and low bit rate are hardly discernable by most non-audiophile folks so that's no big whoop.

I did run into one somewhat annoying aspect of the iPhone/iTunes/iPhoto connection; if you have your photos on an external drive and you don't have it handy, you might not be able to sync your phone, if it contains pictures and you want to sync.  I had this problem occur when I added a bunch of contacts to my Address Book and a couple of photos on my iPhone.  When I connected the iPhone, iPhoto launched and said that it couldn't find my library so I said Cancel [the other options were Find or Create new].  When I launched iTunes, which is where all of the syncing takes place, the iPhone didn't appear in the list of devices in the left column on the main iTunes screen.

Other than these few items, the phone seems to be really well put together and I've been having fun surfing for wikipedia pages while out with friends or watching You Tube videos from home via the WiFi connectivity that's built in; My Nokia didn't have WiFi although I am positive that current models of the N Series from Nokia do include this feature.

Now, if the iPhone just had HSPDA 3G compatibility instead of EDGE 2.5G, we'd start to see some reasonable internet access speeds over the air.