So I am now on the second/third week of ownership of the iPhone 4. I have now started to find other people with them, which much like smoking and baseball (not that I ever ACTUALLY talk about baseball voluntarily, but just sayin’) they seem to be great conversation openers. Of the almost mandatory opinion poll of the people similarly equiped that I have encountered, I have yet to find that tell me that they are anything less than happy with both the device itself AND the service. The usual reply has been that no can tell what all the hype is about. Again with my previous essay, I have been very sedentary in the span of time since I have gotten my upgrade so I am not sure if I am just reflecting the health of the Atlanta market for AT&T, and the second that I go out roving I am going to find that it drops out all over, however to date my service has vastly improved over both of my Nokias, and even that of my former fiances 3GS. (No, I am not just hanging up on her, despite all the advice and implications to the contrary.)
But week 2/3 has found me exploring more into the world of what is possible with the 4, as well as all the features that are just general to the iPhone that I am still learning. I have been conducting a series of experiments with the battery life to see what it is within the peripherals that is eating up all of my time… I might add that I have also GREATLY increased the amount that I am using the phone over the last week. (I somehow managed to corrupt the OS on my “work” phone, and luckily was able to work out how to make my iPhone do a little over 2/3rds of the proprietary inhouse functions, I still haven’t found a trick to get it to do a good job with server emulation, though I am sure that this is more because my msn/mac/ip isn’t registered within the host’s access lists and is there for given the finger and I get the wonderful… “SERVER not found” error, than a problem with the phone’s OS itself. It is the same thing that I get when I try doing the same functions through my laptop.) But I have noticed that even with the improvement that I have seen in the battery, the fact that I have moved from “Dude, why are you on your phone all the time???” to “How many things are you doing at the same time on that phone???”
The one thing that I do have to report is that the phone does seem to be remarkably fast. Now comparing it with another phone/palmtop doing the same functions, I am remarking how much faster things are processed, how much faster the net loads on a 3G (and truthfully even the EDGE service seemed faster for the spots that I was out of coverage), plus the ability to toggle back and forth between two screens instead of needing to close one out and then open up the new one, then reclosing the page and reopening the old one. Come to think of it I hope that “they” take their time fixing my work phone… I am not sure that I am going to be able to take the slowness now that I know that it is there.
Some other notes that I have been making… I haven’t actually used the interfaces, but so far it seems that books seem cheaper on Kindle than through the iTunes/iBooks app… it seems that the Kindle prices are based on the paperback amount where the others are based on hardcover….
I met a couple of people that were using the bumpers instead of a variation of the bullet-proof case that I have and they seem to work just as well… I am still leary of my propensity for destruction and really really don’t want to kill my kewl new phone. Otherwise, this is the report so far… more to come!
