Impressions of a new Iphone owner

[toddrules]

I have now had my Iphone 3gs for 3 weeks and I love it. I thought I would write a comparison with my other smart phone experience. I had a Palm Pre for 10 months and a Droid for just short of 1 month.

First of all in ease of use, the Iphone is king, it is easy for anyone to pickup and use right away, it has a very intuitive layout, its hard ot expalin but the iphone just seems like the way it should be done. The Pre and Droid get easy to use the more you interact with them but the iphone just feels like second nature out of the box.

You cant beat the Iphone as a mp3 palyer and its integration with itunes is a pleasure to use. The same cant be said for the Pre and Droid. Looks wise I don't think anything can touch the Iphone, by far the best looking phone out there, The Pre looks like a kids toy and the Droid is just too square.

There are a few things i miss about my other phones. Notifications, I think both the other phones handle them better, with the Droid edging out Pre by a small amount. Multi-tasking, I never thought i would miss listening to pandora while using my phone for other things but i really do, the Pre handles multi tasking better then droid, i love the card system. Universal inbox, with a lot of different email accounts i loved being able to look at all of them at once, the Pre is the only one of the 3 that had it and I miss it.

I like the openness of android, but the Home screen only impresses for so long and a lot of the need for openness was to install 3rd party apps to replace the subpar ones included on the OS like the messaging app. The default messaging app was horrible.

All and all I am happy with my Iphone purchase and I hope a lot of my issues will be addressed on Thur with OS 4.0. Sorry for such a long post just thought some people may want to hear how someone coming from other smartphones feels about the Iphone.

 

[gottspd]

Ha... we bought our iPhones at just about the same time and I also had a Pre and every Palm device Sprint has sold since the Treo 300 and the Kyocera 6035 prior to that one! In any event, I'm so on board with your comments. I love the iPhone. I never felt that strongly about the Pre. I do agree with your assessment of the shortcomings. I'd also like a useful homescreen (ala WinMo). Otherwise, I really enjoy using my iPhone and find myself anxiously awaiting confirmation on Thursday of the new features of OS4!

 

[iquinn]

To the OP, congrats on getting the iPhone. If you think that you love it now just wait a few weeks and you will love it even more. I have to say it really is the best smartphone that I have ever used. I was a BB user forever and I thought they were the king of smartphones but the iPhone beats the BB in every way, with the exception of email. I know what you mean about the the muti-tasking but there is an app that will do streaming radio in the BG, it's called Radio Stream it all and it is free, it will cost .99 to enable the BG feature but if you are like me it is worth it.

 

[jeffdanger]

I have to agree with the previous poster. I have had a Blackberry, Eris, Nokia and various other smart phones and now have an Apple 3GS. I thought the dropped call thing would be an issue but I have to say the phone is one of the clearest, best reception phones I have had. Maybe AT&T has worked out some of the network issues. With the Eris, I continually received forced close popups, mostly to do with the calendar. Also, bluetooth was the worst connection with my Jawbone--full of static and noise. On the other hand, I could use bluetooth on my Eris to transfer files to my desktop but on the Iphone--no go. The Iphone simply works, with of couse great Ipod integration. I do miss the openness of the Eris as I have found that if I want to remotely wipe my Iphone, Mobile ME is the only option. I would also like to create alert reminders but alas, Iphone does not allow this. I guess there are trade offs with any smart phone you may consider but for now the Iphone fits the bill for me.

 

[fubaracing7374]

I've had a tour, storm, storm 2, palm pre, and the htc hero...the iPhone is the best phone in the world!!!!!

 

[Jellotime91]

It's true, I think people don't truly understand the greatness of the iPhone until the own one.

 

[Microcosmos]

Well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad: you now will soon have multitasking and a universal inbox! Better notification handling will apparently have to wait for a future update (or jailbreak). All in all, I'm happy with the iPhone the way it is now; the software upgrades are gravy for me (but boy do I like me some good gravy)!

 

[Jellotime91]

Well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad: you now will soon have multitasking and a universal inbox! Better notification handling will apparently have to wait for a future update (or jailbreak). All in all, I'm happy with the iPhone the way it is now; the software upgrades are gravy for me (but boy do I like me some good gravy)!

I think Apple will fix PNS, but maybe they were waiting to perfect it or waiting to show off the new phone first. The way PNS performs on the iPad, it's totally ridiculous on that large of a screen. Imagine you're typing on TiPB on your computer, and a message comes up on your screen because you got an IM, someone commented on a photo of you, or you got a message on OKCupid. You now can no longer type anything, switch programs, or anything else until to acknowledge that message by clicking either "View" or "Close"...
It's truly a nightmarish reality.

For this reason alone, I believe Apple has definitely been working on something, but they just don't want to copy Palm or Android, so they are coming up with a unique solution to this problem (or they have, but they haven't shown it yet).