After 40,000 years the iPhone has finally been released on Orange! I signed up and got mine on the day it was released and have had it for about a month now. So – what is it like? Well, boring money stuff first. To get the phone on the contract I wanted I had to pay £90 ish but that is a hell of a lot less than I’ve paid before (the last one I paid for was a Nokia 8800 when it first came out for about £200). Plus I can recycle the old Nokia 6300 so I’m only really paying £50 for it. As for the monthly contract, it’s £35 a month, less than the £40 a month I was paying. Seriously, who can complain at that?
So, the phone? Well I’ve not had a smartphone before and any “advanced” phone features on the ones I’ve had have been underwhelming. I have seen other peoples smartphones before and even comparable touch screen ones don’t come close to the iPhone. It’s the same as with iPods – everything else is just an MP3 player. The design, the software, the whole package is a combination of what they can do using iPod and Mac technologies and some clever innovations to bring together many technologies and software to provide amazing solutions. An example of this is the Maps App. By using either wireless or 3G connection, existing mapping technologies, your current location and bearing, these are all rolled together to provide something that can simply but effectively provide you with a walk back to the car park when you’ve been out and got lost in the big old city.
It’s not just the fact that you can have “real” web browsing (or email) when you’re out and about as well as when you’re near your own wireless (or open ones), but the way in which it’s closer to being a PC replacement with it’s own operating system and applications (they’re now called Apps apparently). This thing is just so useful that I now rarely use my laptop at home, I do it all on my phone.
Top all this off with the way in which it looks – it’s just like everything else Apple does – it looks absolutely amazing, both in the software it’s running and the device itself – everything else just looks crumby in comparison. Unless someone releases an actual iPhone Killer or Apple manage to screw it up, I’m never going back or going elsewhere!
I'm a web developer based in the East Midlands, UK and if I keep up the current rate, I might have developed 3 million sites by the time I retire