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Sunday [7th September, 2008] morning, I visited the Vodafone stores at Prabhadevi, Mumbai to buy the iPhone.
Within ten minutes, I was served the iPhone.
iPhone came packed in the typical Apple product packaging. A very high quality, sleek black box with silver lettering and a photo of the iPhone on top. It's small.
Opening the box, the iPhone is cradled in a plastic piece, suspended over the small instruction manual, polishing cloth, ear buds, USB synch cable, and power brick.
After opening, the first thing did was tested my iPhone by calling from my land line, it worked like a charm.
The iPhone just works.
The first thing you notice is the lack of physical buttons. The only buttons in fact are a volume up/down rocker switch on the side, silence switch for the ring-tone and alerts, a sleep/wake switch at the top of the phone, and the Home button on the bottom center of the screen.
The rest of the user interaction occurs on the 3.5" LCD display.
When you receive a call, a giant green button below the caller ID allows you to "Answer Call".
The iPhone's native email application works with Gmail, Yahoo, .Mac, and AOL.
Email Application on this device is as close to a desktop email client that I've seen so far on a handheld. It's beautiful.
I'm opted for a data plan from Vodafone, which allowed me to retrieve my mails anywhere now and respond in seconds. This is what I dreamed to achieve since long.
Certainly, one of the biggest reasons to own this device is the iPod functionality. The iPod works the same way you're used to, but now instead of cycling through a list of artists, it has a coverflow.
Coverflow is a graphical representation of the album covers in a horizontal scrolling list. Just swipe your finger across the screen in either direction, and you have a fluid scrolling list of albums. Click an album, and it rotates to the back side, showing you all the songs, click a song, and you're listening to it. Forget to plug the headphones in? It will play your music over the integrated speaker, while it's no concert experience, it does sound decent.
Video is simply amazing on this device. The latest version of Videora supports converting ripped DVDs to iPhone format.
The SAFARI web browser does a great job. The best browser I've seen on a mobile device. Browsing the web is not something you'll probably want to do for hours on end, but if you need to pay a bill, get movie times, or locate a phone number it works slick. The browser allows you to enter any address on the web, and it will load the entire page as it was meant to be seen.
The first site I tried accessing was my own website “www.sharanamshah.com” which came up exactly as it appears on the PC.
You can zoom to any section by double tapping or doing the 'squeeze' technique with your thumb and forefinger. The fonts are sharp and crisp, easy to read.
The phone call quality is great so far. I have not had a single dropped call nor one where either party had trouble hearing each other. On a device that has no keys, the phone is a few clicks away.
Using iTunes, the contacts synch from Outlook or Outlook express without a hitch.
The phone has the ability to easily put someone on hold, if you're talking on the phone and you receive another call, the screen gives the option to put the current caller on hold, and answer the incoming call. Once you have a person on hold, and an active call, you can easily swap between parties or even merge the two calls together, brilliant.
The iPhone supports two types of networking, traditional WIFI over B and G networks, and EDGE data connectivity over cellular network. Speed-wise you see the best performance on WIFI networks.
The best part is that iPhone remembers networks that you've joined previously and automatically connect to them when you're in range.
That’s it till now. Will keep posting more.
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