Rejoice and give thanks my loyal flock; for I have seen the glory and bright white of my salvation.
Well, that may be overdoing it a tad - but after many years I am now part of the iFaithful.
Yup, I now own a shiny, 16gig, white-backed 3G iPhone and after my first 24 hours with it - I’m convinced I have made the right move.
As you may have read in my piece about Nokia’s E71, that was a good phone with a QWERTY board and easy email set-up. The iPhone is even easier to set up and after firing off a coupla texts and using the touch QWERTY to set up passwords, etc I find it just as easy to use.
I’ve added some tunes and apps via iTunes and as this was my first time with the whole iThing, again I have to say what a pleasure it is to use and thoroughly intuitive.
I actually attempted to get an iPhone on Friday.
I finished work early and sprinted across London to arrive at the Regent Street store at 4.20pm. The line was closed 2 people ahead of me as they had “run out of 16gig phones” and “not sure when we’ll get any more”.
Quite miffed I consoled myself in the Phoenix Theatre’s members bar.
On returning home I checked the site and lo-and-behold they had some more in stock for Saturday! (check the site after 9pm for phone stock and note that they’re opening up at 9am Mon-Sat, there was a bunch of people turning up ‘early’ for the regular 10am opening and they had to queue outside).
This leads me to believe that they have a ration as to how many they sell per day - which is good but they’re also seemingly keeping this a secret.
I chatted to one of the guys working there and he advised that “as long as you’re here before 3pm you’re pretty much guaranteed to get one, although the black ones go real quick”.
Personally I prefer the white ones as they’re not going to show all the finger prints and scratches as bad. Besides, it’s only the 16gig ones that come in this colour option so it also shows that you’ve got the good one.
I can also recommend you give yourself plenty of time. For me on Saturday it was a 4 hour round trip. Got to the store at 9am (tube was playing up-I left at 8:30) and got home at 12:30. I had to queue around the lift in the store behind about 30 people then was lead upstairs to queue (this time sat down though).
The actual credit check, authorisation and activation of the iPhone takes between 20 minutes and half-an-hour.
As you can tell from the pic the apps that I have d/loaded so far include:
- Last.Fm
- Twitterific
- Facebook
- and most importantly PhoneSaber
If you’re not familiar with PhoneSaber it gives you the pointless but totally cool image of a lightsaber (you can chose the colour) and as you move your iPhone you get the iconic sound of the whooshing and clashing saber - depending on information received from the phones accelerometer.
By-the-way; all of those apps above are free, gratis! :0)
I am still slightly disappointed by the speakers and they are really easy to cover up when using the keypad for example and when you cover one speaker up you can hardly hear the remaining one.
Still on the subject of audio - the bundled earphones are ok but not brilliant. I’ve got me some Koss Porta Pros - great headphones but I guess that the 80’s styling wont be to everyone’s taste but just think to yourself - there must be a good reason why they haven’t had to change these for 20 years………….
Righty, I’m off to see what else this thing can do!
It seems to have been longer than the 6 months that it actually has been since I got word that Sling Media was going to bring their SlingPlayer to the iPhone 3G.
Microsoft Live Labs have just released their first application for 
