xmz - Xavier Muñiz’s weblog |

Now that I have the new iPhone 3G, and the configuration and initialization process of transferring my personal data has finished, I’ve been using it intensively for 1 day, and these are my first impressions.

First the bad stuff:

1. The Contacts application is kind of… slow when starting up. Maybe this is because of my 367 contacts.
2. The keyboard is not much reliable at the first impression. You need to use this keyboard some time before you feel comfortable with it and start typing at a decent speed. One good thing is the keyboard learns from what you type, so theoretically after some weeks of use, it will start suggesting me every word as soon as I type the first 2 letters. We’ll see.
3. Really miss Copy & Paste. There’s no copy & paste. I understand it is not an easy thing to do, mainly because of the user interface paradigm (How would you select text with one finger? And how would you send it to the clipboard when selected with one finger too? Now the same, but without breaking the UI?).
4. There’s no week view in the iPhone Calendar. It would be great to have a 5-day week view when in landscape mode.
5. The iPhone can’t show subscribed calendars. This is a big problem; some partners and I share our calendars by publishing them as “.ics” in some web hosting, or by setting the calendars as public in Google Calendar. At home, my wife and I are sharing our personal calendars to know about future compromises with the family more dynamically. By now this is available only at the computer, and not in the handheld device.
6. The birthdays calendar doesn’t show in the iPhone. The fact that it is not synced via Mobile Me is not a bad thing, as the Birthdays calendar on iCal and on the web calendar of Mobile Me is just a view generated “on the fly” with the information taken from the birthday field in Address Book. This it is just a feature that has not been implemented in the Calendar application of the iPhone OS.

The good news is, the good things about the iPhone are by far more important than the mentioned bad things, so I can live with them. The good stuff:

1. It feels solid and trusty. The phone has the right size and the right weight. It feels well in your hand, you never think it will slip. The back is made of plastic, but it is hard and doesn’t scratch. The glass of the front face (and the screen) feels smooth to your fingers.
2. It is glossy. Yeah, the entire device is some kind of fingerprint magnet, but when it’s clean, looks awesome.
3. It just works. The software is very responsive, very fast; whit the exception of the Contacts application (a bit slow on startup, as mentioned earlier) the entire OS reacts at your command. Everything behaves as advertised; every button and link takes you to the expected place. The scrolling, zooming and panning works very natural. The A-GPS is very precise, and Google Maps updates in real time.
4. It feels so familiar. Sometimes I just think the iPhone is an extension of my MacBook. I have my appointments on my calendar, which feels just like iCal, the Address Book makes me think is the same program, NetNewsWire shows the same information in the phone and in the computer, not to mention Safari is a great browser with the only limitation of the screen size; the overall interface is very Leopard. This is what a PDA or a mobile computer must be.

There is one more bad thing: In Mobile Me, you are forced to use the “@me.com” email account; there’s no way to configure your own domain (as in Google Applications for Domains). This is very bad for us who want to keep our email address. This is what keeps the overall experience not to be perfect; a 9 of 10.

This is by far the best phone I’ve ever had, and no doubt is the most powerful mobile computer in the market today.