Seven days after my 16GB iPhone arrived, my gut reaction from last July still stands. To me the iPhone feels more like a piece of high-end test equipment or something from the glory days of HP’s calculator design studio than the flimsy plastic phones I’ve had over the years. Sure there will be a 3G model in a few months, but that final “push me over the edge” purchasing moment wasn’t solely the release of the SDK, but a aggregation of things: the SDK, the big iPhone seminar track at WWDC, all the excitement among developers I respect. I’m certainly not enough of a developer to be on the 2.0 beta fast track, but I did conclude that’s it’s kinda important for me to get up to speed on it. Not because it’s a phone or an iPod Touch or whatever the hell Apple comes up with, but mainly because it’s the first new Apple OS since OS X and I believe that most of the interesting new development stuff is going to happen on it rather than on OS X. At least until Lion or whatever cat 10.6 ends up being.
Some notes so far:
- The only way I could get AT&T to transfer my mobile number from T-Mobile was if I contracted under AT&T’s pre-paid GoPhone plan. AT&T couldn’t give me a satisfactory answer and suggested that I switch to a regular plan later.
- I’ve barely used my iPod since getting the phone. Using it now feels like going back to OS 7 on a Mac Plus. My observation last year about “eventually all small devices like this are going to work this way” is apparently still holding.
- Sound quality is substantially better on the iPhone than on my 5G iPod, even when holding earphone variables constant.
- Mobile Safari is pretty handy, but I appreciate mobile-browser optimized web sites much more. If anything, they’re less cluttered and rarely have advertisements.