Visited the Palo Alto Apple store today and took the plunge on a 8GB iPhone; TechCrunch’s Nick Gonzales and I bought one each at the same time. Phone unlocked and app installer on (thanks John) and the phone is working with the Optus sim. It won’t work on the AT&T Edge data network, which given the roaming fees for Optus is probably a good thing, and there is Wifi everywhere here so using it to get online is a sinch…except for the hotel where the Wifi is spotty.
First impressions as an owner are the same as the first time I played with one. Wow. There is nothing else like it, it’s beautiful in every single way. YouTube doesn’t work with the unlock unfortunately, and of course there is no visual voice mail, but hey: email and web surfing is amazing. Camera is just as good as my old Nokia. iPod is brilliant, cover flow is even better again and it pumps out a decent sound on speaker. The typing gets easier with time, and I always sucked at txting anyway, so I’m already quicker on this. Call quality is excellent and most importantly it’s got a stronger antenna in it: where as I can’t get AT&T coverage at all at TC central on the Nokia, I get?Ǭ† 3-4 bars on the iPhone.
More soon…perhaps when I stop constantly picking it up and playing with it 🙂
Great post! I bought mine about the same time – same store too. I was resisting the hype, but after playing a friends for a while I convinced myself that I *needed* one. What surprised me is how much I love it. The screen is so sharp, the UI so intuitive and the wifi fast enough that, as strange as this sounds, I almost prefer websurfing on it. I enjoy all the optimized for mobile sites (digg, facebook, meebo, gmail, etc), and I love the google search/maps integration. 1 click to call, 1 more for directions another to add as a contact – everything is just so easy.
Sure, you can do some of this with a blackberry, but it isn’t as fun and, more importantly, a blackberry has no where near the potential of an iPhone. As you suggest, the real fun comes after jailbreak. I activated with AT&T (I’m not thrilled with a 2 year lock-in but it is what it is), and now I’m not sure I’ll be able to live without Installer and 3rd-party applications. If, as anticipated, the dev team struggles decrypting future firmware and Apple is both intent on maintaining control and releases a really interesting update, I’ll have a hard choice to make. Right now, sticking with 1.0.2 is an easy call.