The ePiC rAMblInGs of Justisengard

Anyone who follows my tweets knows about my initial purchase of the iBrick and later the joys of owning and using the iPhone. Given I have had it for about two weeks now, thought I might mention some of my views, frustrations and experiences.

First question I usually get is, what was wrong with your old phone, the Nokia 6620. My initial answer is nothing, except it was three years old and I have dropped it too many times. I got a huge scare when I arrived at JFK in NYC for the NYC Sushi adventure. When I tried to power on my Nokia while walking off the plane, nothing happened. I quickly walked over to a seat in the terminal to mildly panic. Starting a weekend in NYC with 5 friends all in different hotels and schedules without a cell phone - that was going to suck, huge! So I quickly started to disassemble the phone, first battery reseating, nothing. Then I removed the memory card, sim card, reseated everything I could find - crossed my fingers and toes, held my breath, and prayed a bit to the cell phone gods and pushed the power button once again. The power came on, the phone booted up and connected to the network seamlessly. I actually yelled, woohoo, out loud in the airport. So reason number one, my Nokia seems to possibly be dying. Reason number two, I blame on my friend Rob. During the NYC Sushi Adventure, he kept selling me on the idea, while pointing out features on his Motorola Q phone that my 3 year old Nokia did not have. …and lastly reason number three - my famous saying that my friends always quote me on all the time - “it is only money; I can make more…”.

So on the morning of June 30th, 2007, I left my house to obtain an iPhone. First, I went to a remote AT&T store, where they directed me to the Apple store. So unfortunately now off to the mall on a Saturday. Turning the corner in the mall, I half expected to see a long line coming out of the Apple store, but to my surprise none was to be found. My heart sank a bit as I walked closer, thinking that there was no line because they had already sold out of them. (The iPhone was released the day before to huge crowds and long lines, etc. Unless you were living under a rock, you heard about it on the news.) So I walked into the Apple store to find crowds huddled around the iPhones on display that you could play with. I walk directly past them and straight to the back sales counter where a lone Apple sales rep stood. I immediately asked, “Do you still have any?”, his response was an enthusiastic, “oh yeah!”. Five minutes later I was the proud owner of the 8GB iPhone.

Next question I get is why 8GB over 4GB? My answer: If you are spending $500 for 4GB, another $100 for double the storage is a no brainer - is it not?!

30 minutes later my friend Puken Luken arrives. (impish grin) I take full credit for his iPhone purchase. (Hear that Steve Jobs, I want my commission.) With our quaint little iPhone bags in hand we had lunch and stopped by my place to active our brand iPhones. To active the iPhone you must connect it to iTunes.

The iBricks Days:

So we connected the iPhones to our MacBook Pros and walked through the activation process. Both of us being current Cingular/AT&T customers we felt this would be a seemless process - boy were we wrong. AT&T had no problem quickly turning off our old phones. My Nokia was out of service in a record breaking five minutes. Efficiency. So we figure the iPhone activation will be just as quick - we are AT&T customers, we will get priority or something. (You would think…right?) An hour later we are still looking at the AT&T waiting for activation screen on iTunes and on our brand new iPhones (or iBrick as we would learn). Btw, you cannot do anything with the iPhone without activation, nothing. Well, except call 911 Emergency. Four hours later, with no activation we were considering calling 911 Emergency. So the wait extended into Saturday night with no working cell phone. Surprisingly AT&T had taken us both back two decades into communication technology - no cell phones. It was actually a bit enlightening as to how dependent we are and how our expectations as a culture have been changed by the instant communication of cell phones. Throughout Saturday night, Sunday, morning, afternoon and night, we expressed our dissatisfaction, frustration, etc. through Twitter. Our new iPhones had became iBricks.

Monday morning, over 48 hours with no activation - my patience ran out and I started calling AT&T customer support. Surprisingly I got a customer service rep. in like five minutes. She explained that it looked like my extended voicemail feature on my AT&T plan was what was creating the delay in the migration of my old plan to the new iPhone plan and thereby activation of the iPhone. She removed that feature and the iPhone was activated ten minutes later. It turns out that being a current AT&T customer was a bad thing. Everyone moving from different carriers had no problems whatsoever, it was only the existing AT&T customer that were having issues. (Yeah, we quickly discovered that we were not the only ones have issues late Saturday afternoon.)

…and then a working iPhone:

Soo, Monday, 48+ hours after initial purchase I have a working iPhone. Even though there were some rather significant frustrations in the beginning - I love this phone! I will be the first to admit that there are missing features that would have though Apple would have gotten into the phone. Things like 3G, GPS, MMS Messaging, support of Flash and Java, customized ringtones, etc. However, even with all that missing, it rocks!

Here are a couple of things that were very cool to discover. One, sitting at a cafe for lunch and actually reading various websites with full text, graphics, etc., as if I were using my Macbook. Granted, the AT&T EDGE data network, sucks sooo bad. But I leveraged the cafe wireless internet connectivity through the iPhone. Having the ‘real’ Internet, not some limited mobile version is awesome. Two, seamless integration with email, addressbook and calendar between my iPhone and Mac. I had some of this before on the Nokia, but it was never this seamless. (Here is comes again..) It just works - I do not have to think about it or maintain it. …and for me at this moment in time, that is a huge benefit. Three, full blown Google Maps. Hopefully, I do not need to say more on that topic. Four, the visual voicemail. Being able to see all your voicemails and pick which one you want to listen to, rather and hear the voicemail lady drone on about you have 5 voicemail, press, such and such for this, etc, etc. Just press on the voicemail and listen. Simple. Five, which I only just really appreciated this weekend - text messaging conversation threads. You see all you text messages in a conversation thread just like a IM chat window. Really useful when you are having multiple texting conversations with multiple people. Six, the ease at which you can store, sync and scroll through photos. This was a bear on my old Nokia. When the topic of the NYC Sushi Trip comes up, I have access the photos in like 2 seconds, and the resolution of the iPhone display is really nice. Before you ask, I have not even used the iPod features of the iPhone yet.

Now for my major complaint. I have the camera. Even though the camera on my old Nokia was only VGA quality it was extremely stable and adjusted to low light and even had a nightvision feature. It was fantastic for capturing those incriminating photos late into the evening, when everybody has had something to drink - hehe. The iPhone camera is a 2 Megapixel camera, which is nice, but it desperately needs improved stabilization updates. You have to almost rest you hand against a wall to take a picture without blurring it. It does not adjust to medium to low lighting either, so indoor photos are almost always dark. (Please Apple - upgrade the camera through for software or firmware updates, please!)

If you are looking for a phone for business, I do not think the iPhone is just there yet. Wait for the next version or for some significant updates. But if you are looking for a phone for personal use - in my humble opinion, there is nothing better. If you own a Mac, it seems a no brainer due to the seamless integration. For the first time, since I have had a cell phone, I feel like we in the US have something stands above or at least is up to par with our good friends over in Japan.