iPhone 3G first impressions

Posted by Tanos on Fri 11 Jul 08, 4:36 PM

Tags: computers

I don't usually go for the latest gadgets but I've been thinking of getting a phone that's practical to use with the web for a while. My old contract has just finished it's minimum term and so the iPhone 3G - launched today - was a natural choice, and I managed to get one of the first batch.

I've never bought any Apple equipment before, but I've been quite impressed by popi's iPod and what I saw of the old 2G iPhones in shops. I realised the new ones would be in short supply given the pricing, and so for the last few weeks I've kept an eye on O2's iPhone web boards. So I knew at the weekend that it would be a good idea to be around online on Monday morning, presumably once O2's customer services had opened (8am). I managed to order one at about 8:40am with no problems, and O2 rapidly sold out of them that morning and had various website overloading problems.

Today the iPhone itself arrived by DHL without any problems, and after a frustrating 30 minutes trying to activate it online on the iTunes site (which was overloaded due to the simultaneous release of the iPhone 2.0 software to the old iPhones) I managed to get it all going.

And I'm very impressed!

The good size screen and generous resolution (about double the Nokia N95) were the main thing I was after for web pages, but the clever interface and the flexibility of the touch screen do indeed seem to squeeze even more usability out of such a small device. It even has motion sensors to let you switch between portrait and landscape views just be rotating the phone!

The picture shows my homepage rendered in Apple's web browser, Safari, and I'm going to try making a post on IC with it next...

Edited Mon 16 Feb 09, 5:05 PM by Tanos