Aaron Silvers

Brian prompted me to give a little rundown on the iPhone, now that I’ve had it for a full week…

• My phone service was absolute shit at Lollapalooza yesterday. 3G barely worked, and EDGE was so godawful slow I could’ve walked my cellphone over to someone across the country and showed them what I typed in better time. Irony here: Lollapalooza is an AT&T sponsored event.
• 3G sucks down battery life way too fast. I get at least double the battery life when 3G is turned off. I’ve already turned off WiFi. I may turn off 3G unless I’m browsing. Idea for an entrepreneurial App developer: make an App that makes battery saving settings a one or two touch deal, instead of the many contextual menus I need to employ to turn shit off and/or on.
• I’m LOVING Appigo’s “ToDo” application. Keeping me and my work very organized.
• There are some real hangups to using GPS. It works great if I turn the phone off and turn Maps on the first time. Once I enter my building at work, where I get great 3G, and then leave the building — it’s like GPS can’t acquire it’s link to a satellite or whatever it does — it just spins forever.
• Speaking of spinning forever, the FlickUp application is absolutely worthless. I picked it up to work around an issue I discovered this morning — I couldn’t import my photos from the iPhone into iPhoto (wtf????). So FlickUp is supposed to just upload my pictures from my work picnic and Lollapalooza to Flickr right? It does nothing. It authenticates with Flickr. I select a photo out of my Camera Roll to upload to Flickr. I press upload… and… it… just… keeps… spinning. Maybe it needs WiFi to work. That would’ve been nice to know before I installed it.
• Speaking of nice to know — Twitteriffic only seems to work with Twitter under 3G, not EDGE. Of course, I was trying this out during Lollapalooza where service was dog slow no matter what… but still.
• When I use a USB iPod dock connector cable to power or sync the phone tethered to my computer, I get an error saying the device is pulling too much power from the computer and the computer will close the port (WTF???). When I use the cable that came with the iPhone, this doesn’t happen. So something about it is not interoperable even with the older cables — that’s pretty f’ing disappointing.
• Making custom ringtones and assigning them to people is fun. My brother, Kevin, is “Holiday in Cambodia.” Suzy is “She Bangs the Drums.”
• If I’m on email or Safari and I do anything data heavy, the iPod seems to skip around a bit. Not predictable but it is repeatable.

Overall, I still give the iPhone a 7/10, because what it does well, it does STELLAR and it does a lot of things that well. The things above aren’t just nitpicky, though. iPhone to iPhoto problems are total FAIL. That should be a slam-dunk no-brainer impossible to screw up.

Technorati Tags: iphone, iphone 3g, issues, flickup, 3g, edge, at&t, cables, appigo, todo, gps, quirks, maps, lollapalooza, fail

UPDATE – 8/5: It seems the issue with the iPhoto/iPhone import was resolved by directly connecting the cable from the iPhone to the computer.  This also seems to resolve my complaint about the power issue — thinking now that maybe it’s an issue with the powered USB hub I was plugging into.  Which is annoying, but at least within a realm of understanding.  Also worth noting that at least as of the 2.0.1 update, FlickUp now works.  I don’t know if the update itself fixed it or not, but it is what it is.

As well, with just a little bit of use, maybe it’s just me but after the update, the phone’s interface feels a lot… snappier.