Well the hoopla surrounding the iPhone is now one week old and yes, I was tenth in line to get my grubby little hands on one.

Since I live in Northern Ireland, just North of Belfast, there are no Apple stores over here, or indeed, any part of Ireland full stop. So I just had to make do with the O2 store in CastleCourt, Belfast. There was a small queue forming outside an hour before opening, and it was enough to worry the shop next door, calling security to get the number of people moved away from their doors.

Getting the iPhone in my hands and getting home was filled with an air of great anticipation, something that I though wasn’t going to happen to me. Actually seeing the screen light up after registration was a great relief, especially reading that some people had difficulties. This boys details went through in under 3 minutes.

Now that I’ve had the iPhone for a week now, I’m still very pleased with it. I can quite safely say that this is the first phone where I can use nearly every aspect of it without needing a manual or just plain giving up. In fact it is so simple, my mum was able to operate it and she can’t even get the DVD player to work.

I’m going to go through each function of the iPhone and tell you what I think of it. First up is the SMS text messaging service.

Anyone who has used the iChat application on the Apple Mac will feel right at home with SMS. Rather than a list of mixed up SMS messages being displayed on your screen you have a list of those you’ve sent or received messages from. Tapping on their name brings up a your current conversation.

This whole concept of seeing your full conversation is great, no more looking through a list of 30, 40 or even more numbers and peoples names to find out what someone was replying to. I love this if nothing else.

I’ve very rarely used a calendaring option on any mobile phone. I’ve tried a number of times but all that fiddling about with small keyboards and multiple button pushes, just simply put me off.

This on the other hand is a breeze to use, a breath of fresh air. Everything is at hand and really intuitive. Entering repeating events couldn’t be easier, short of actually talking to your phone. The amount of calendar information is growing by the day and it even syncs back to your iCal application.

Unfortunately the timing of the iPhone release over here happened to be the same time as I was updating to Leopard, Apple Macs newest operating system, version 10.5. I was looking to install the new range of iLife applications onto my MacBook Pro One of these applications is iPhoto, which help you organise your photograph collection. I currently don’t have iPhoto installed and as such am missing out on the great photograph experience.

I have however created a number of sub folders in my Pictures folder and dumped part of my photographic collection in there. These are synced to the iPhone and any changes automatically taken care of. I’m really, really impressed by the way the iPhone handles these photos. Due to the way the touch sensitive panel works, you are able to use two fingers to enlarge or reduce the photo on screen. Using your finger to simply flip through your collection is amazing, just watch peoples faces when you do it. If a photo is taken in landscape mode, rotate the phone and the photo is automatically rotated and stretched to fill the screen. Absolutely brilliant.

Photos can be used as your wallpaper, or sent via email with simply a touch of the screen. If you like taking quick snaps using the phone, see below, these are instantly available to view.

This has to be one of my disappointments with the iPhone. The camera sensor supplied is a mere 2.1 mega pixels. In this day and age, many ordinary lower end phones are coming out with 3 or 4 mega pixels now, and with the price of the iPhone I half expected for a better built in camera.

If your just after a quick snap, and don;t really care what the quality is like then I guess it will suffice. The quality of the image is not too bad, but being at such a low resolution, graining is very much in evidence, and when moving the camera around the image displayed on screen can get very blurred.

One large omission from the phone is the lack of any form of movie capture facility, although seeing the slow display update this might be why.

That is it for the moment, as this post is getting a little long. I’ll be posting another 3 blogs covering the rest of the current available options on the iPhone.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 10:02 am and is filed under Phils life, apple, infurious. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.