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5 things I love and hate about the iPhone

I've had my iPhone a little over 2 weeks now and love it. I thought I'd make a list.

Things I love about the iPhone

1. It plays my iTunes purchases. My Blackberry 8703e couldn't play any media, so it's nice to have a phone, an organizer, a web device and an iPod all in one. While I was taking my radioactive eggs test a week or so ago, I was able to text message, watch an episode of Torchwood and surf the web to pass the time.

2. Wifi. It's so much faster then EDGE - and when I'm around the house, I can hang out and surf around on a real, full browser. The Blackberry's browser sucked. Opera mini sucked as well. They just weren't full featured and never rendered sites correctly. Outside of Flash, the iPhone handles everything well.

3. iTunes Music Store. I was sitting downstairs when Tom Petty came on the radio. I was able to open the iTunes store on the phone, and grab the album. When I sync'd the phone back up, the purchases transfered without issue to my iMac.

4. The activation and setup process was a breeze. Getting my email set up on my Blackberry was a hassle. iTunes moved all my settings over automatically, including server settings. Ongoing settings maintenance is also very easy.

5. Customization. I like being able to easily make my own ringtones and wallpaper. This was a hassle with the BB.

5 things I hate about the iPhone

1. No 3rd party apps - yet. It's coming soon, but I miss some of the apps the Blackberry had, like native IM. I'm looking forward to the apps people create. Managing them through the iTunes music store is a good idea.

2. Why can't the iPhone record video? This is a no-brainer - and moving it over to a desktop when you sync should be easy. This would be a killer app. I don't want to stream video live (maybe someday), I just want to record video when the mood strikes.

3. In the Blackberry, I had a "Mark all email as read" function. Is there such a thing in the iPhone? If so, I haven't found it.

4. This isn't really an iPhone thing, but EDGE coverage in my town blows. We got much faster data speeds from Verizon (even faster then Erie), but the addition of WiFi more then makes up for this.

5. The headphone connector. The iPhone has a different headphone jack compared to regular iPods. This is, I imagine, to let you use their iPhone headphones with the microphone in them. I found this out the hard way when I put a playlist for a radio show on the phone and when I got to the studio I found that the regular headphone/line-in jack wouldn't fit. Weak. There are 3rd party hacks for this, but it's lame.

Overall, I love the iPhone. It really is light years beyond any phone out there. I turned on my Blackberry the other day to get some numbers off it and I was shocked how much harder it was to do stuff on there compared to the iPhone.

Posted by Mike at February 18, 2008 5:47 PM | Add to del.icio.us