I have had an iPhone for six days now and have loved every minute it of it, with the exception of my experience with the Rogers dealer I went to in Dartmouth Crossing not knowing of their $30 data plan for 6GB of data (as has been advertised on their site for Android phones and for both of the iPhone releases as a time-limited deal). it wasn’t too big of a deal though, the dealer who activated me gave me the number to the Dealer Service/Help line, after spending nearly an hour trying to get the plan worked out with this line and the staff in the store (the question “can an iPhone be activated like that?” was commonly used during my visit). When I got home I called the number on it and had my issue solved in under ten minutes flat (and that’s including authenticating my account, however at the end he said “I’m not sure where you got this number from, but please don’t call it again.”)
I should say that the overall experience was great! I was out of the store after more than two hours (I’m a new Rogers customer) and on my way to spend my day in Halifax. All that I can say is that 3G is awesome, I was able to burn through more than 200MB in <3hrs without trying. The speed of 3G may as well have been my home network because pages rendered over the 3G as fast as they rendered on my iPod Touch at home. I used RSS Player to download podcasts at 700KBps inside of Mic Mac Mall… the reception was everywhere, even inside of Costco.
But then I drove home. I lost 3G after about 15 minutes on the highway. So for most of my time with iPhone I will be using EDGE, which doesn’t bother me as much as I had thought. EDGE (with at least 4 bars) seems to have enough bandwidth to listen to TWiT.am or Last.fm, or to download email, check Twitter, or browse the web (albeit for a limited time before frustration sets in). My average speed (as determined by the SpeedTest.net app) is about 120kbps down and 140kbps up. Not so bad.
So in the past (almost) week I’ve done a lot with this phone that I’ve never been able to do before. Given that I’m not a complete virgin to the iPhone experience as I’ve had an iPod Touch for more than a year leading up to this… but there’s no comparison. Using the $1.99 app AutoStitch I made panoramas, something that I last did in 1998 on an 800MHz computer by hand, and this app does it all for you. The other app I’ve really got into is TweetReel, which is a combo-$2.99 app and online service that allows you to record a video or take a picture on your iPhone, upload it to the service and Tweet a link to the video. The quality isn’t so bad, here is a test I did this morning with it.
Panorama Made by AutoStitch
Another app I will definitely play with is called RK_Free (short for Run Keeper), which you use when you’re running, biking, or another outdoor activity where you would like to see your speed, distance, and a map of where you’ve been. This is a free version of the app and is limited to storing five runs. This is intended for the 3G/3GS, and according to the app information, isn’t accurate on other iPhones or the iPod Touches. The other issue I’ve had is in areas of limited GPS signal (on the screen as ‘poor signal strength’) it misreports my location and stated that I was travelling 165KM/h for a period of time and ruined the results for that bike session. But overall is a great app, especially because it’s free.
The other utility I’ve been playing with is MobileMe, or at least a free trial, and I love the push email, in fact I would have all of my mail be push, but $109 CAD/yr for it… I don’t think so. So I’ve also heard that Yahoo mail does push (for free!)… so I wondered what the difference in cost would mean, also whether Apple would truly allow someone else to do push for free. So I did a simple test, send a message from my GMail account to both addresses, with exactly 1 byte of data on each (lorem ispum) to see which one is faster responding. Here are the averages:
- Over Wifi MobileMe took <2 seconds to deliver the message and over EDGE, took 8 seconds.
- Yahoo took 10 minutes to deliver over Wifi, and over EDGE took 10 minutes and 31 seconds.
From what I can tell from this, Yahoo might as well not offer ‘Push’ for the extra server capacity it requires and just stick with the typical 15 minute-fetch cycle.
This is the best internet device-iPod-phone I’ve ever used.
