Real-world iPhone 3G experiences - good or bad?
A post by Ian Hendry over on ZDNet got me thinking about just how well the iPhone 3G delivers against the hype and promise of the past few months.
Shortly after picking up my own iPhone 3G I wrote up some very initial responses, and to be honest I still stand by most of these. The biggest disappointment to arise since then was the bugginess of the OS software, something I had been utterly unprepared-for given the relative solidarity of the original iPhone OS experience. MobileSafari was much more prone to freezing up, third party apps would bail out before even reaching their title screen and dump me back on the home screen, and the GPS I’d loved so much proved to be quite inconsistent, even when tried from the same spot several times in a row.
Thankfully a 2.0.1 maintenance update to the iPhone firmware (available for all users of iPhones and iPod touches on 2.0 software) seems to have ironed out some of these, and general reliability seems improved. So my remaining niggles - battery life probably chief among them - are entirely possible to live with, and as so often with Apple products, I find that the overall experience is so enjoyable I’m actually much more forgiving of the shortcomings than I perhaps should be.
What’s interesting about Ian’s post is that the bulk of his comment is really saying how access to a data connection is the real problem, not the iPhone itself. Essentially the summary is ‘I’d love to show this thing off in the Lake District but I can’t because the signal’s pants’, and I agree - surely these are the times you really want to know where the nearest pub is, what the weather’s going to do etc, as opposed to sitting in your back garden challenging the GPS to spot you again (speaking from experience). So perhaps it’s not where the iPhone doesn’t work, but where mobile networks’ limitations are, and what they could be doing about it.
Anyway, off to press that little ‘locate me’ button one more time, just to see…
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