Was wondering if people would be willing to share their overall experience with their new iPhone now that they have been out for a while?
It would be interesting to hear about:
• Quality of reception (compared to your old cell phone for example)
• Ease of setup and overall operation
• Quality of support from AT&T
• Experience with the phone's email function
• Are you happy you did it?
• Anybody comparing it to a previously owned Treo or other "smart phone" devices?
Any other overall experience good or bad would be interesting to me and I'm sure to everybody!
Sure:
• Quality of reception (compared to your old cell phone for example)
My previous carrier was Verizon (CDMA) and my wife and I had a Motorola V710, Q, and Razr. I was very pleased with Verizon's service overall. The call quality on my Q was as good as a landline. The V710, while older, also had excellent reception. The Razr was kind of spotty because it didn't have as good of an antenna as the V710 or Q, I guess. Enter the iPhone. First of all, the earpiece & mic are good but not great. The earpiece doesn't get as loud as I would like; for example, I used it to make a call to AT&T while in a crowded Apple Store and I had a very difficult time hearing the rep even on full blast. Next, the speakerphone: completely useless. Absolutely, completely useless. I hope that Apple fixes this in a future update. Sometimes I'm too lazy to use my Bluetooth headset and so I just put it on speakerphone in my car. I have a fairly quiet car, but the speakerphone just doesn't cut it. Third, AT&T's service is borderline good. Not great. Not horrible. Between "okay" and "good". If I walk more than 5 or 10 feet into a structure, I cannot get reception. Here at my computer desk, 15 feet from sliding glass doors, I cannot get reception. Even with 5 bars, the voice quality is not always that great. Sometimes it is has a fair amount of static. I am not pleased with AT&T; it feels like I got thrown into the past 5 or 10 years ago when cell phones were still like the commercials, "Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?". This is an annoyance, but not a showstopper. The rest of the phone makes up for it, fortunately. I'm hoping that by merging with AT&T, Cingular's service will improve over time.
• Ease of setup and overall operation
Overall setup was very easy. I ran into two issues: the first one was that Verizon took a good 24 hours to transfer our numbers, the second that AT&T fried one of our SIM cards through activation somehow and we had to swap iPhones. Aside from that, fairly painless. It's all iTunes-based and is laid out pretty well. Syncing is very simple, you just check a few boxes (all checked automatically when you first set it up) to decide what to sync. My one gripe is that you cannot add individual songs to the iPhone; you can only copy playlists. I have a playlist folder called "iPhone" that I update with the songs I want, then set iTunes to automatically sync that folder whenever I plug in the iPhone. Kind of annoying but not the end of the world. Picasa even reads the iPhone as a picture drive and can import your photos directly from it, which is super-nice. I just got a Mac laptop, so I'm looking forward to setting up with iCal, Contacts, and all the other goodies that the iPhone will really shine with. It works flawlessly with my wife's iMac - automatically did everything from her Calender to her Mail.
• Quality of support from AT&T
Excellent. Their reception might not be great, but they were super helpful when I had problems. Overall I spent 2 hours with tech support the first night I got my phones, trying to see why Verizon was taking so long to transfer the numbers (supposed to be 6 hours max) and why one of the SIM cards wasn't reading. They also have close connections with iPhone tech support and can transfer you over quickly if you have any special questions about the phone. I was very impressed; I spoke with Americans every single time I called, I could understand all of them clearly, and they were all very polite and helpful. I had good experiences with Verizon as well, but when they ran into an unsolvable problem they stopped helping me. For example, my wife and I had separate accounts at Verizon for a long time and we wanted to merge, but my wife was not the primary on her account (she had gotten it ages ago before she had credit and a friend had co-signed for her.). Her friend had essentially disappeared and we couldn't do anything to the account without her info (social security # and whatnot). If we stopped paying bills on the account, her credit would get bad ratings because of us. Verizon was completely unhelpful and after many months of searching we finally found my wife's friend and got it sorted out. So AT&T's service has been leaps and bounds beyond AT&T - they stuck with me through all of the problems and made sure that I was all set before hanging up or transferring me to someone else.
• Experience with the phone's email function
In a word, awesome. They nailed it! I have my Yahoo and my Gmail account set up on my iPhone. It vibrates whenever a new email arrives. I love it! It does folders, replies, photos, all of the basic functions that you want to do from your phone. Far better than any of the Windows Mobile software I've used. I am very happy with the phone's email function. I don't really know what else to say; it's the best implementation of email on a portable device I've ever seen. Nothing to complain about, just works great!
• Are you happy you did it?
Yes! The iPhone is absolutely the coolest thing I've ever owned. It crashes and freezes far, far less than my other phones have; in fact, it hardly crashes at all. If a programs crashes, it simply kills the program and goes back to the main menu instead of locking up the whole phone, like Motorola and Microsoft products would. However this is a rare thing, it hardly ever crashes. The first time was right out of the box; it froze on a webpage and I had to do a hard reset. It hasn't done that since I got it synced with my computer. The second time was on the Google Maps app; my friend was zooming around a lot in satellite mode and I think it was eating too much data because it kept crashing. Other than that it's really great. Things I love: the iPod (I LOVE the Coverflow feature; I thought it would be useless!), the Calendar, the Alarm system, the Timer, Google Maps, Safari (yay, real Internet!), a pretty decent camera, the Photo Album system, the Weather widget, Email (which is awesome and painless), Visual Voicemail...I could go on and on. It's really a fantastic piece of hardware. Battery lasts all day too!
Again I am not pleased with AT&T's, but it's not so terrible that I would take the phone back. I knew exactly what I was getting into with Cingular because some of my friends have Cingular and I am familiar with the voice quality. I do get frustrated sometimes with the service; if I am only getting a couple bars indoors I often get the "Dropped Call" message which I NEVER got with Verizon. So it's not a walk in the park with AT&T. I am considering getting one of those indoor cell phone repeater-amps to extend the signal at my place. I hope AT&T updates their network soon! The iPhone is cool enough that the rest of the features overshadow the rather poor service, however. Oh and the phone is very scratch-proof. I keep it in my front pocket with my wallet all day long and there's not a scratch on it. I did get the PowerSupport Crystal Film screen protector; I would highly recommend that to both protect the (glass) screen and so that you can wipe off the screen with a shirt instead of having to use the special microfiber cloth.
• Anybody comparing it to a previously owned Treo or other "smart phone" devices?
My brother used to have a Treo (700wx I think) and I had a black Motorola Q. Let me start out by saying that the iPhone is no way, shape, or form a business phone. It is purely a consumer phone right now. Even many of the fun consumer-oriented features on other smart phones are not available on the iPhone. For example: no games (at all), no A2DP (that means no Bluetooth stereo headphones), no tethering (for use as a wireless modem for your laptop; at least, not without hacks), no custom ringtones (without hacks), no Flash/Java/WMP (makes the Internet not quite as much fun), no custom programs (aside from websites), no other advanced Bluetooth features (just the Headset profile for now), etc.
If you look at all the drawbacks - poor AT&T service, useless speakerphone, tons of missing features - it's easy to get turned off by it. I'm just trying to clear the way for you so that you understand the pros and cons. If you absolutely, positively need the best cellular service, do not get AT&T, period. If you want some of the more advanced features that phones like the Blackberry, Treo, or Q have to offer, do not get an iPhone. Do your homework, decide if it works for you, and get it. I decided that AT&T's average reception was not a showstopper for me, and while I'm not pleased with it, I am very, very happy with the phone. It's awesome - it's fun to play with, I love showing it off, and it's just really, really cool. The iPhone doesn't do a whole lot (yet), but what it does do it does
extremely well. It does Contacts really well. It does Internet really well. It does Email really well. It does iPod really well. It has a really neat phone system. It has lots of fun little widgets to play with. Overall I love it and I'm keeping it. Apple did a great job; most of my complaints can be fixed with future software updates from Apple, so I'm not too worried about them.
