KungPowThinking

So, I bought my iPhone 3G the day it came out. The lines and heat were ridiculous, but I got lucky and was able to cut in line when two of my friends decided to give up, drop out of line, and go home. Even with being able to skip in front of a few hundred people I still waited at least three hours. Here are some of my observations on the phone and the process.

• Waited in line for hours but the activation process took all of 5 minutes. The whole time I was in line I was wondering why the Apple Store had employees standing outside and milling around instead of all hands on deck activating phones. It would have been nice to see them processing requests outside basically walking around with a bag of 3G’s, a tablet (if Apple made a tablet) and a credit card reader selling/activating phones. They could have at least had a VIP line for existing iPhone customers. Oh and when is someone going to build a credit card reader addon and point-of-sale software for the iPhone/Touch?
• It was so hot one of my friends who dropped out of line was absolutely exhausted. Waiting in the sun ruined her weekend.
• Met the CEO of a startup. We talked shop - user experience, how to make content actionable, etc. He’s in closed beta right now so I’ll save commentary on his stuff till a later date.
• I got a black 16gig. I like the plastic better than the metal, and it fits in my pocket better. I just wish Incase would hurry up with their Slider case for it.
• I now have 1700 songs and 1 movie on the phone with an assortment of apps. Oh yea, there is about 3gigs of free space left for all the pictures I don’t take.
• The voice quality and volume is way better. No doubt about it. Although I will say voice gets a wee bit “peachcanny”.
• 3G is a ton faster than Edge. It’s not even close. I’ve actually mistaken my 3G connection for slow wifi in some cases. I know this isn’t the same for everyone, but the coverage in NY isn’t bad. The 3G also has a significant range increase on detecting wifi signals.
• Battery life is about the same. I charge just about every day. I don’t mind because I use the internet and apps on the thing constantly. The only sure-fire battery killers are games like Super Monkey Ball. I’m on wifi most of the time I’m browsing and I think all of my settings are close to default, although I do check email every 15 min.
• Favorite apps so far are: Shazam, Pandora Radio, Twitteriffic, and Urbanspoon.
• Least favorite apps are: Where, Loopt, Wordpress (cause I can’t get it to work), and AIM.
• App updates for Facebook’s app and Pandora have definitely helped.
• Syncing takes forever because it decides to back up the phone every time. I’m sure I can figure out a way to turn this feature off if there is one, but I don’t have to sync nearly as often anymore.
• Some things are slower. It seems like typing has hiccups - doesn’t matter what is being typed or in which app. Contacts are slowish, and every once in a while the sound effects don’t make noise. I am starting to think it has something to do with how I hold my phone and the proximity sensor not the actual phone though.
• It’s crashed four times since I got it. AIM crashed it twice, Super Monkey Ball crashed it once, and Facebook once. No data loss that I know of.

Let’s see. I think that’s all I got right now. If you have any questions post a comment. Oh yea, I definitely like it much better than my previous iPhone, and I’m actually surprised to hear myself say it.