The Purchase
I walked into the AT&T store by my house and was greeted by a friendly sales guy. I told him I wanted to buy an iPhone. I chose the one I wanted and about 2 or 3 minutes later I was at the checkout counter with another salesperson.
Since I was an old AT&T Wireless customer that never switched over to an official Cingular plan, I had to choose a plan and officially become a "new" AT&T customer. This made the activation process a little easier for transferring my number to the new SIM. I was asked for my e-mail address. I reluctantly gave it because I was wondering why they needed it. I paid the cash for an 8 GB, and I received the phone and a temporary SIM card. The temporary SIM card was what I could use for my old phone in between the time of the purchase and my in-home activation with iTunes.
The Activation
The activation had one snag that I noticed. I connected the iPhone to my Mac, started the activation and iTunes made it to a page that instructed me to check for voicemail on my old phone because it would be lost as I continued with this activation. Now at this point I tried to check my voicemail on my old phone with the temporary SIM card. Well, I didn't have access to my mailbox anymore. The mailbox wasn't setup on the new SIM and the old SIM was deactivated. Luckily I didn't have any voicemail messages so it wasn't that bad.
Other than that the setup was very smooth. Apple did a good job in my opinion.
Music and Video iPod
The user interface is just as easy to use as the click wheel on the iPod...nothing special here. The video looks pretty good and the audio is adequate. It works just fine.
Bluetooth
My V600 let me setup shortcuts for different functions. That's what I used to setup and activate Bluetooth. The iPhone doesn't have shortcuts yet...at least I haven't found them. To activate Bluetooth, from the main screen: choose Settings->General->Bluetooth. Make your headset discoverable; enter the passcode and you're done. I use a motorola HS820.
Again nothing special here. I just wish I could jump right to the bluetooth screen to deactivate and activate Bluetooth when necessary.
Pinch, Touchscreen, and typing
Pinch is cool, using the touchscreen along with Pinch will take some getting used to though. I found myself having to zoom in on some links to ensure that I was hitting the right link with my fingers.
WiFi
I don't broadcast my SSID from my home home network, and apparently if the SSID isn't being broadcast the iPhone can't use it, even if you enter all of the info manually. I'll have to do more testing to confirm this. Once I had the SSID and WEP password loaded into the iPhone and set my Netgear router to broadcast the SSID I was able to connect the iPhone to the router. However, there was a little snag and I needed to reset my router. I'm not sure what the problem was but it was easily fixed with the reset.
There was a noticeable difference between WiFi and EDGE with the WiFi being much faster.
Syncing
The one problem I am seeing with syncing is that there are 44 music files that get synced every time I sync the iPhone. Oddly enough the files are made up of multiple tracks by each of the following artists only: Beastie Boys, Kanye West, Maroon 5, Justin Timberlake, Snoop Dogg and Knee Deep Shag.
I have it setup to sync selected playlists. I tried de-selecting the playlist where those files are, syncing, selecting the playlist again, and finally syncing one last time. So far this process has lessened the number of files but it didn't fix. For now it's an annoyance that I'll have to live with.
Accessories
I have a Kenwood KDC-MP5028 Stereo with a KCA-iP500 iPod Interface also by Kenwood. Despite the warning on the iPhone's screen all three of them play nicely together.
What's Missing That I need or want
Shortcuts to setup menus
Bluetooth file transfer of photos
Bluetooth transfer of contacts
A2DP Bluetooth streaming.
What's Missing That I'm not to concerned about
Video recording
Further Testing
My Motorola V600 is unlocked and I was able to use my iPhone SIM with it. The next experiment will be tethering the V600 to my iBook with bluetooth to try to use the data plan. Even at a lower speed using the configuration can be more desirable in some situations than using EDGE on an iPhone. If I'm typing a long e-mail or reading a long blog post, I'm much rather use a full screen and full keyboard than the iPhone's UI in Safari.
I also want to see what happens when the iPhone is connected to my KDC-MP5028 when I receive a phone call. What if the headset is on?
Overall Impression
I'm satisfied with the iPhone so far. It delivers what it promises so I could only grade on some kind of arbitrary pass/fail basis. I give it a pass. So far there's nothing outstandingly great nor really bad.
