Three weeks ago today I queued up outside Carphone Warehouse at a ridiculous time in the morning, coffee in hand, to collect my shiny new 16GB iPhone 3G.

The doors opened at 08:02 and we all filed in to dutifully hand over our £159 to pick up our iPhones. If only it were that easy.

The queue outside was tolerable, good natured chatter and coffee make things tolerable, it was when I got inside that the pain began. O²‘s systems crashed almost immediately leaving me unable to have either a credit check or a proof of address check.

All of this lead to me standing in the shop for over three hours while they repeatedly tried to verify that I lived where I said I did and that I’d be able to pay the bills.

I got it though, obviously, and I’ve been using it for the past three weeks. I have a number of observations about it.

I’d never really fancied the first iPhone, I don’t like to be an early adopter of consumer electronics they’re normally bug ridden or prototypes in need of refinement (Nintendo DS?). So I generally wait for version 2.0 or 3.0 wherever possible, that’s what I did here.

There are lots of pros and cons to owning an iPhone though.

Pros

1. It’s a beautiful piece of design
2. The screen is a delight to use, high resolution and bright
3. It’s also covered in scratch proof glass
4. Everyone’s writing applications for it
5. It has built in GPS, fast GPS
6. 16GB of storage is great, enough for a couple of movies and a lot of music
7. It has a very well designed OS
8. Visual voicemail is superbly implemented
9. The mail client is very usable
10. MobileMe synchronisation is fantastic
11. The ringer is turned off by a physical switch

Cons

1. Battery life is terrible, three hours of full use is not enough
2. The camera only outputs 1600 x 1200
3. It has no flash
4. It doesn’t do video
5. The keyboard is plagued by lag
6. Safari crashes more often than a hypoglycaemic dieter
7. So do a lot of the other apps
8. The phone’s contact list takes forever to load
9. Sometimes calls don’t connect and all you get is crackle and noise (O²?)
10. The 3G signal quality varies wildly
11. Ringtones have to be created, you can’t just use an MP3
12. Sometimes it just locks up
13. The camera requires a screen touch to take a photo, making it very easy to drop
14. No cut and paste

That’s a lot of negative points but I still think it’s the best phone I’ve ever owned. Aside perhaps from the battery life none of the points raised are particularly unfixable and I’m certain that they will be fixed at some point in a firmware update.

The battery life is the biggest stickler though, it’s just too poor to be acceptable. If I watch a movie on my way to work (a journey of twenty five minutes) I’m down to about 70% battery life by the time I get to work. If I make a couple of phone calls during the day, maybe browse a few websites and send some tweets, by three o’clock I’m out of juice.

That really is unacceptable.

My old Nokia 6021 last about two weeks on standby admittedly they’re very different beasts but I still expect more than three hours talk time or a days standby from a phone.

All in all though I standby my love for the iPhone, it is an amazing piece of technology that ten years ago would have been impossible. I can just about overlook the battery life issues with careful placement of chargers and all the really cool stuff it does makes up for it.

Roll on firmware 2.1. That will be the true test of Apple’s commitment to the cell phone market.

Filed under: Gadgets, Geeky Stuff, Reviews