So of course all of us new iPhone users made a bunch of calls last night to play with our toys. I checked my bill this morning and found that all of the calls had been billed against my 5,000 night and weekend minutes, not my unlimited mobile to mobile.
Oh AT&T, you sly dog. But you have Apple customers now who don’t suffer crap.
So I called them and the very nice lady checked with her manager and yep, they burn your Night and Weekend minutes FIRST and then go into your mobile to mobile! Shame on you AT&T.
She said she fully understood how poor that was and she would bring it up with her V.P.
I suggest you call AT&T and let them know that shady practices suck.
Conference calls rock. It is so easy to add people to a call, or go private with just one. Amazing.
I paired my Jabra JX-10 headset. After finding bluetooth (Settings-General) it simply found my headset that I had put in pairing mode and listed it. I tapped the Jabra, entered the code and wah lah, I had paired it. Next, I made a call and as soon as I tapped the name of the person I was calling, a widget showed up allowing me to select the Jabra, iPhone or speakerphone! Once on the call, the upper-right “Speakerphone” had changed to “Audio Devices” which I could then tap and easily switch between the Jabra, iPhone or speakerphone. This is unheard of in my experience with phones!
While using the Jabra on a conference call, I could play the iPod and music played in my earpiece only.
The phone lists calendar alarms and missed calls right on the wallpaper when you turn it on. If you have only one event, such as a missed call, the slider will take you to the screen to deal with it. Got a voicemail? Sliding the phone on takes you right to voicemail.
Aside from the playback bug, visual voicemail rocks! I accidentally hit the delete button, but a simple tap of the Deleted Messages button, tapping the message and then tapping Undelete did the trick. Now I have to convince sears I didn’t order a microwave. Wonder if iPhone will help with that?
Bugs
When playing back a visual voicemail for the second time, dragging the time slider playhead jumped the voicemail to the proper time, but it then stuck at that time. The voicemail played properly, but the playhead no longer moved, unlike the initial playback of the voicemail. I tried a second time by going home and trying again. This time it worked fine.
While on a conference call and using my Jabra headset, the WiFi connection to my Apple Airport N router kept dropping out. While trying to use Google maps, I’d continually get “Cannot connect to Edge” because I was on a call and WiFi had dropped. So I went to the wifi screen and could see three routers (two are mine) and watch them them go away and come back about every 20 seconds. I am not sure if this is because I had a laptop, Jabra, Express, Wii in the living room and two routers downstairs (one for the OLPC which does WEP only) or what, but it was sure annoying!
Tips
My iPod’s Monster car/audio adaptor will charge the phone but the audio out won’t work. I will need an updated device I suppose.
OK this is going to take a long time to write up. I’m tired as hell so let me get some talking points down on paper:
Cons
Let me do the cons first because its a short list
The speaker is weak, weak, weak. Even on full volume, while in a restaurant we could only hear 2 of the 25 supplied ring tones. The volume of the phone is low volume also, even at max volume. Apple really needs to address this, either in the next rev or better yet via firmware. You would not hear this phone ring in your purse.
Safari crashes - A lot. A crash is evidenced by a sudden return to the main menu.
Thats it! Ok so edge is slow, but its much faster than GPRS which is all I had before!
Pros
Oh boy this is a long list!
Amazing. Simply Amazing. Easy to use, no manuals.
Fast, 5 minute activation right at the mall on my laptop
Fast initial sync, did just contacts, bookmarks and mail accounts.
Pinching. Kicks. Ass.
Whoever designed the rubber banding of the UI, so you know the phone is still responding to your fingers, should get a huge raise.
Gorgeous screens.
Pictures sync via iPhoto when the phone is connected
Battery life is good and long it seems. 3 hours nonstop use, still half battery left.
When a call dropped near my home, iPhone beeped, said call failed and offered a nice big green “Call Back” button.
It’s an awesome, awesome, iPod
Safari rocks! (when its not crashing)
The you tube app is really cool
Animations everywhere give excellent feedback.
Flicking and scrolling is very intuitive
Turning a call into speaker/non-speaker is so damn easy its silly.
Activating voice mail and setting up the password was a snap.
I really like the silence button
Seamless movement between apps
Typing on the keyboard is really easy. I totally fumbled spelling “goodies” and yet it offered “goodies” as the word I meant to type.
The phone just looks and feels gorgeous
The calendar apps is very very nice
The world clock is a welcome feature!
Google Maps rocks!!!
Tips
Don’t make your girlfriend your wallpaper. Otherwise you may answer the phone “hey babe!” and it might not be her
Bugs or little glitches to fix
the iPhone should not enable mail accounts that were not enabled in mail.app
Emails should rotate when the phone rotates
The iPhone auto hopped to a wifi network called “wireless” that had no internet access. It must have been some goofy mall network, but we could not surf at all. It should have realized the network was bogus and switch to Edge.
Existing headphones don’t work without an adapter.
The headphone jack has no rubber plug - Seems like it will fill with junk quickly. I hope those iSkin covers are good and ship quick!
If you use the drag to zoom in on text near the top of the screen, the loupe does not flip downwards, so you can’t see what you are selecting.
Elizabeth sent me two SMS messages 4 hours ago and they still have not arrived in. Is ATT just hammered?
This really is am amazing phone, especially as Apple’s first shot. I can’t wait to see future revisions.
Whew! What a day! First off, let me say a huge thanks to my excellent girlfriend Elizabeth for coming and swapping batteries for me, to John for coming to Wash Sq to buy his phone and hang out all day, to Starbucks for all of the free goodies, the Washinton Square mall staff and security and to Apple for the excellent line experience, coffee, water, donuts and other goodies.
Ok so since 3pm it went like this:
Charles showed up to hang out with us and take photos.
Barry showed up to check out my phone and hang out
At 6pm, they opened the doors to a loud countdown and let 10 of us in the store.
The entire purchase experience was 5 minutes. It was seriously excellent. With Apple’s handheld scanners, they moved us through very quickly.
I went across to the Made in Oregon store and activated the phone in 5 minutes. No issues, no delays. smooth as silk.
I synced mail, contacts and bookmarks quickly, then we went to dinner with Elizabeth at the Cheesecake factory.
We played and played and played, I will make another post on phone impressions.
2:36pm Rob Griffiths of MacWorld and MacOSXHints fame is now in line with us and even captured me in a photo on his blog entry.
Apple has closed the store and will re-open at 6pm. Overheard from the security guards is that they will be letting 10 people at a time into the store for purchasing their phones.
1:45pm Someone from last November’s Wii line outside Fred Myers just looked me up. I didn’t remember him and he sat next to me!
12:30pm While eating lunch I hear my name being called. It’s Elizabeth’s parents! Odd seeing them here, as they live up in Washington. Turns out they are not here for the iPhone, but rather their car is in the shop down here and they had 3 hours to kill. Also funny is that Elizabeth had just left after dropping off this battery (she is swapping dead batteries with me and charging them at home. Does anyone dare ask why I love this woman?). They caught up to her though as the Crocs booth had slowed her departure from the mall. Imagine that
11:16am John got lunch after they passed out food court coupons, but not for what he wanted heh.
Quote of the day: “are you in line for that new iPod?”
Line has wrapped into the second stanchion.
8:26am Apple delivers coffee from Starbucks!
7:20am John “CatCow” and I are in line at Washington Square Mall in Tigard (Portland), Oregon for the launch of Apple’s much awaited iPhone! I arrived around 6:20am to find 11 people in line ahead of me. They had already started an informal list of people in line. John arrived just before 7am which is when they let us into the Mall.
Apple was present along with mall operations, reminded us to remain civil and already had stanchions in place for the line.
Upon getting in line, Apple informed us that Starbucks will be delivering coffee at 8am! And then the awesome mall operations folks moved the mall benches along the wall for us to sit on all day! How awesome is that?
Then it got even better when mall folk brought by donuts for everyone!
There were rumors in line that Apple would be charging us for our phones at 7am and letting us go home. So far Apple has only reminded us that phones don’t go on sale until 6pm.
I will update this single blog entry and keep adding photos.
I stopped in at an Apple store tonight to discuss iPhone launch logistics, as many of us will be there at 8am or earlier. The nice floor guy had no info but listened to my ideas and sent me off to the manager.
The manager of the store informed me that there will be no braclets, no lists, no nothing. What will be there is increased security, whatever that means. So lets figure out how this is going to go.
People start lining up
100 people are in line hours later for potentially forty phones (nobody knows)
9 hours later, 5 friends show up to the fifth person in line, either:
** Causing no issues, people leave
** Causing a confrontation, scuffle, security hauling people off, etc
Apparently Apple wants this frenzy. They want it to be a zoo. After all, any press is good press. But do they need this kind of press? Everyone who shows up is a rabid fan. Why should they be put through a shoving match?
I can think of two reasons why I was told this:
The Lie
There will be crowd control - They just don’t want people to know so they ensure lots of people show up
The Truth
There really will be no crowd control and it’ll be a pushing and shoving match to get into the store, with smaller people being shoved, possibly knocked down, etc. Remember the guy who ran into the pole during the PS3 launch? Yeah.
I also spoke with a nearby AT&T store. They too have no plan. I explained that they should do something to reward the loyal customers.
I proposed the following to both Apple and AT&T, based on the plans of the Boston AT&T store:
Hand out bracelets at 10am based on who is in line
Take personal ID to associate with the bracelets
Require that people be back no later than 4pm to get in line, in order of their bracelet number.
Put up a sign when phones are gone for the day
Why? Who wants to stand in line for 11 hours to find out they ran out the person in front of you? That would suck. The iPhone already has plenty of press, plenty of buzz and more than enough demand. Do your best to make this the best, most fun experience for everyone. Let the crazies show up, get their bracelet and go home to blog about how excited they are. Come back at 4pm and have two hours of mad excitement.
The customer wins
Apple and AT&T employees win
The malls, stores win having less madness all day.
Apple and AT&T win with the two hour frenzy ahead of the sale.
Ok so who knows what will happen, but the goal of this blog entry is to get people writing to Apple and AT&T to at least voice concerns and ideas. We all want this to be a smooth, fun launch.
What I plan to do, which I did not do for the Wii launch (and should have) is:
Bring my own bracelets
Ask people in line if they want to use them
Take a codeword with each bracelet handed out (as well as name)
This ad hoc system would not be honored by either store, but at least if there was a contested spot in line, people would have some data to present to security to help resolve things in a calm and proper manner.
I hope the day is smooth and fun - I know many of us are looking forward to using our iPhones! Apple is all about the user experience - Lets hope they make our experience in or out of line great.
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