Recently in iPhone Category

Courtesy of Vinny Ferrari at the Apple Phone Show...

Starbucks iTunes Wifi Store in Action from vincenzof on Vimeo.

Although we often find ourselves on the side of hackers and the open-source movement, we must respectfully disagree with most of the blogging against Apple on the subject of bricked unlocked iPhones.

We think that Apple's practices are quite common with product warranties, albeit not usually with software.  Let's take cars for example.  Let's say you cruise your car down to a performance-enhancement specialist, and they add a performance exhaust, a new chip for the engine-management computer (or flash the existing one) and new suspension springs, for instance.  If your newly-sporty auto develops a  problem with the catalytic, and the engine light comes on telling you to take it in, the dealer and the manufacturer will immediately blame the after-market exhaust and will not warranty the problem part.  If the wheel bearings start to make a noise, the dealer will blame the suspension and charge you to repair the noise.  Oh and if ANYTHING is wrong with the way the car runs, the manufacturer will most definitely blame the new, or re-flashed, chip and void your entire engine warranty--even if the problem is mechanical and has absolutely nothing to do with the engine management system.

Our iPhones arrived a few weeks after the BIG launch, which we covered here on AppleSavant with three lovely videos filmed around Orange County, CA (shameless plug...wait, you're already here!).

So we were just sitting around preparing for our Monday morning (oops, already here) and realized we hadn't posted that post we've been tossing around in our heads.  Let us enlighten you to our Thoughts on iPhone, 3-Months In.

According to The Apple Phone Show, O2 will become the official carrier of the iPhone in the UK.  The Brits will enjoy a similar activation process as we get over here in the USA, yet they'll require only an 18-month contract, rather than AT&T's 24-month contract.  But seriously, why would you want to break your iPhone contract!?

The unit will cost £269 (including VAT--European Value Added Tax), which is $538 USD.  Now our $399 price looks even more like a bargain!  The people of Great Britain will also enjoy unlimited WiFi use with O2's 7,500+ point public WiFi network--an industry first in the UK.  Plans range from £35 to £55 ($69 to $109 USD) and include between 200 and 1,200 minutes, unlimited data, 200 to 500 SMS messages, visual voicemail and the aforementioned WiFi hotspot usage.

This is great news for Europeans.  The rumor sites are abuzz with Germany being the next land to get the iPhone.  Learn more from Apple's Press Release.

We've received our iPhones and we must say first impressions are very good.  Here's a quick list of things we love about the iPhone:

• Call quality is excellent
• Speed of applications: this sucker flies!  You select something and it just appears, almost instantly.  Much faster than any "smart" phone used recently by our staff.
• Thoughtfulness: the iPhone has a lot of thoughtful features.  It's amazing that Apple was able to design this thing in the vacuum of Infinite Loop, without outside customer input.  Little things like being prompted if you want to switch audio sources, is the extra touch that identifies this as an extremely well though out product, from a usability standpoint.
• Display: simply beautiful
• Keyboard: truly amazing and much easier than we anticipated
• Speaker: loudness is quite, um, loud!  We're impressed with the ability to listen to a Podcast while on the toilet and not juggling with ear-bud wires.
• Delete Podcast/Video once complete: After you watch a video Podcast, iPhone asks, to paraphrase, "do you want to erase this video to recover some space?"  This is a great feature, because you may need to clear space for more pictures or to download mail attachments. 
  

Here's some things we'd like to see:

• iChat: we're sure that SMS prevails here, just like they don't want you running Skype on this thing.  The good news is third-party developers have come up with Web solutions--and the reality is you need to be connected to use iChat anyway.  The solution we like: beejive.com
• MMS: or lack thereof, rather.  People have been sending us MMS messages, with no response.  This is a strange oversight and we're not really sure why they would leave this off.  AT&T makes money on these messages, so why not on the iPhone?  Perhaps Apple just figures people can use email for that function.
• Video Podcasts in Podcast Section: this is a usability item that we dislike in all iPods and it's been carried over to the iPhone.  When you're in the Podcast section and you click on a video Podcast, it only plays the audio.  Why can't it play the video or ask you if you want to play the video?  In order to play the video, you have to go into the Video section and select Podcasts.  To us, this is a strange choice of UI design on what's a well-designed UI, otherwise.
• Web-Based Mail Attachments or Downloads: we haven't figure out if this is possible, but it seems that when you attempt to download an attachment from Gmail or other Web pages, you cannot open these attachments.  It would be nice if Google Mail supported the reading of PDF's online, but it doesn't, and the iPhone doesn't allow these sorts of downloads.  To make this work, you have to use Mail.app with POP access of Gmail.

More on the iPhone and other Apple opinion in the coming days.

Analysts have spent days pontificating over iPhone's sales this past week.  Some are throwing out numbers, such as 500k on the first day alone! 

"Shoppers may have bought as many as 700k units over the weekend," said David Bailey, an analyst with Goldman Sachs Inc.  The venerable Gene Munster threw his hat in the ring, with a sales estimate of 500k units.  Both these guys were expecting around 200-300k unit sales.

Here's our read: analysts everywhere expected the iPhone to sell briskly the first couple of days, but I don't think anyone expected this volume level.  We believe that once the word hit the streets that the iPhone works as advertised--and those initial reports were very positive--the floodgates opened, along with wallets, and by Wednesday, it was a sellout. 

We ordered ours 10 min after 6PM on Friday and do not have them.  The phones will arrive in mid-July and we'll give you our impressions.

The iPhone die-hards waiting in line at Fashion Island, in Newport Beach, CA. Amazing the length of the line(s).

iPhone Launch Line Waiters from HydraMedia and Vimeo.

From Lake Elsinore, Corona, City of Orange, and Huntington Beach AT&T Stores.

Because of all the stories submitted, MacRumors set up a special iPhone channel (wow, good idea).  Check it out at http://www.macrumors.com/iphone/ .  They have some great stories from Pasadena Apple Store.