Yes, after posting a 1,200+ word rant about why I don’t want an iPhone, I decided to buy one – to at least try it. For this decision, I give full credit to those who commented on that post, either directly or via Twitter and Facebook. They convinced me that I really don’t know what I’m talking about until I actually spend a good amount of time with an iPhone.

I was planning on switching to AT&T Wireless anyway (their least expensive family plan had the best price out of all the major wireless providers), so now I have 30 days in which I can use the iPhone and really decide if it’s the right phone for me. And by that I mean that I can find out if paying an extra $30 each month for the required data plan is worth keeping the phone or exchanging it for something else.

I will keep track of my thoughts across this 30-day trial, posting every once in a while about everything I find to be good and bad with the device.  Yesterday was my first day with the iPhone 3G S and, as you can imagine, I have a lot of first impressions, so I’m going to keep each one short to avoid turning this post into another essay.

First Impressions with the iPhone

Out of the box – Battery nearly fully charged. Switch from T-Mobile to AT&T active almost immediately. Good start.

Initial confusion – It helps to read the instructions that came with it. I didn’t know how to perform certain actions (like rearranging icons) at first but reading the short booklet helped.

Keyboard – I make way too many typos. Keyboard is much better in landscape than portrait. I wish more apps supported landscape mode. Typing is frustratingly slow.

Camera – Easy to use and decent quality, though sometimes filled with color noise. I’m surprised I can silence the shutter sound. This picture of my cat is the first picture I took with it (click for full-quality original image).

YouTube – Incredibly simple to use and looks/sounds great over Wi-Fi. Video wouldn’t play at all over 3G.

Safari – Very similar to Safari on a Mac but it often selects links I don’t mean to. Zooming will take some getting used to. There’s a weird bug(?) that stops zooming from working occasionally. I have to leave Safari and relaunch to get zooming to work again. Or I just don’t know what I’m doing.

Maps – Seems useful though not entirely intuitive to use. Had to get used to the fact that it knows where I am already.

Copy/Paste – I’ve already used it a million times. Would have driven me nuts without it. I’m glad I didn’t get an iPhone sooner. It’s slightly clunky to get working (especially the text selection), but it’s better than nothing.

Battery life – After two hours of non-stop fiddling, I still had over 75% battery. At the end of the day, after many more hours of playing with it, I still had 40% battery. Didn’t turn it off or plug it in overnight and now it’s at 29%. I’ll run it down to 0% today before charging it fully for the first time overnight tonight.

Brightness – Holy cow, this screen can be bright. Too bright even. That’s better than too dark.

E-mail – Tried to enter IMAP e-mail settings manually and couldn’t get it working. Asked for help and was told that syncing to my Mac would set all that up for me. Worked like a charm. Reading e-mail is easy but I really wish it had a junk mail filter. Responding to e-mail will rarely happen for me – typing is way too slow.

Software Updates – I was required to update iTunes to sync the phone. It also said I should update Quicktime. Not sure why.

Syncing podcasts – Extremely slow. Probably 5-10 times slower than syncing my old iPod via Firewire. The initial iPhone backup had already completed, so I don’t know why it was so slow. I guess I’m blaming it on USB.

iPod – Haven’t tried iPod functions yet. Noticed that the connector is smaller than on my old iPod, which means I need some kind of adapter for my Belkin car plug if this is going to become my primary iPod. Is there such a thing?

Free space – iTunes reports 14.1 gigs free out of the box, not 16 gigs. There are only 2.6MB of apps and 160MB of “other”, so where are the other 1.5 gigs?

Apps – I started to sift through the App Store on the phone until I realized that it was quite cumbersome to do so. Then I spent an hour or two going through all the top 100 free app lists on iTunes. Downloaded 123 apps. Only tried about 20 so far. Good free selection, but too many garbage apps. I won’t be purchasing any apps until I decide if I’m keeping the phone (and even then I won’t buy many).

Phone – After fiddling with the iPhone for a few hours, I finally left the house to get dinner and actually try it as a phone. While at home, service ranges from 0-3 bars, but it always seems to still work well regardless. It does a great job at finding service when there is none. Better service than I ever had with my old phone and T-Mobile.

Vibrate – Biggest complaint so far. I always keep my phone on vibrate as I find ringtones to be obnoxious (it seems like everyone notices your phone ringing except you), but the vibrate function on the iPhone is way too weak. I barely even notice when it’s active. Not good. I expect a lot of missed calls.

So there it is. My first day of thoughts with the iPhone 3G S. Mostly good, some bad. I’ll continue to play with it, adding more apps and functionality, and post again next week with more thoughts. As of right now, I’m undecided on whether I’m keeping it. After a few days of taking it out of the house, we’ll see in which direction I lean.

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