João Prado Maia’s Weblog

It’s been close to 10 days now with the new iPhone and I wanted to write down my impressions.

The bad:

• Battery life is terrible. I mean, I understand the usual fanboy tactics of saying that the iPhone 3G still has the best battery life among 3G phones, but who the hell cares? It still sucks, I still have to charge the damn thing at least two times a day.
• It crashes a lot. I mean a lot lot.
• No idea why, but deleting emails from a specific IMAP account that I have, completely disables the Mail app against any other account. I have to restart the whole phone to be able to use that app again.
• Every so often iTunes does a backup of the phone, and it is now taking a LOT of time. I remember it taking around 1 hour for the first time. I believe it takes that long when you install new applications on the phone, but it makes no sense to me to take that much time.
• The contacts app takes a lot of time to open now. I’m assuming this has to do with a new architecture that allows one to search the database, but damn. 4-5 seconds to load a contact database of 73 contacts? Come on.
• The App store needs to review new applications / updates to existing apps more quickly.
• The store should restrict app reviews to users that actually purchased the app.
• A small thing, but it’s quite common for the phone to stop doing the “unlock” sound. You know, the one that is triggered when you unlock the phone with a sliding motion. The “lock” sound still works, but the “unlock” one doesn’t. I need to restart the machine to make it work again.

The good:

• The App store is so very cool. Lots of cool apps available, and I’m sure many more will come in the future.
• Exchange support is very useful. I can finally sync with my work’s email account with ease, without doing a lot of IMAP/procmail hacks.
• The new “tap at the top of the screen” to scroll to the top of the list of email messages is awesome, something I wanted for a long time.
• Same feature is now available in the contacts app.
• Being able to delete multiple messages is also invaluable. I can’t believe how much time I wasted in the past deleting a whole bunch of spam.
• The sound quality seems much better. The speakers are much better as well.
• The ability to save images into your photo folders is awesome.