….my first tech blog

I’m new to the iPhone world, i specifically didn’t jump on the bandwagon first time around because the first generation phone was simply not well enough equipped for me. I previously had a Nokia N95 which was - in my opinion - the best phone on the market for a long time (only beaten by the 8GB N95).

I also had major issues with the fact that some of the great functionality I relied on heavily on my N95 (Shozu, MS Exchange Push Email, GPS, Shazam TrackID to name a few) was not available on the first gen iPhone.

Well…I picked up my White 16GB iPhone 3G from the Apple Store Trafford Center Manchester last night, and i’ve had it for exactly 24 hours now.

It’s been a good exercise really, i have been lugging around 30GB of music on my Microsoft Zune Media player for a long time now of which I’d say i listen to no more than 10GB - 15GB…. so my music collection has gone on a serious diet. Along with that i have a new contract with O2 so i took that opportunity to get a new number, ditch a severe amount of contacts and evade those sales calls who get your number from god-knows-where.

During my first 24 hours, i had no network service with o2 from about 21:30 when my signup ended at the Apple store until around 07:50 this morning when i finally got signal and started to receive text messages from o2…. anyway, as i said, my first concerns were the functionality i relied on with the N95 - being replicated in the iPhone, so i installed Shazam and Shozu from the App Store as soon as i got home over my home wireless network. (They’re both free, however i expect Shazam will start to charge some time soon) I tested both these apps right away and was very pleased with their level of compatibility (in terms of GUI Navigation) with the iPhone.

When i got the phone it was on about 75% charge and by the time i had finished playing with it (which included watching a 1 hour episode of Top Gear from the BBC iPlayer iPhone interface, syncing some music and video podcasts and of course installing the apps… the battery level was around 50%

First job this morning when i had some o2 signal was to get my office push email set up on there to pull my contacts and mail down off our exchange server…. now I’m used to this being done on my N95 using Nokias free app ‘Mail For Exchange’ and the setup process is a little cumbersome to say the least, you have many fields to fill in before you can proceed. When it came to setting it up on my iPhone, it was done and fully synced within minutes - so a big big thumbs up there. Another big plus with the iPhone Exchange Support is that you can view all folders in your mailbox! By default it pulls down the folder hierarchy and you can select a folder to view and it will pull down the relevant mails. Winner.

We then had the obligatory GPS / Google Maps test while in the car share journey to the office which totalled about 30 mins of GPS tracking while receiving emails. I was expecting this to have some impact on the battery (I’m very used to my N95 being attached to a plug socket to get topped up with juice after performing these functions) but to my surprise, the battery level hardly moved! Again, thumbs up here.

Next job was changing the ringtone (for a quick guide on how to do this follow this link

I spent the majority of the rest of the day with push email turned on along with GPS and WiFi all while listening to some albums…and the battery held up surprisingly well!

I would rate the Apple Store staff very highly following my 2 hour (and first ever) experience in there last night - so thanks to them for keeping the spirits up of the folks in the queue.

I’m 24 hours in, and I’m already convinced that as of right now, this is the ultimate phone on the market. There’s nothing on the market today by Nokia or HTC to name two major competitors that can even come close to the sheer usability and design of this phone. Sure there are a few niggles - poor camera / no copy paste / non replaceable battery / no video recording…..but what this phone does do… it does very very well.

I hope my enthusiasm remains!

I hope to test the directions function in Google maps tomorrow so I’ll report back then