iPhone 3G Good:
- A lot of very nice, free apps – the Facebook and Bloomberg apps are particularly impressive. Apple’s Remote app is superb.
- Generally a very responsive OS and the screen looks fantastic.
- The GPS seems to get a fix in tough conditions (e.g. indoors) although there’s no way to know that this is a GPS fix and not just a phonemast/wifi-located signal.
- Automatic geotagging when photographs are taken means there is going to be an explosion of geotagged images on the web soon.
- Exposure’s “here are the photos nearest to where you are now” feature is nice.
- No Flash content – not sure if this is a good or a bad thing, but I think on the whole it’s a good thing.
- Web browsing with Safari is very good.
- Lots of intelligent gesture-recognition.
- The process of adding a contact’s photo, and adding a new application, is extremely straightforward.
- There’s a WordPress client for the iPhone coming soon – cool!
iPhone 3G Bad:
- No “decent” GPS app with sat/signal info, waypointing and live updating of directions – yet.
- The iPhone itself is quite heavy – it feels like a solid block of metal. It’s also going to be a pain to keep the surface clean.
- No apparent way to get “free” homebrewed applications (e.g. OSM or a simple GIS) onto the iPhone itself, without shelling out for a developer license. I would love to create a simple application for field surveying, for instance.
- The camera is pretty poor quality – worse than my Nokia N73, which I thought was pretty bad.
- The Weather app always says “Sunny, 23” on its logo when it’s not open. Actually, it is sunny and 23 outside in London at the moment, but that’s just a coincidence.
- Likewise, the clock logo doesn’t update.
- No obvious way to know if an app has received the latest data, or you are viewing old data, on first opening it.
- No password manager for Safari.
- Not brilliantly impressive text autocomplete – it should know a few of my internet login IDs by now.
- Lots of spammy looking apps cluttering up the app store – some QA by Apple would have been good.
- I can’t assign Facebook pictures of friends to be contact pictures in my address book.
- It would be nice to have Java J2SE or Python on the phone, but I don’t think Apple’s application rules would ever allow it – they do keep Flash away from the phone too which is good.