Got my hands on an iPhone 3G-S. Didn’t have to wait in line or anything. Just walked in, picked it up, and bought it.
So far, I can only sing praises for how good the iPhone itself is. Very nice stuff. However, having come from Verizon, I can say that the AT&T service needs a lot of work. My first impression of AT&T was that when they went to activate my phone at the Apple Store AT&T put a hold on it to do a credit analysis. This took 20 minutes. Ridiculous.
The area around me has 3G which is nice but having gone up north to Michigan the coverage is extremely spotty despite AT&T’s map showing that I should have edge. And by spotty I mean “no service” at all. That means I couldn’t, for instance, even make a phone call while on the highway. That’s absurd in 2009. While up here at Higgins Lake Michigan my Verizon connection is still 3G. Meanwhile, it’s Edge on the iPhone and just barely. AT&T is clearly the weakest link.
Some other impressions:
I have an iPhone Touch so I was able to immediately notice some improvements with the 3G-S and 3.0:
- It’s a lot snappier. The new processor they use in the 3G-S is definitely worth it.
- The GPS on the iPhone is fairly mediocre compared to a dedicated handheld GPS (like Garman).
- The call quality is adequate but noticeably inferior to my Blackberry on Verizon.
- You can now purchase and download videos from iTunes. Very nice.
- The camera and video features are as cool as they say.
- I made and uploaded a video to YouTube right from the phone. Very nice feature.
- I found the voice control surprisingly nice. We were driving up north and needless to say, I don’t want to be messing with play lists while driving. Now, I could hold down the home button and say “Playlist Brad’s driving music” and voila. It would play.
So far so good.
