A1203

Could not resist, had to buy Apple's product with the model number A1203 - the iPhone

My old cell phone's buttons got old and didn't react on each touch any more and are scratched. And it's orange colored. Orange sic
Now, after unpacking the iPhone, and after i played some time with it, here are my first, personal, private impressions.


Pro:

• Installation, registration and activation worked fine, although still a little bit too complex for John Doe users. But why the heck do I need an iTunes account? Without a PC, iTunes, Internet access and an USB port, i can't use my iPhone.


• The iPhone works without SIM card, e.g. you can browse the address book and have WiFi access, synchronize with iTunes
  - and all without SIM card. That's great, esp. while you're waiting for your old phone to back up its data to the PC. And the old phone needs its SIM card for that...
  My old phone needs a SIM card for everything. Without a SIM card, it just shows the message "INSERT SIM" and the only thing you can do
  is power it down.


• WLAN/Wifi access to my local, secured home wireless network worked instantly. That is amazing


• Access to my IMAP email account worked perfectly at the first try. (Okayyy, i needed two trials to correctly type in my password)


• Even online messaging (ICQ) worked, using meebo.com service. However, i didn't try to send messages yet, but it showed my pals being online, that's enough as a first test.


• Insert SIM card while iPhone is running in idle mode. With old phones, you always had to pull out the battery.


• Automatic BCC to myself on outgoing mails. Nice feature. Auto-adding sigantures. Nice.

Contra:

• I used my existing SIM-card. The guys in the T-Punkt inserted it for me (I wanted to make sure they do it, because another sales person told me that sales persons are not allowed to do it. So, it's not my fault when something goes wrong) Well, the iPhone does not recognize the contacts saved on the SIM card! You will have to go a long way around by exporting your existing phone book to Outlook/Windows Addressbook/iTunes back to the iPhone. That's a really major drawback.


• Copying address book via bluetooth did not work (from Sony Ericsson W800 to iPhone) The iPhone was recognized as bluetooth device, but no connection could be established. My Sony worked with other PDAs, so I doubt it's Sonys fault.


• The documentation talks about a "SIM-Removal-Tool", but it cannot be found in the package anywhere.


• The iPhone is easy. And with easy, i actually mean simple. And with simple, i actually mean that it doesn't have a lot of features. Well, it misses a lot of features. Really a lot. Time will show if these features are really necessary for mobiles.

Misc
For those who are interested what the User-Agent of iPhone (Firmware 1.1.2) is:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48a Safari/419.3

Mail agent:
X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (3B48a)

3B48A is 242826 in decimal. Don't know what it means.

Oh, and to legitimate such a blog post on a java-related blog: Safari on iPhone does not support Java Applets. An no Flash.

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