With any luck, I’ll be swapping out my Nokia N95 with an iPhone tomorrow. Rather than fight the mass crowds at the Apple store, I am likely to just hit the local AT&T store. I have some trepidation as the store seems very unprepared for the launch. As of today, the store I plan on going to had no protocol for how they would handle lines, whether they would hand out vouchers (so people don’t stay in line with no chance of an iPhone), and how existing customers can transfer their accounts. The focus really seems to be on getting new customers, which is a shame given I have been with AT&T (then Cingular, now AT&T again) for about 8 years.
Having used the N95 for several months, here are some more thoughts about the phone:
1) Bluetooth with my car, computer and headsets still works flawlessly. Something I hope the iPhone will match.
2) The media player is frustratingly slow and the quality is good, but not excellent.
3) Moving songs over via USB is the worst experience I have had on a portable device. If I try and move more than 4 songs, the device hangs and I must go delete the empty files off the device’s SD card and start again. After each file transfer it resets, requiring me to browse back to my music director in Finder every time. As a result, it took me 45 minutes to move 1.5g of music the other day. Completely unacceptable.
4) Accessing WAPs is tolerable, but not a friendly experience. To date, I’ve still never gotten it on a WPA2 network.
5) The web browser is basically useless. The only site I use it for is mobile bloglines.
6) The phone quality is excellent. Best signal and voice quality of any phone I have ever used.
Now that the reviews of the iPhone are rolling in, I am excited to check it out. Of the “missing” features, everyone is complaining about, the only thing I really expect to miss is the lack of a chat application. I am hoping that Meebo will work, but the watered down Safari browser may not be able to handle it.