The World According to Tim Skipper

So a few days ago my wife Francesca upgraded her N95 to an iPhone. She likes new gadgety phones and usually upgrades when something new and whizzy comes out. I was a bit “meh” about it to be honest. It’s just a phone, after all. Right?

Until I played with it for a while.

Now I have one too!

I didn’t mind ditching Vodafone for O2 as there’s better O2 reception in rural Norfolk/Suffolk than with Vodafone (although Orange is better still), so the single provider wasn’t really an issue.

The touch interface is amazing. My previous experience with a touch-sensitive phone was the truly awful LG Chocolate my wife had, but this is a vastly different proposition. Even fine control of cursors is easy and accurate, and the pinch-zoom feature works incredibly well.

Web browsing is not a problem, in fact I’m posting this from my iPhone right now. As we have come to expect from Apple, everything just works in an intuitive and natural way. I am impressed.

So, what don’t I like about it? There’s a few things:

Bluetooth. Although it syncs seamlessly with my Parrot CK3100 car kit, and my TomTom 710, it will only interact with headsets and hands-free devices. So I can’t sync it to another phone (even another iPhone) or my laptop, or more disappointingly the TomTom Traffic feature. The O2 contract for iPhones has an unlimited data use, which would make TomTom Traffic a very attractive feature as it’s more accurate and reliable than the RDS based signal. I hope Apple upgrade Bluetooth to allow data transfer with future software releases.

SMS. With a new phone number, the first thing I wanted to do was send everyone in my contacts list an SMS with my new number. Unfortunately you cannot send SMS messages to multiple recipients, so I had to do it one at a time. As a result, I only told the most important people in my list rather than everyone. It is also not possible to forward SMS messages, but this isn’t something I’ve ever used before or likely to need.

Safari Web Browser. Why no home page? It just shows you whatever page you previously browsed, but I would really like a Home setting, or at least a button. The ability to remember logins & passwords would also be really useful.

In the big scheme of things these are small gripes, and things which I hope will come into play with later updates. Overall, the iPhone is a big winner in our household.

Tags: Apple, Bluetooth, SMS