iPhone review
Since iPhone came out I have not been very interested in it, it always seemed to be inferior to other phones.
It had lower specifications, it was overpriced, it was 2G, was lacking basic features such as copy/paste, video recording, MMS, multitasking etc.
But Apple has an amazing marketing machine, and even if the platform is closed and so far from being open as it can get people still bought it, made applications and games for it and now in it’s 3rd generation it actually started looking like something.
It has 3G, MMS, video recording, and a pretty clever way of handeling copy/paste, and an amazing amount of apps and games.
So my old phone was getting old and felt pretty outdated, HTC Trinity started out as a Windows mobile 5 device, and thanks to the people over at xda developers I was able to
Upgrade to home cooked 6.1 versions. But it did not change the fact that the device was slow and memory were more and more getting to small.
So it was time for a new phone, I was having my eye on Android, and with HTC having some very nice phones and more and more manufacturers planning Android phones I was concidering it, but perhaps my next phone will be Android.
I ended up picking the iPhone mostly due to the applications out there, my main concern for not picking the iPhone was the lack of multitasking and customization, and Apples insistance on locking down the platform.
I wanted to use the Spotify client instead of iPod as I like the idea of having access to the wast library of music that exists in Spotify but the advantage of the built in iPod is that you can play music and browse the web or use other apps while listening to music, something not possible with Spotify due to Apples in my oppinion stupid policy.
But I came across the jailbrake community, I started following the iPhone download blog and found out about the whole homebrew scene.
One of the apps I came accros were Backgrounder an application that allows you to run program in the background.
This made the whole iPhone thing much more attractive.
So Sunday soon 2 weeks ago I went into the 3 store and bought the black 32GB iPhone 3GS.
So after using it for soon 2 weeks, how do I feel about my choice?
Well I think I made the right choice, it is a very nice looking phone, the OS works really well, it is a bit like OSX (I know it is based on it) in that it just works, no fuzz easy to use.
The Appstore works great, the sync with my google apps mail, contacts and calendar was a breeze to set up with push working like a charm, updates in contacts were pushes on both directions almost instantly, mail would sometime pop up on my phone before the browser showed that new mail has arrived.
I started out downloading a bunch off different free apps from the app store, Spotify was one of the first followed by some games and others. I subscribed to some podcast that I listened to on my way to work, and they told about different apps and games and one game called Dungeon hunter got very good reviews, a kind of Diablo clone with very good graphics and gameplay, so this was my first purchase from the app store and indeed a very nice game that I spent a lot of time playing.
But It was deeply annoying me that I could not listen to Spotify while using safari to read my rss feeds or reading my mail, etc.
When I bought it there were no Jailbrake available, not until last weekend was I able to jailbrake it, so I got a week of locked in usage, and it was bugging me a lot.
But thanks to Blackra1n I was able to jailbrake and install backgrounder and a bunch of other applications for example winterboard, an application to customize the looks of the iPhone and an app called sbsettings that adds a quick menu to enable and dissable various things like wifi and Bluetooth without having to dig into the settings dialog.
And now it works as I wanted it, nice OS that I can customize to my taste.
And it is great to use, last weekend we went to Denmark for a baptizing, and in the train I used the iPhone as a mobile Internet for my laptop so I could surf and chat on the go, I could have done this directly on the phone but it is nicer with a big screen for extended use.
Once there I used it as camera and videocamera.
On the night before we had to go home, Emilia got a fever and stuffed nose, and on the way home we realized we did not have any medicine for babies such as fever lowering medicine, so I used the iPhone to log in to the website for the pharmacy to see where to find a night open pharmacy, then used the built in google maps app to find out which one was closest to the train station, and to find our way there using the built in GPS and compass when we got there.
All in all I think the iPhone will work well for me, but had it not been for the abillity to jailbreak I think I would be less happy about it.
Oh and by the way, I typed this entire post on the iphone using the wordpress app. 
