PS: I live in Germany but the review is equally useful everywhere else on Planet Earth
I am a regular man, with the insane amount of love for gadgets, at time competing with the love for the better half of the species! It would not be exaggeration, if I say that, I have experienced almost all of the consumer electronics be it home theatres, projectors, high end cables, LCDs blah blah. After spending insane amounts of money & time on some gadgets which I have touched barely once or twice, I have developed a philosophy that, the gadget that I use the most will get the biggest budget.
Obviously mobile phone is the most used gadget by me, be it for work or otherwise and so I wanted the most functional mobile. I was having a SonyEricsson P990i and then P1i, both are essenitally touch screen smart phones. I love SE and wanted to go for Xperia X1. Though SE phones are good, the sofware is always a nagging question.
Then I waited for X1 like. for ever. They keep changing the release date every now and then and the final nail in the coffin was that they launched the product on Sep 30 and even on Oct 15 it was nowhere on the websites, online stores.
With iPhone, I always had a love hate relationship. When I saw it in a store, I like the screen size, iPod functionality and I hated Steve Jobs for making it carrier specific. What if I really want it? Then I have to switch my service provider which is too much for me. And I almost made up my mind not to go for apple as they are forcing people to do what they want.
Coming back to half of October, X1 launch dates and no clue of pricing was driving me crazy. One of my dear french friend calls me up to find out the pricing of iPhone in India but we gave up as we figured that even that phone is carrier locked. But he calls me back in an hour and tells me that the phone is carrier free in Belgium and 90 min drive from our city. We gave no further thoughts, cancelled our schedules and just hit the road to buy the iPhone.
The initial impressions were mixed. It felt nice, solid and SEXY in hand but the keypad or lack of it was almost unacceptable for me. Playing with the phone for few days revealed so much about the phone. If you are like me, just trust the predictive text and type away what you feel like and some how based on your finger movement pattern it gets the right words most of the times.
Mails: I have an yahoo, gmail and my office outlook exchange account. On weekends, the first thing I do to check mails was, to power up the laptop and go to various applications as well as web pages. even at times only to find out that there is no new mail other than from people wanting to sell viagra or loans. Now things are easy, I am still in bed with three touches I see all the new mails in all my accounts.
iPod: It is as awesome as before with coverflow and genius it is even better. My 60GB non video color iPod is complaining big time. May be I should find a rightful owner for her
Web: Web browsing is slick, cool and almost real. Still at 3.5inch screen it is not comparable to real laptop
Photos: Pinch, zoom is awesome. The software organizing is really nice
App Store: This is one more big reason why this phone is so good. I spent zero money till now but have so many fun and useful applications which is awesome(like train schedules, facebook, linkedin etc)
Maps is really well implemented and so is youtube.
I still keep discovering the new features. I went to Greece for work the other day and I was trying to change the time due to time zone difference. On the way back, I realized that if I just leave it on Auto, based on the service provider/GPS it automatically knows the country and sets the time!
Bottomline, if you are in the market for a phone try to see how the software is implemented rather than just hardware specs comparision. I guess those days are gone where a 500MHZ processor is better than 400MHZ processor. Now a days it is also about the implementation, ease of use and flexibility. iPhone scores perfect 10 in all these
There is no product with out pitfalls. iPhone suffers from poor battery(especially with the 3G ON) but I guess the main reason is due to the excessive usage of the phone:) The calls may get dropped at times but this is very occasional.
If you like what you read, just go and pamper yourself because you are worth it!(That is what I keep telling myself whenever I spend insane amounts of money and the proof is I am typing this blog on my new ALU MacBook!)
Update: I forgot to mention the most important thing. Contacts! The organizing of contacts is great and for the first time I am finding a place where I can write Birthdays of friends and with the iHappyDays application, I can see when the birthdays are upcoming! Also, I am having all my contacts on our Office Exchange server which gets synced up automatically on my iPhone, Adress Book on Mac and contacts in Outlook/Entourage. I make change at one place and everything gets synced up! very happy about it:) Weather and Stocks is also cool and so is Remote application which controls the iTunes library on my PC and Mac with the iPhone as remote to play, browse and everything!
Update for few Comments:
@irwing13
No, It does not have the ability to copy and paste. It could be a handicap to some if you find the work arounds too tiring. I might have felt the need of it, may be twice, in the past 2 months. So it is not a deal breaker for me
@pathetic_colleges
Calender Sync:
I use Outlook exchange server to sync calender, contacts and mails which is all over the air. For some one who does not have access to the exchange server they can go to paid services like Blackberry or MobileMe from Apple
Push Mails:
Blackberry service is also Push technology and is provided to the end user with a license fee where as the MS Exchange Push is for free. When it comes to power consumption if you use Blackberry Service or Exchange push it drains the same battery(atleast theoretically, as it is the same technology). My office Outlook is on exchange and so I get the mails real time, infact a tad earlier than in my outlook. I do not know whether yahoo is also Push but I get yahoo mails also automatically. Then there is this called FETCH which I have set at 15 min interval and my Google mails are FETCHED every 15 minutes
Data Plans:
I honestly do not know but it is more country specific I believe. I have flat rate on 3G till 5GB a month and never touched the limit
Storm vs iPhone:
This is a topic which can be read extensively on the net but I never touched the Storm phone and so I reserve my comments. But a 1st Generation touchscreen from Blackberry vs few generations older iPhone from Apple, I will let your mind decide. As I said before, it is the software, UI and support from the manufacturer. If you are happy on these three with Storm, I would say it is a good phone.
Last but not the least, your opening line shows the hatred for Apple and so I feel that you would NEVER BE CAPABLE of understanding the HYPE. Peace.
