About six weeks ago, I became eligible for an device upgrade on my AT&T wireless account. I headed down to the AT&T Wireless store by Pac-Bell park and (eventually) walked out with a shiny new 16GB black 3G iPhone. Nearly 18 months ago, I paid the same amount for the HTC TyTyn aka 8525, a Windows Mobile 5.0 phone. My, how the mobile world has changed.

As someone who works in the mobile industry, I had been tracking the release of the original iPhone, along with a variety of other developments like Android, RIM’s new technologies, Symbian S60 devices and even Palm’s attempts to keep up. Apple was winning the press game and got a lot of attention for their device, and I can say after considerable usage, rightfully so. In terms of a combined personal and professional mobile device, it is clear to me that the iPhone is the most enjoyable device to use out there. Certainly, there are problems and it is by no means a perfect device, but Apple seems to have struck a good balance between control for good user experience for mainstream users and openness for 3rd party programs. (By openness, I’m just referring to the availability of an SDK, and a decent one at that. All the legalese surrounding it and the treatment of 3rd party apps as second class citizens on the device are up for debate.)

Pros

Outstanding battery life on EDGE

iTunes <-> iPhone end to end ecosystem for music management is great. No need for an iTouch or any separate music device.

Top notch 3rd party apps really have a good degree of polish and are very usable. I still haven’t paid for a single iPhone app but have found plenty of useful applications.

PIM (contacts/calendar) sync is very easy to do with iTunes (though it still doesn’t really make sense that you go through music software to do this…)

Call quality is superb. No dropped calls, very clear voice quality.

The form factor is great, I really appreciate the rounded edges when this phone is in my pocket. The HTC phone was a brick that constantly bulged from my pants pocket and not in a good way.

The glass screen has kept me from installing the protective plastic skin I bought for the phone since glass is so scratch resistant as compared to most plastic screens.

Cons

Special cable for charging the phone. I really liked being able to use any mini-USB cable to charge my old HTC phone, which were just laying around at work or at home. Firewire charging also isn’t compatible with the new iPhone, which means I need to modify my car stereo setup to bring that capability back.

Cut and Paste would be more handy than I had anticipated when I read gripes about this being missing.

No background processing and no push updates for 3rd party apps (yet) really limits what the iPhone can do when you’re not actively using it. Mobile devices should be constantly working for you, not just when it has your attention.

Battery life on 3G isn’t as bad as I expected based on what I had read, but it can be an issue. I’m probably exclusively on 3G once or twice a week when I have high data usage needs and waiting for that to come down over EDGE isn’t a judicious use of battery.

Speakerphone really isn’t loud enough as compared to other devices.

Since the iPhone treats phone capabilities as an “application” on the device, there are too many button pushes/screens to get through to place a call. Double clicking the home button to get to your Favorites is a nice touch though.

The cost of the data plan + 200 text messages is a bit outrageous. They know they can get away with it so they do. The rumored tethering plan at an additional $30/month is just insane.

I wonder how much of the transition eye candy really inhibits the performance of the phone. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but I frequently see very stuttered animation for the transitions. If this can be cleared up with future updates, then it’s just an optimization problem. If not, it’s clear that there is overburdening of the hardware platform and they should have scaled the transitions back accordingly.

Inability to treat the iPhone as a USB hard drive/memory stick out of the box. I know there are a variety of paid iPhone apps that help with this, but it should work like this out of the box. Apple should have implemented an appropriate file system separation to facilitate this given how much storage these devices ship with.

AT&T does little to make using this phone on their network special. I think this is a key shortcoming that caused them to take the bad tasting medicine of a very expensive exclusivity agreement. Just take a look at how much AT&T paid Apple last quarter.

SmartTags exists in Mail.app in Leopard, but not on the iPhone mail client. This would save me some hassle in saving people’s email addresses, phone numbers and physical addresses that I get in email or text. How many times have you received a txt/email saying “meet me at X address” and you just want to click on that address, load up Maps and calculate directions from your current location?

Final Thoughts

Clearly, there are many things to improve and fix on the iPhone. That said, I’m happy with my purchase, can swallow the extra expense for data over my previous $15/month all you can eat + 200 text messages package and look forward to what’s coming next for this device.