Marty Chinn said:I debated long and hard on Saturday if I should get one and decided not to after talking myself out of it. I figured if I left the house, it was over cuz I'd hit an Apple store and I'd fall in love with it. Turns out since I went out to lunch I decided to go to an Apple store any way after I had spent a few hours talking myself out of it. By the time I got to the store, I figured I was doomed and I'd be walking out with one.
However, it turns out my experience with it completely sucked and I came away empty handed and disappointed. I just had the worst time typing on it. I was hitting the wrong character half the time which meant constant backing up for me. I played with it for a good 15 to 20 min and just was terrible at typing. On top of that, the Edge network was just completely sucking for me. So bad that I have to think it was a fluke. The iPhone said it had full signal and the E was lit up to indicate Edge. Wi-Fi was turned off as well. Yet, it was impossible for me to connect about 95% of the time to anything. I would pull up google maps and it would show me a map but if I clicked on satellite view, it wouldn't be able to grab the data. I'd open up the web browser and come here, but once I got to the thread listing, if I was able to get to the thread listing, I couldn't open any threads. Yahoo would constantly time out. It was just completely underwelming and I refuse to believe the network sucks that badly. I was expecting slow but non responsive most of the time was worrysome. So it makes me wonder, was it just the store? If it was just in the store, how many other pockets in the Bay Area are like that?
At the beginning of the day, I was set on getting an iPhone either now or when it hits a revision but coming out of the store and not being able to type or connect to the Internet has me questioning if I'm going to get one at all. I'm tempted to hit an Apple Store today at lunch to see if this place is different, but I'm very not impressed right now. I even tried two different units to make sure it wasn't the unit itself.
Bog said:I'm currently month-to-month with t-mobile. What's the best way to go about canceling that, but moving my number over to AT&T for an iPhone?
SuperPac said:Buy iPhone, hook it up to iTunes, and when you're activating it they'll ask you if you want to move an old number. You can check to see if your number's eligible here -- http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/transfer-your-number/
Marty -- if I had to back up with *every* mistake I made while typing on the phone it would be very slow going. I've found that the dictionary almost always suggests what I meant to type so usually if I steam ahead it'll be no problem. You just gotta let go and let the iPhone autocorrect do its thing. It's usually right.
14 day trial period (but if you bring it back after opening the box you'll be charged a 10% restocking fee).Marty Chinn said:I didn't realize there was an auto-correct, but to what extent does it correct things? Is it just stuff out of its own dictionary because I was doing this while using google maps which I would imagine would not have an auto correct. If I'm mistaken, then great, but I could see myself getting frustrated with google maps over time if I have trouble typing with it. I'm definitely not writing it off yet, but I'm less enthusiastic about it right now and yet I still want one to some extent for some reason.
Is there a trial period at all? If Edge is terrible where I'm going to be using it, I don't want to be stuck with it. If I can't transfer my number, I don't want to be stuck with it either.
The Sphinx said:14 day trial period (but if you bring it back after opening the box you'll be charged a 10% restocking fee).
Regarding the typing correction: It will learn words you type frequently. So if your last name is something uncommon it will learn it after a few times and start suggesting it when you type.
SonnyBoy said:Woah, there's a trial period? Do you can try the phone out on ATT for 14 days without a contract?
The Sphinx said:14 day trial period (but if you bring it back after opening the box you'll be charged a 10% restocking fee).
Regarding the typing correction: It will learn words you type frequently. So if your last name is something uncommon it will learn it after a few times and start suggesting it when you type.
But you can also accidentally add words to your dictionary by typing out a word, dismissing the autocorrect dropdown by adding another letter, then backspacing over it. Yeah, for some reason that adds a word to the dictionary file, too. And believe it or not, this confusing little problem caused us to add a number of bum words to the dict file (which you can only keep or clear in its entirety -- and no you can't back it up, either).
SuperPac said:Plus $175 to get out of the AT&T contract, I believe.
dammitmattt said:Unless it's different with the iPhone, this doesn't apply if you're within the Buyer's Remorse return policy.
EekTheKat said:It took me approx 5 minutes to convery my cingular/at&t account over to an iphone. It was surprisingly painless and easy to go through. My old phone deactivated itself within 10 minutes and I was sending and receiving calls almost right away.
tedtropy said:Gizmodo's got a pretty nice, no "BS" assessment of the phone up...
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/no-bs-iphone-review-276116.php
aparisi2274 said:I wonder if one of those 19 out of 20 major cities is NYC??
That was a good review... really touched upon a lot of the issues I have with the phone, and that is why I have yet to purchase it. I just hope that by Nov, a lot of these issues will be fixed with FW updates...
Marty Chinn said:I debated long and hard on Saturday if I should get one and decided not to after talking myself out of it. I figured if I left the house, it was over cuz I'd hit an Apple store and I'd fall in love with it. Turns out since I went out to lunch I decided to go to an Apple store any way after I had spent a few hours talking myself out of it. By the time I got to the store, I figured I was doomed and I'd be walking out with one.
However, it turns out my experience with it completely sucked and I came away empty handed and disappointed. I just had the worst time typing on it. I was hitting the wrong character half the time which meant constant backing up for me. I played with it for a good 15 to 20 min and just was terrible at typing. On top of that, the Edge network was just completely sucking for me. So bad that I have to think it was a fluke. The iPhone said it had full signal and the E was lit up to indicate Edge. Wi-Fi was turned off as well. Yet, it was impossible for me to connect about 95% of the time to anything. I would pull up google maps and it would show me a map but if I clicked on satellite view, it wouldn't be able to grab the data. I'd open up the web browser and come here, but once I got to the thread listing, if I was able to get to the thread listing, I couldn't open any threads. Yahoo would constantly time out. It was just completely underwelming and I refuse to believe the network sucks that badly. I was expecting slow but non responsive most of the time was worrysome. So it makes me wonder, was it just the store? If it was just in the store, how many other pockets in the Bay Area are like that?
At the beginning of the day, I was set on getting an iPhone either now or when it hits a revision but coming out of the store and not being able to type or connect to the Internet has me questioning if I'm going to get one at all. I'm tempted to hit an Apple Store today at lunch to see if this place is different, but I'm very not impressed right now. I even tried two different units to make sure it wasn't the unit itself.
Mine has crashed but definitely notthat often. Charge the whole thing then turn it off for a whole night. See if the problem still happens. If it does go to Apple I would say.StrikerObi said:Is Safari really buggy for anybody else? It seems to crash a lot on a good number of sites every time I visit. I can never get Digg fully loaded before it crashes. 1up crashes sometimes. Really, mine seems buggier than anybody else's. I imagine the internet would be making a lot of noise if it was this buggy for everybody else. What could be causing it? I am just surfing the internet, nothing else. I can understand 1up eating up a ton of memory... but Digg? It's not that complex.
tedtropy said:Gizmodo's got a pretty nice, no "BS" assessment of the phone up...
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/no-bs-iphone-review-276116.php
Is there anything that you think can't be fixed?
Yes. Rosie O'Donnell's vagina. There are more complications that may never be resolved. Regarding the iPhone's network partner, Pogue cites Consumer Reports when he says that AT&T has the worst or second to worst reception in 19 out of 20 major cities. Pathetic. Jason's informal testing shows it to be fine, but sound quality for me has been not good; whether that is reception or hardware, it doesn't matter. Apple is in bed with AT&T for at least 5 years. Which circles me back to my metaphor. Signing up for the iPhone is like being tossed into a menage a trois with Angelina and Rosie O'Donnell. You want the beauty, you have to sleep with the beast. Like 3G, there's no easy fix for this one, but it's something I can live with, as long as AT&T continues to do their part. Their part being "drastically improving customer service, the data and voice network, while not jacking up pricing." This is nothing we should hold our breath for, based on historical evidence.
ant1532 said:Mine has crashed but definitely notthat often. Charge the whole thing then turn it off for a whole night. See if the problem still happens. If it does go to Apple I would say.
Sportin this for the week.![]()
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LiveWire said:For anyone interested in seeing the quality of pictures from iPhone...I took these at yesterday's Nationals game in DC:
Gizmodo said:We also noticed a bug in iTunes syncing. Occasionally you will re-sync a few tracks or playlist or albums back to your phone even though the files are already there. The re-synced songs get pushed into the "other" data section, which means there's no way to reclaim this without factory resetting your phone. This bug became so bad that iTunes resynced all our music and pushed the original 2.5GB into the "other" section, which means the only way we can reclaim that space now is to run a factory reset. Luckily for you, as long as you sync before you do a factory reset, iTunes will keep your call logs, your SMS messages, and most of your settings as well so you can re-sync after the reset is done.
yayaba said:That's weird. What part of the Bay Area are you in? I've noticed no problems with the old Cingular or the new AT&T with my old phone or with the iPhone. EDGE is speedy wherever I go as long as I'm in a general metro area and not off the grid like in the mountains of Santa Cruz or one of the remote coastal areas.
I use it most often in Sacramento, on Highway 80 inbetween the Bay Area and Sac, and in the South/East Bay.
Here are my average load times:
Google Homepage: 3-5 seconds
Yahoo Homepage: 5-10 seconds
NeoGAF forum thread listing: ~10 seconds
NeoGAF actual thread with a full page of postings: ~15-20 seconds
CNN.com: over a minute... it chugs real badly
Marty Chinn said:I live in San Jose and work in Mountain View. I tried it at the Apple Store in Oakridge Mall. I also went today and tried it at the Apple Store in Stanford Shopping Center. I did a little better at typing today, but Edge was almost as bad. I was actually able to connect a bit more and I had high hopes in the beginning because GAF didn't seem to take too long to get a thread listing this time and I was able to look at a thread. However, it seemed to get slower and less responsive as I played with it more. So I got to a few pages and then it started sucking. I don't know what it is, but it was really unbearable to use and was at a point where pages either took forever and I got too impatient or they just weren't loading at all.
I really want to love this phone and even deal with Edge if it was ok, but it's not selling me so far. Again, I was ready to walk out the door with one as they had it in stock but I just couldn't do it because of the experience I was having. When GAF first loaded up, I thought, I can deal with this.
Marty Chinn said:I live in San Jose and work in Mountain View. I tried it at the Apple Store in Oakridge Mall. I also went today and tried it at the Apple Store in Stanford Shopping Center. I did a little better at typing today, but Edge was almost as bad. I was actually able to connect a bit more and I had high hopes in the beginning because GAF didn't seem to take too long to get a thread listing this time and I was able to look at a thread. However, it seemed to get slower and less responsive as I played with it more. So I got to a few pages and then it started sucking. I don't know what it is, but it was really unbearable to use and was at a point where pages either took forever and I got too impatient or they just weren't loading at all.
I really want to love this phone and even deal with Edge if it was ok, but it's not selling me so far. Again, I was ready to walk out the door with one as they had it in stock but I just couldn't do it because of the experience I was having. When GAF first loaded up, I thought, I can deal with this.
Kung Fu Jedi said:Move on. The iPhone isn't for you.
yayaba said:Hm, not sure what to say then. Are you already used to using 3g devices? I've never owned one... only EDGE devices so for me, the iPhone actually feels faster than my old phones.
Safari does chug while it's loading a page. You can scroll around, just not very quickly. Once the entire page comes up though, it's ace.
Marty Chinn said:Nope, not using 3G nor have I really used a phone that had it. I'm not really complaining about the speed at this point because the issue is more like having trouble loading up pages at all which feels like it's a weak signal or something else to have it take so long to try to load. My current phone is pretty slow since it's like almost 4 years old and it felt worse than that.
To be more specific, it would be like, I go to Amazon.com and three minutes later, I still see the icon spinning at the top and nothing on the screen.
yayaba said:This concerns me. Have any of you ran into this yet? I think I had 30 or so megs in my Other which I was wondering what that was.
yayaba said:Ok, just to test, I tried out Amazon.com on my EDGE connection here in Sacramento and here are my results:
20 seconds before I see the top menu bar on Amazon
35 seconds and I see content rendering and I can start moving on the page... wow, there are pictures of women in scantily clad undergarments...
50 seconds and the page finishes and Safari retracts its top menu bar
Amazon is probably one of the busier sites I can think of. So yeah, I'm not sure what to tell you. I was at Valley Fair this past weekend and I was surfing inside and outside the mall with similiar speeds.
If you went to multiple stores too, I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe EDGE inside the stores is gimped?
Marty Chinn said:Well the thing is, I don't have AT&T or an iPhone yet. I'm using this within the Apple Store at their display. I can try Valley Fair when I take my wife to show it to her next, but ya, I think I can handle those types of speeds, but it's not what I was seeing at all. It was fairly unresponsive. I thought it might just be the one location the first time, but now I'm wondering what's going on since I did it at two different stores on a total of four phones. I wish I knew someone that had it so I could just mess around with theirs at various spots to see what it's like but so far my only experience with Edge is within the Apple Stores.
Costanza said:Anyway, both Apple stores I went to didn't have crystal film. Shit.
Yeah, I know... but it's just nice to have. Although I walked around with it all day today with no case and it actually attracted less dust than usual, so I guess I won't worry about this until I can find one in stores with ease.Kung Fu Jedi said:Eh... you really don't need it.![]()
www.meebo.com works.cvxfreak said:AIM Express doesn't work on iPhone. =/
I really want my AIM on the thing ASAP.
yayaba said:Were the stores on Wifi or edge? Maybe they were running on Wifi and running incredibly slow.
In either case, I wish you the best of luck. The iPhone is really an incredible device. But if you feel like it isn't right for you at the moment, don't take the plunge.
With the research that you've done, if I had done the same and had the same results as you, I would've been hesitant as well.
cvxfreak said:AIM Express doesn't work on iPhone. =/
I really want my AIM on the thing ASAP.