My Experience With My New iPhone 3G

Well, I’ve had my iPhone for almost a week now, so I thought I’d write a little review about it.  I went to the beach this weekend and took it along with me, so it was a nice little test of what it could do.  I used its GPS to help us get there and back, and I used it to browse the internet and read email while I was traveling.  All in all, it has done everything that I have expected it to do.

I had actually never used an iPhone before.  Infact, I have never even used an iPod.  I’ve always had an old Dell DJ MP3 player that I used, and I never had the need to buy another MP3 player.  Lately though, I had been wanting to buy an iPhone.  When I read about the iPhone 3G coming out, I had to go buy one.  I’m glad I did.

App Store

Yes, I know, you’ve probably already heard way too much about the App Store.  It is a nice way to find great apps for your iPhone.  I have found many that I like to use.  The only problem that I have with it is that not just anybody can make software to put up on the app store.  If you want to program your own apps, you have to buy the software for $100.  I think we could see a lot more third party apps appearing if that price tag didn’t exist.  I know there is the jailbreaking option, but I’m not too sure about jailbreaking my iPhone just yet.  Maybe if I see something that I can’t live without then I’ll jailbreak my iPhone.

GPS

Well, the GPS is probably not as full featured as some of those more expensive GPS units that you can buy, but it does enough for me.  Being able to zoom in on your current location is great, and actually got us back on track after a couple of wrong turns this weekend.  If you get directions via GPS, it will tell you each step.  There were a couple of steps that weren’t so clear, but after looking at the map I could tell which way we needed to go.  Also, I really love the ability to search for nearby places.  Yesterday, I needed to find a place in town so I just searched for it on my iPhone and it told me where to go.

Browsing the Internet

This is one of the best features in my opinion.  The full browser allows you to view any web page as if it were being displayed on a computer.  The only downside to this is that it doesn’t support Adobe Flash or Javascript.  I know Adobe has been working on a solution for Flash for a little while, so let’s just hope that there will be some good news on that soon.

Conclusion

There are a ton of other things that I didn’t review like SMS, Email, iPod, etc.  I don’t have an SMS plan so I really can’t test that unless I want to spend some extra money.  I actually found out a way to send and receive free SMS messages through Email, which I will be making a post about this week.  I’d say the things that I use most on my iPhone so far are Safari, Email, iPod, and Youtube.  I actually haven’t found myself using many of the apps that I have downloaded that often.  I did just download the new Wordpress app for the iPhone that was just released today, and I plan on testing that out sometime soon.  I did have an issue with setting up the voicemail, which I actually just got set up yesterday.  Other than that, I’ve had a lot of fun with my new iPhone.