Be Excellent To Each Other

Good luck myp. Right, anyone still not got one?

Hello Sofa! I have some Sennheiser CX-300s - will I need an adaptor as well? What do you mean it's deep within the case?

You know iPhones have the features of a dead fish, no real keypad and will attract every scratch, fingerprint and scuff for a mile, within about 5 seconds...

Why are you trying to rain on everyone's parade in this thread? You've already given your opinion of them earlier - you don't need to keep repeating yourself.

They float?

I am stating a fact, so that people know of this and look further into it before perhaps wasting money.
You don't need to be hostile.

I've not had a go of one, but they look a bit too large to be very practical

They're actually incredibly resilient to scratches. I've had mine about three months now and have never bothered with an outer case for it, I just carry it around in my pocket and the screen is still absolutely scratch free. All my previous mobile phones normally look like shit after a couple of months of my ownership. It does pickup fingerprints, but as a big speccy four-eyes I usually have a glasses cleaning cloth with me that I can just give it a quick wipe with. It comes with it's own cleaning cloth, too.

As for the headphones thing - yeah, you do need an adaptor unfortunately. The earphone socket is recessed into the phone in such a way that only iPod earphones can reach it. I bought an adaptor for a couple of quid online though, so I can use my Sennheiser 'phones on it myself.

I wasn't being hostile - don't be defensive.

I'm sure anyone who is willing to part with a big wodge of cash will look into the features and see whether they want one or not. I've read Grim...'s account of his and I'm still willing to take the chance. I want a great-looking phone with a good UI. It fits the bill perfectly.

I've seen the case close up and have heard a lot of reviews complaining about scratches. Hm.
You're posts come across as very hostile Myo, perhaps you should check 'em.

Does anyone else agree that I appeared hostile?

Not me, dude.

I do, you bum-sniffing, goat-faced boob.

Fuck off, Craster.



I love you really.

I know Pocket Pete, and he can barely carry any phone.

But are you talking about the demonstrator phones they have in O2 and Apple Stores, or an actual one owned by someone whose spanked a couple of hundred quid on it? The ones in the shops do look a bit rough, but they have school kids fiddling with them everyday. A bit like the demonstrator Nintendo DS we had in GS that some little fuckmonkeys used the stylus on to permanently etch their little doodles into the screen (before it got ripped off the demo pod and nicked that is).

Cripes, it's in my sweaty mitts. Wish me luck!

Owned ones.

Right, look. First my credentials. I am a gadget hound. I have used PDAs extensively over the last ten years: Psion Series 3mx[1], Revo, two Palm Tungstens, a Sharp Zaurus, and a bunch of quite high end phones -- 6230, T610, K750i. Etc. I've been around the block here, is what I'm saying. Also, I know several people who work in CPWs so I've used most of the major phones I haven't owned.

For nearly two years now I've been using a HTC TyTN, branded as the Orange SPV m3100. In some ways it is unbelievably good. It has a proper QWERTY pad. It has WiFi and Bluetooth and HSDPA-compatible 3G. It has a very nice 320x240 screen, 64Mb of RAM, 128Mb flash, 6Gb in the memory card slot. It has a pretty quick processor and reasonable 2d video acceleration. Even two years on, it basically has everything that any modern smartphone has; the only two knocks against it really are the camera (which is 2MP and not great) and the lack of GPS (I have a Bluetooth unit for that). Spec-wise, then, it utterly outmatches the iPhone.

But software wise it sucks. It's running the very latest Windows Mobile, 6.1, and it's still awful. It's sluggish, taking upwards of 2-3 second to switch apps or rotate the screen. The z-ordering gets messed up all the time, so dialogs end up hidden under topmost windows, unseen. It keeps losing the "SMS received" sound. It needs to rebooted every few days. Pocket IE has to have it's temporary files cleaned out every week or so because they fill the internal disk. Pocket IE itself is downright crap, taking 20-30 seconds to render simple pages, and doing a downright crappy job of it. The PIM support is much worse than that found on the Palm devices from a decade ago and the syncing with Outlook has freaked out and duplicated all my contacts and appointments not once, but twice. I have plenty more stuff like this if you want it.

Look, what I'm saying here is that Just Fucking Works is a feature and it's one where the iPhone totally outclasses the competition. This tedious argument I keep seeing all over the internet about "it doesn't to such-and-such" is totally bogus because it overlooks the key point: the user experience on the iPhone is streets and streets ahead of any other device and that counts for a lot. Whether it outweighs the things the iPhone doesn't do depends on the user, and is a judgement call you make you buy it or not -- I'm not saying the iPhone is right for you. But you shouldn't comdemn others for buying it just because you've failed to see the key part of its value proposition. That's just rude.

My perfect phone would have the same sort of sliding QWERTY pad as the TyTN, but I'll take an on-screen QWERTY over a T9 keypad for anything beyond SMS messaging. Entering URLs, for example, is exceedingly fiddly on T9; in this regard the iPhone is, not ideal, but a reasonable compromise.

[1] Bought second hand off the son of David Potter, the company founder. TRUFAX.

Everyone calm the fuck down about the iPhone.

No features? Mine's got an NES emulator, a SNES emulator, a Mega Drive emulator, a GBA emulator, two guitar simulators, a piano simulator, an FTP server, an AFP server, an RSS reader, a version of Backgammon, a version of Tetris, a first-person shooter, an HP-16C programmer's calculator emulator, a password storage app and an ear trainer for musicians. That's on top of the usual features (IMAP for my Google *and* Yahoo email accounts, the best mobile web browser around, and it plays music and videos). Oh, and it's a phone, too.

It's a great piece of kit.

mrbogus, are the third-party emulators and such any good? How do you control them?

Of course there's an arguement over if the iPhone is any good compared to the competition. But I think the point of this thread is you can't buy 'the competition' for £179 unlocked anywhere.

If anyone that dislikes the iPhone knows a phone with a better feature set and more functionality at that price I'm sure we'll be all ears.

Although I'm just bitter as:
I need a new phone.
I can't afford one.

I think, CUS, that one of the main functions of a forum is for debate, some of those will be a bit 'heated', but most intelligent people (of which these boards are pretty fully comprised) know to state their reasons for their opinions and accept that some people will disagree. As long as people give reason for their disagreements (and not simply say 'you're wrong', or just 'it's crap', over and over with no justification) then such threads will (and should) be part of the boards. If everyone agreed and such debates on subjects both big and small didn't take place then we'd be left with a pretty bland board. As long as people don't take to personal insults then healthy debate should be encouraged - for one thing the conversation here will help some people decide whether they want one of these gadgets or not (see, I'd quite like one but a] don't have the money, and b] don't really like mobile phones )

Hrm, it's not a fact that they are easily scratched and scuffed though. That might be your opinion, but, with all due respect, it's not true.

Nobody is claiming that the iPhone is perfect in every way, in fact it has some major shortcomings in its features list if you compare it to equivalent-priced phones from other manufacturers. Everyone knows this. And people here are big enough to make their own decisions, I think

I know. I tried to start such a debate recently. I mostly just got people telling me to calm the fuck down about what to them, seemed like a pointless thing to be having a slagging match about.

Everyone calm the fuck down about the iPhone.

I just give another side to the debate, I don't like to be ebaten for it which it's starting to feel like..so, yeah.
All my arguments can be found via google. Not worth getting heated over an overpriced phone.

YOU calm the fuck down, Cussy Wussy!

No, everyone calm the fuck down.

So are these emulators and such any good, then? Can e.g. a Megadrive be adequately controlled by what I presume is some kind of weird touch-joypad?

The emulators are still in the early stages. None of them is perfect. The GBA emulator is probably the most advanced, in that its sound isn't too bad and the speed is fairly consistent. The SNES emulator doesn't have sound yet and is far too fast. The Mega Drive emulator has sound, but it's nowhere near accurate, and when it's active the emulator slows down. The NES emulator varies in speed a lot and the sound jitters. Lots of potential, but it's not a great emulation platform yet.

All of the emulators use the same control system. You can either have the iPhone portrait or landscape. When in portrait orientation, the top half of the screen shows the game, whilst the lower half displays a bitmap of the original controller. You touch the buttons on the controller picture. When in landscape orientation, the controls are overlaid onto the (full screen) game display.

Both modes have problems. In portrait mode, the game display has to be scaled to fit into the top half of the iPhone's screen (although this is quite probably *larger* than the original resolution anyway). In landscape, you can't see most of the screen because your thumbs are in the way. In both, the control isn't accurate because there's no tactile feedback. You can't tell if you've hit a button accurately because it feels the same as not hitting a button and, as your thumb is over the picture, you can't see if you've hit it or not. (Same problem with ScummVM, but as you need to be considerably more accurate there I've given up and removed it.)

The speed and sound problems should be easy to overcome. It's got a 600MHz CPU after all, even if it is clocked down to ~400MHz. It's still 333MHz faster than a DS. The control problems will be insurmountable unless someone comes up with a way of attaching a real joypad to the dock connector, although once the frame rates are good enough, it should be possible to become more accurate through practice.

MESSAGE TO ALL EXISTING O2 CUSTOMERS:

Because I was curious, I decided to have a look at the official activation sequence first. Apparently, you can use your existing SIM/number as there's an option to do so. BUT if you've joined O2 or upgraded since September, you'll be charged an additional £269. I last upgraded in Jan 2007, so I might actually go ahead and do this.

I can always jailbreak it at a later date, surely?

I don't think you are being 'ebeaten' ( ), Shewolf, but rather asked to state proof of what you claim to be 'fact' rather than personal opinion. I think people on these boards accept opinion as is, and will respect you for such, but they will also usually expect you to justify your opinions and give some kind of evidence when you claim something to be fact.

Also, calm down CUS.

What sockets, ports etc. does the Apple 8GB 1st gen. iPhone have? It doesn't have Bluetooth (right?) which is a shame.

Speaking in mind of mrbogus' very interesting post about the state of playing cool games and fun stuff with wicked grafix on cor the iPhone, woo!

It's got Bluetooth (allegedly crippled, although the only mention of that I've seen is by people who resort to making up problems with it rather than pointing out any of the actual flaws, of which there are a few). It's also got 54g wireless (proper wireless, not half-baked wireless on the cheap like the DS) and the dock connector. As the dock connector gives you USB and FireWire compatibility I'd say there's plenty of scope for expansion, should any companies want to release more complex add-ons for it.

It does have Bluetooth, but with a poor software stack behind it and very limited profile support; only Headset and Handsfree in fact. No A2DP (stereo headphones), Serial, or any other neat stuff. Hopefully this will be fixed in a patch; there are references in the latest official Apple beta firmware to A2DP, at least.

As for ports, I think it's just headphones (with stupid over-recessed jack as discussed elsewhere in the thread) and the normal iPod Dock connector on the bottom. You can get line outs and video outs from the Dock.

What mrbogus means here is that it supports WPA and not just WEP like the DS does. The difference is software, mind you, not hardware.There is no USB Host support I am aware of, so you are never going to be able to plug it into USB devices like printers or anything. Additionally, Apple are quite stringent on what they do and don't support on the Dock connector, and they have categorically started there will be no SDK support for the Dock connector. Unless they change their minds this means there will likely never be any plug in joypads, or suchlike hardware add-ons. In fact I don't think the microphone add-ons that can be used on the 4G and 5G iPods work either.

Wow, I had no idea that so much hacked 3rd party things were going on for the iPhone. I suppose it makes sense though since it is the most hyped and wanted gadget of the last 12 months. It seems to be very HW capable, so its ace that this is getting thoroughly explored by 3rd party people. If the 2nd gen one can sell for about 200 quids, has a better capacity (40GB or more, please) and Rockbox can be ported to it so I don't have to use apple software to listen to music, I'd be pretty tempted to get one, I reckon.

Damnation, I was hoping they'd been daft enough to put USB or something on. I've not heard of A2DP before - that's interesting. I *would* get some nice Bluetooth headphones, too, if they patched that in for the iPhone. I have to say, in terms of feature-set, I'm getting more and more interested (and would have had one already but for silliness with rezoned postcodes).

I say - who needs 3G to download rubbish clips of awful movies, when you have (early) emulators running at 600mhz and several gigs of my most favouritest songs ever? I don't want or need internet-over-3G, but if I'm in a pub with wi-fi I might want to check the news. Hoorah! Anyone want to buy... three iPods?

edit: glad to hear it supports WEP and WPA properly too, yes, that does irritate me lots about the DS. Ooo. OOOO.

They are neat. I have a pair of these which I use with my HTC Windows Mobile smartphone. They are OK; not awesome but OK. In isolation with good signal, the sound quality (listening to typical 128k compressed stuff, WMA or AAC) is equivalent to normal cheapy headphones, not as good as a reasonable pair of 'cans of course as the sound is recompressed for transmission over Bluetooth. The signal range is typically pretty good, I can put my phone on the side in the kitchen and wander around the whole room cooking food and generally have no interruptions to the music.

The headphones have transport controls on them too (start/stop/next/prev) and also have a microphone for phone calls. They are a neat gadget. The biggest problem I have with them is the physical design, I would prefer a wraparound pair with the band around the back of my neck -- these ones I have fall off your ears a bit too easily. The biggest advantage is never having to untangle the cord when I pull them out of my pocket, and that is definitely a plus. Oh, battery life is something like 10 hours or so, so effectively unlimited as long as I've remembered to charge them recently.

I disagree with this and this is why I am holding off. I have 3G internet on my phone now and even with the crappiest browser I have ever used being able to pull Google Reader up and skim some headlines while I'm in queues or whatnot is acebestness. I'd really hate to give that up. Now, admittedly, I actually do most of my browsing over EDGE and not 3G because of O2's coverage in my area -- but that will change over time as they build the network out. Plus, the 3G iPhone will possibly clean up some of the other things with the hardware too, like not have such a dimwit headphone jack, and perhaps a better camera. Oh, and you never know, they may even add GPS (it comes as standard on a lot of System-on-Chip chipsets now). None of these things is particularly compelling, but I'm a patient guy, and to me at least they add up to "wait a few weeks and see" and not "BUY BUY BUY RUN DON'T WALK".

It's touch and go mind! I'm really close to snapping. But I'm tough. I can hold out.

The Ars Technica mob shoved their iPhone in a pocked with a set of keys, and then tried scratching the screen with the keys in more direct fashion. The result? No scratches.


Sounds similar to what one of the senior editors at a very prominent tech mag said to me when we chatted a couple of weeks back. He's gone from 'iPhone sceptic' to 'iPhone happy', because—in his words—this is the first time this tech has ever really worked—and he's seen and used literally hundreds of similar devices.

As for the keypad, the lack of a tactile device has problems in some cases (just try using the iPhone NES emulator), but it also means the device is in no way restricted UI-wise by convention. Want a specific set-up for your app? Design it and bung it on the screen. This is where things are going, and it's not going to be long before everyone's copying. For Apple, this is a second chance to not fuck up (having disastrously lost control of the PC market in the 1980s)—this time, it looks like the company's getting most things right, although it still needs to understand that places outside of the USA are not the USA.

It's only gone and worked (the official way, not teh H4xx0r way). It deactivated the SIM in my old and activated the one in the iPhone. I'm on the same tariff as before, only the 18-months has reset (I was on an 18 month contract anyway).

This is what I would ideally want out of the iPhone:

1. A good, quick, easy-to-use phone
2. A decent iPod
3. A decent portable video player
4. A portable web browser over wi-fi
5. Ability to view those mobile webpage thingies over GPRS
6. A few decent games, maybe emulators
7. Decent battery life
8. Good camera
9. Decent video recording

Here's what I understand of it how it would live up to that, from a quick go on one:

1. Absolutely fine, except apparently you can't forward SMS messages
2. A given, surely? I don't need more than about 6gb due to disliking 99% of all music.
3. Fine, surely? Didn't get to test it.
4. Looked good to me.
5. No idea. Due to my pay-as-you-go meanness, I only have GPRS on the go so this is fairly important (although the city centre is fully wi-fi)
6. There must be a half-decent solitaire and othello, surely? I know emulators are right out, as the quick go I had showed them to be utterly uncontrollable with the touch screen.
7. No idea.
8. The camera seemed embarrassingly poor.
9. There is no video recording, is there?

Am I even vaguely correct?

As ASHEN said, Battery life of the iPhone is something that I feel annoyed for not asking about / looking for already. Tch. What's it like then, eh?

A thick little twat from some Carphone Warehouse callcentre called the other day to advise me that it's upgrade time again!

Further, as I've been with O2 for five years, 'we want to do you a deal!' The deal, apparently, is either an upgrade of £100 cash back.

He offered me a Nokia 6300, which is barely different from my existing 6233 (which I have a number of gripes with... crappy web browser and pathetic internal memory among them).

I said I was interested in the iPhone, and he burbled a bit of nonsense while constantly consulting with some colleague as he didn't seem to know much.

Thing is, there's also those new LG touchscreen phones which are rather similar.

So... is it worth forking over £169 for a 8Gb iPhone (or even the ridiculously huge whack for an extra 16Gb so it can accomodate my mp3 collection), or get one of the LG phones, or just tell them to fuck off?

I'd get the LG phone so your mates don't take the piss out of your iPhone...

But I'm one of his mates and I'd take the piss out of the Viewty! MeatAngle, I heard mixed views of the Viewty; it has a very good camera, but no WiFi, which sucks. The music and video is inferior to the iPhone too. Look, what make computer are you reading this on? 'Nuff said.

But the question then is do I pay mass-o-whack for the 16 gig iPhone, or 8 gig one on the cheap and then get an iPod Classic for my musicy needs, and thus carry TWO Apple-shaped products around with me?

Also, what's so wrong with the LG? Just wondering. I'm wondering if I should go and visit one of our mutual CPW-employed friends for guidance.

iPhone > LGphone > Hannsphone

Well, if you can't live with 8Gb of storage, my personal choice would be to wait for the 3G iPhone; after the 8Gb-only price cut the 16Gb is stupendously expensive. My guess is the 3G one will bump the capacities to 16Gb/32Gb, although I could be very wrong here. Carrying two devices would surely defeat a big part of the point of an iPhone in the first place? Also, just how much music are you going to carry around anyway? Although I have ~35Gb in my biggest iTunes library, that's all in Apple Lossless Encoding format i.e. huge. If you go to 128k AAC, or even 192k, you get a lot in 8Gb and although the lossy ripping isn't the best for audio quality I reckon easily good enough for the on the move / in the car typical iPod use cases.

It's just not as slick as the iPhone, as I understand it, and doesn't have WiFi which feels like a step back to me. Unless you are in 3G areas all the time (I'm not, Cwmbran is still 2.5G for O2) then that's a bit of a knock against the web browsing. Also, "friend" singular these days, it's just Nick left there now. He hates the iPhone for the same reasons other do in this thread i.e. he can't see past the spec sheet (also, as they don't technically sell the contracts, he might get far less commission off them too). I'm sure he'd be happy to let you play with them both though -- you know what store he's in now? No amount of internet punditry, even mine, beats your own hands-on time with the devices.

My collection at the moment is 14.09Gb, and when I ripped my CDs in I deliberately did them at MP3 encoding 160 or 192k. Only stuff I downloaded is going to be in anything different.

I've played with a colleague's iPhone and am stupendously impressed with the limited time I've spent with it. The only real negatives for me are the small capacity and the price. The LG was suggested by the aforementioned telesales bloke (who didn't know what he was on about, from the sound of things)