Day number three of the next generation of the iPhone and here are the highs and lows:
Highs:
1. Speed. Yep, it’s definitely zippier. I wouldn’t call it screaming fast, but certainly some annoyances of waiting between applications to open have been alleviated;
2. Search. The whole phone search feature is really nice. Searching calendar, inbox, contacts, etc. really adds useful data when my old brain is trying to remember things;
3. Battery Life. It’s better. In fact, yesterday was the first day that I’ve ever made it through a whole day without a recharge. Yee Haw!
4. Compass. It’s neat to look at. 
Lows:
1. Multitasking. Really? The makers of Mac OS still can’t figure this out. Argh.
2. MMS. Who knows how long it will take to work. AT&T, you suck. ‘Nuff said.
3. Calendar. This one is still the killer. Why on earth are phone numbers and addresses that are added to the "location" field in Outlook appointments not clickable? This was in my Windows 5.1 phone 5 years ago. I can’t believe that I can’t go into my calendar and click to call or click to find a location.
Interestingly, one feature that I haven’t really used is cut and paste. In the words of my partner Ryan McIntyre, "I’ve trained myself to not use the cut and paste feature in previous versions." I think that I’m in the same boat.
So overall, nice upgrade, but I think that I would trade them most all of them for an actionable location field in my calendar. In some ways, I’m surprised that the legal eagles at Apple haven’t told the product guys that they HAVE to do this. It’s mighty dangerous driving and trying to pull up calendar entries and then get the phone number dialed in. This is especially true due to the lack of multitasking.
To lows I would add "tethering". For me, that's the difference between using my computer only in places offering wifi, and using it practically anywhere. Really looking forward to that one.
Glad they got speed nailed. If you happened to try the early betas of OS 3.0, it was quite the opposite. Like "waiting seconds between keyboard presses" opposite.
Comment by charlieok — June 24, 2009 @ 1:01 am
well said on all fronts. only additions I'd make are… app UI event speed is insanely improved IMO, and secondly having an actual camera (not amazing, but a massive improvement) have been a huge help.
Comment by Jud Valeski — June 24, 2009 @ 2:18 am
Agreed. I’m find out, too, that I love the video capability.
Comment by Jason Mendelson — June 24, 2009 @ 2:23 am
The iPhone actually does support multitasking (many of the built-in apps run in the background, as they have since 1.0). I believe Apple made the business decision not to allow this in third-party apps for performance reasons. The Palm Pre does allow this, and I think it will be interesting to see in the long-term whether the user experience suffers as a result (essentially they leave it up to the user to police CPU and memory utilization. Honest people can disagree about whether this is a good idea in a phone). I also suspect that push notification functionality may obviate background processing for many applications; we'll see as 3.0 updates for apps trickle out.
The no-clicky thing in the Calendar app is a mystery. I noticed they finally added the capability to create a meeting request from the phone (albeit with no view of the other participants' calendars), so hopefully this won't be too far behind. Overall a huge upgrade, and I'm glad I waited for the 3G S before upgrading my gen-1 iPhone.
Comment by Mike Merideth — June 24, 2009 @ 1:03 pm