I’ve finally caved in and got myself an iPhone yesterday. Now that I spend a whole day playing with it I thought I should write down my first impressions. In short: It’s absolutely awesome. In long:

What I liked:

• UMTS is fricking fast, at least in Hamburg. But maybe I’m easy to impress because I’m used to surf via GPRS on my old phone (I know…). I switched to EDGE and still got about 280 kbit/sec.
• The GPS finds your position fast, cell phone tower triangulation works good too. The map starts circling your position as soon as you open it and then refines it as more data becomes available.
• Visual Voicemail! I gave up on normal voice mail. Sorry if I never even listened to messages you left. It’s just too bothersome. But I can work this!
• Location based services. This has been promised since years and now it finally works. It’s spooky though. Exposure (a Flickr app) has a feature called “Photo’s near me”. I touched it and a few seconds later it showed me a photo of a building across the street and told me it was taken 150 meters from my position.
• The AppStore can turn this little thing in just about anything. And there’s always the SDK if you want to get your own hands dirty. Some of the games are awesome.

What I can learn to live with:

• Scrolling is weird? Maybe it’s just me because I never heard anybody else complain. I’m used to drag scrollbars down when I want to scroll down. On the iPhone you drag the whole view. If you want to see the bottom of the view you drag it up. Takes some time to get used to.
• It’s a dust and finger print magnet. Maybe the white one doesn’t show them as badly? Once the screen is lit you wont see the dirt.
• I think I’ll keep using my old iPod as a music player. I’m just not used to doing that on my phone. Maybe I’ll change my mind in a few days.