So I went out and got the new iPhone 3G on Saturday 7/12. The second day’s seemingly short line only took me 4.5 hours at the Apple store to get one, but I did finally get one! For those thinking of getting one, don’t even consider going to the AT&T store. Apple ships them with very limited quantities (~40 total for all 3 varieties) so you won’t get one that you want unless you’re the first 10 in line! If you’re going to the Apple store, make sure to check your local store’s availability.

My last phone is the Nokia N95 so most of my impressions will be to comparing the iPhone to the N95. I seriously thought the N95 would last me for many years. Guess I got suckered into the Apple hype.

So with that, here’s some of my initial impressions in no particular order:

Buying Experience

I didn’t buy the first iPhone, but I heard people just went in, bought the phone, and left: simple, quick transaction. The difficult part of buying the 1st iPhone was finding a store that still had the phone in stock. I purchased my N95 from a web retailer, so was just a buy, ship deal. For the iPhone 3G, Apple really screwed up the buying experience. This is just another example of where money/profit/margin takes priority over customer satisfaction. Forcing everyone to activate in-store is what led to 4.5 hours of my life gone. Since the Apple store can’t handle all the activation cases, I noticed most people buying at the Apple store having to call up their provider because of problems. One family held up an Apple employee and all of us in line for 45 minutes trying to get their account figured out. Eventually, the family didn’t even buy an iPhone, wasting everyone’s time. My activation took only 10 minutes since I was a simple new AT&T customer. I figure most people on average took 20-30 minutes.

Web Browsing

Much nicer on the iPhone. The larger screen and navigating pages through the touch screen is a lot simpler and more efficient than on the Nokia. Pages just load much faster (unless you’re multitasking, see that section) on the iPhone than the Nokia.

On a note of web browsing, this is also my first time with mobile internet. One word: awesome! I have no idea how I lived all these years without mobile internet! Even though it’s awesome, I am paying 2-3 times more for this iPhone AT&T plan than my original plan though. Ouch.

Call Audio Quality

The iPhone is really good. People have said I come in crystal clear. The earpiece on the phone is a lot clearer than my N95. The microphone is really sensitive, picking up the slightest noise. The included iPod headphones double as a hands-free headset with a small speaker on the right headphone. If you put on both headsets, you can actually hear your caller in stereo!

The speaker phone is OK. You won’t be able to hear your caller in a noisy environment (ie. out in the streets), but a quiet room will work just fine.

User Experience

iPhone wins in this category. The previous winner was Nokia, but iPhone sure makes the UX really nice with really good graphics, metaphors, and transitions. The large screen and high resolution icons make the Home screen a pleasure to the eye.

Another elegance of the iPhone compared to the N95 is the transitions. If you’re listening to music and a call comes in, the music fades out and the ringtone comes in. On the N95, when a phone call comes in, the music stops abruptly and the ringtone rings. A small thing, but nevertheless shows Apple’s elegance in offering the best user experience for the user.

On that note, the touch screen on the iPhone can be a hit or miss. Because it’s a touch screen with no tactile response, I always end up looking at the screen. There’s no way you can “feel” your way around the controls like you can do with gadgets with physical buttons. The iPhone has to be one of the worst phones to use in the car. With my N95, I can keep my eyes on the road while I change the volume, change songs, and play/pause.

Listening to Music

Hands down, the audio quality on the iPhone is far superior to the N95. Unlike the N95, there’s no annoying hissing noise on the iPhone. The iPod UI on the iPhone is much improved over the old iPod UI on my 4G iPod. Finally I can repeat/shuffle without having to navigate 5 levels of menus. For ease of use and great user experience, the iPhone has the better music player compared to the N95′s music player. For functionality, the N95 music player is better than the iPhone.

Playing music over the speaker phone is decent. Similar to talking on the phone, it’s hard to hear in a noisy environment. Otherwise, perfectly audible in a quiet room.

One favorite, unexpected feature is being able to view lyrics of a song while it’s playing. If you have lyrics embedded in the ID3 tag of the music file, tapping the album art while a song is paying will display the song progress and overlay the lyrics.

Watching Videos

Watching videos on the iPhone is far superior to the N95. The huge 3.5 inch screen is much more enjoyable than the 2.6 inch N95-1 screen. The resolution is also much larger (480×320 vs. 320×240). These 2 factors alone make watching videos on the iPhone so much better.

Unfortunately, typical of Apple, there’s just some missing features that make the whole feature feel incomplete. First, why can’t we watch videos in portrait mode? A video podcast can be viewed in both portrait and landscape, why can’t movies? Second, why can’t we have a video playlist? Once again, video podcasts can be added into playlists, why not movies?

Build Quality

The iPhone feels much more solid than the N95 (version 1). The N95 has locations where it can flex and the innards are exposed. On the other hand, the iPhone is completely solid. One thing I know for sure though is that the N95 can take a beating. I haven’t tested yet whether the iPhone can take a beating yet without completely shattering. I know many people where this would be an important “feature” to have.

Spec-wise, the iPhone is heavier than the N95 (138g vs. 120g). Holding both phones evenly in hand, they feel about the same. If the iPhone is off center, then it feels heaving in my hand. In my pocket, the weight difference is unnoticeable. The thinness of the iPhone is definitely noticeable compared to the N95. Size-wise, the N95 is sure “fat”.

The most annoying thing of the iPhone build is the finger prints left all over. It just picks up finger prints way too easily! For neat freaks like myself, the finger prints all over the phone is just too hard to ignore. I bought an Invisible shield to wrap the phone in so that fixes the fingerprint problem.

Keyboard

The keyboard is easy to get used to and works surprisingly well. It took me just a couple of minutes before I started typing really quick. A full keyboard is just so much easier than typing with a number pad and T9. Just like the original iPhone, the keyboard is a touch screen keyboard, with the button you’re pressing magnified. When you type out a full word but mistyped a few letters, the iPhone is smart enough to recognize what you’re trying to type. 95% of the time it is correct.

The auto-correct feature also doubles as a auto-complete feature. Sometime auto-correct would recognize the word I’m tying before I’m complete. If that happens, I can just hit Space and complete the word without typing the rest of the word. Unfortunately since I always end up staring at the keyboard most of the time, I usually see the auto-correct word by the time I’ve completed the word, so no help there.

The on-screen keyboard and the auto-correct feature reveals a disadvantage with virtual keyboards: they use the processor. Once you multitask enough on the iPhone, even the keyboard lags significantly. At onetime, it would take me 2-3 seconds after typing a letter for the letter to show up! See the Multitasking section later.

Chinese Support

And of course one of the new features with the iPhone 3G and iPhone v2.0 update is the international language support. Since traveling to Taiwan last year, I’ve found being able to input Chinese on my phone indispensable. My European N95 at first didn’t support Chinese input. However since failing and having it fixed when I was in Taiwan, Nokia Taiwan actually installed the Chinese firmware on my phone. Because of that, now I have asian font support as well as Chinese input with zhuyin and pinyin.

The iPhone always had (so I’ve read) asian language support pre-2.0 you could read asian fonts. However Chinese input is something new with 2.0. Playing around with it, I have to say it is awesome being able to write your word in. If you prefer pinyin, support for that is also there, but unfortunately there’s no zhuyin. Actually writing the word out as an input method also has a side benefit of forcing me to learn how to write a word if I forgot it!

Multitasking

The iPhone really sucks in the multitasking category. This was a shocking revelation the first time I realized this problem. I multitask on my Nokia all the time:

• Listening to music while browsing net
• Listening to music while using GPS
• Listening to music while taking a picture
• Taking a picture while using GPS
• Listening to music, using GPS, taking a picture (this one is a stretch, but most times it works)

The iPhone can barely handle any of these tasks without having an application crash or the music stutter. Talk about a sore disappointment: the power of OS X in your hand, yet it can’t even handle 2 processes. True the N95 sucked at multitasking when it was initially launched due to limited RAM and bad memory code, but it was significantly improved with the latest update by adding memory paging support. I hope the iPhone’s multitasking problem isn’t due to hardware and that Apple will be making a similar update to smooth the multitasking experience in the near future.

GPS

The GPS on the iPhone is not true GPS. It is assisted-GPS. A-GPS uses cell phone towers to triangulate your location instead of using GPS satellites. While A-GPS has it’s advantages, it also has the disadvantage of not working when you don’t have a cell phone signal. Having GPS was one of the main functionality holding me back from the original iPhone (since I had GPS on the N95). Now holding the iPhone 3G in my hand after hearing about GPS support, I am so disappointed to learn that it is only A-GPS and not true GPS. The iPhone also does not support Bluetooth GPS connections. If you’re not going to give us true GPS, the least you can do is allow us to use an external GPS device! Very disappointing indeed.

The N95 has built in support for both A-GPS and has a GPS chip built in for true satellite GPS. Clearly the N95 in this.

Missing Features

And of course there’s lots of other missing features of the iPhone that the N95 has:

• Video Recording: um, which modern phone today doesn’t have this?
• Bluetooth A2DP: I don’t have any such headsets, but c’mon… all advance smartphones nowadays have this!
• Wireless sync: My N95 can automatically sync with my computer once I come close enough through bluetooth. The iPhone has no way to automatically/wirelessly sync with your computer. So now I have to always bring a cable around wherever I go?
• Call Log with details: um… every phone in the world has some kind of detailed call timer, details. Why doesn’t the iPhone have one? I’m guessing once again it has something to do with profits.

So which is better? Both devices have their pros and cons. When you buy an iPhone, you’re buying one for the experience, not the features. If you look at the features of the iPhone, you will be very disappointed. For a 2008 phone, it has the features of a 2003 phone. However if you look at the phone through the user experience perspective, it is clearly a 2010 phone. No current phone comes even close to how slick the UI is on the iPhone.

That said, the iPhone really needs to catch up on the features as well and fix some of their existing features. First they need to support multitasking better: add more memory, add a faster CPU. Second they need to fix some of their basic features. Third, add features that every phone in the world currently has. The saving grace for the iPhone is the 3rd party support. Finally Apple allows us to create our own applications to fill in the holes of the iPhone native software. I am not impressed with the applications currently on the App Store, but hopefully that is just because it’s new. Hopefully, with time, applications will mature and become more usable.