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The First Eight Things I Did With My Neighbor's iPhone

Somehow, I utterly failed to snag an iPhone. On the fated date of June 29, I waited in line at several AT&T stores as well as one Apple store, but to no avail. While everyone else in the mobile blogosphere played with their iPhones, I waited and sulked with envy. In fact, I am still waiting. I have one on order and soon I will taste the sweet, sweet joys that come from owning the it phone of 2007. However, I did get my hands on one last night. So now I get to tell you about the first eight things I did with it.

As you may remember, last month I detailed the eight things I planned to do with an iPhone once I got my hands one. Well, here is the list with my responses:

"8. Savor that heavenly iPhone ring tone."

Apparently, they changed the ringtone from the one Steve Jobs showed off in January. Not that I didn't enjoy the new iPhone ringtone, but frankly, I was a little disappointed. I was also disappointed to see that you can't set any of music in iTunes as your ringtone. That was a bummer. But, the quality of the sound was great.

"7. Test that much-hyped, new-fangled type interface."

I actually liked the virtual keyboard. For quick messages, it's perfectly adequate. I missed the feedback of real keys -- perhaps Apple can mimic the manual touch of keys with some form of haptic technology in the next version.

"6. See how long the battery lasts."

Well, my friend didn't let me keep his iPhone for eight hours, but for the two hours I played with it, the battery lasted for a pretty long time. So far, I am impressed.

Oh, and using Wi-Fi access on the iPhone is way easier than on any other handheld I've used to date.

"5. Slam it on my desk."

I tried to, but my friend stopped me. I'll have to wait until my iPhone arrives.

"4. See how quickly the iPhone can surf the Web."

On Wi-Fi the mobile version of Safari is blazing fast and beautiful. On AT&T's EDGE network, it is slow, but not as slow as the early reviews two weeks ago indicated (or as slow as I thought it would be). Maybe my colleague Eric Zeman was right. AT&T really upgraded their EDGE data speeds.

"3. Test the quality of the mobile version of Safari."

Even though it didn't render certain sites all that well, I liked the mobile version of Safari. And some pages, including the New York Times and InformationWeek, looked really good, at least in my opinion.

"2. Make a phone call."

I made five phone calls on my friend's iPhone. Two local calls and three long distance. The call quality was... not so great. I found the quality of the phone on the iPhone to be about the same as that on most BlackBerries about two years ago. It wasn't horrible, there is, however, a lot of room for improvement. And dialing on the iPhone is far from easy or intuitive.

"1. Enjoy complaining about my kludgy iPhone."

Well, I don't have mine in my hands yet, so I will have to wait a little bit longer for this one.

How about you? How many of your have kicked down for an iPhone? If so, what do you think? Please, post your reviews below.

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