iPhone – The Dumb Blonde of Phones?

When I went looking for a new computer for my son, I chanced upon the new iStore in Noida. As I played with the iMac, I instantly fell in love with it. The effects were too cool and it seemed like a computer built for true home computing. The fact that the design of the machine itself was also very s**y helped me make my decision to buy the iMac. It was reasonably more expensive than an equivalent PC but I think it was worth it. My son wasn’t too impressed though. The games he was used to playing didn’t run on the new Mac. This was of course an opportunity to get new games. Many of the games came with really cool graphics. The overall experience was close to the gaming station. Of course, it made my wallet lighter quite a bit.

When I saw the video preview of iPhone I was hooked. I salivated at the features presented by Mr. Jobs in the video. This will be my next phone I thought. So finally when I managed to get hold of an iPhone for myself, I was a little boy with a new toy. I was lucky to open a firmware version 1.1.1 of iPhone. This made it easier to unlock it and use it with my existing sim card. The next two days went in playing with my new toy, upsetting my family for not giving them enough time over the weekend.

After the initial euphoria of the new toy, I finally managed to use the “phone” of the iPhone, and I instantly missed my old Nokia. To start with, I couldn’t access the phone numbers and SMSs stored on my old sim card. iPhone doesn’t recognize sim card as a device on which phone numbers and messages stored. So before upgrading to iPhone figure out a way to get your phone numbers in Microsoft Outlook Contacts.

Finally after a weekend, I started on the Monday morning drive to office. The earphones are convenient contraption for hands-free driving (which unfortunately is as illegal in Delhi as using the phone itself while driving). Anyway the earphone on iPhone are very good for music but not for hands-free usage while driving. The earphones do not have any button to take a call or disconnect a call. So if you are using iPhone while driving, you still need to do things on the phone to take a call. I recommend getting a Bluetooth earpiece for hands-free on iPhone.

You will be absolutely enthralled by the finger scrolling on iPhone. It is undoubtedly one of the coolest features on iPhone. But if you want to find a contact in your contact list, you can’t just simply type the name for quick search. You still need to scroll through the list to find the contact, which is a pleasant experience initially but I miss the ability to type the first few letters of the contact name to quickly get to what I am looking for.

iPhone can’t separate the country code/city code for incoming numbers. So when I got a call, my iPhone displayed the number instead of the name, since the phone number stored in the phone was without the country/city code. I of course failed to recognize the number. The one thing that mobile phones and new technology has done is that it has reduced my ability to remember numbers. (I beginning to feel it is critical that kids get their math education without calculators.) So when the person on the other side of the line reminded me gently that he was my boss calling, I had to quickly recover from my lack of recognition. To ensure that your iPhone displays names stored in the contacts list, store your numbers including country code and city code, e.g. +91-98… or +91-11-234… etc.

iPhone also can’t send business card, or at least I haven’t figured out a way of doing this. So I am not sure how I can simply forward a phone number stored in my contacts list.

Of course, there is no end to the cool features. The SMS stored as conversation is really nice. You can see all the messages together with history. The finger scrolling feature has all the s*x appeal. The photo scrolling, zoom in and out of photos, websites etc. is fantastic. Overall the iPhone is too cool. Notwithstanding the fact that there is much improvement required in the actual “phone” of iPhone, you are sure to turn heads when you flaunt it.

PS: In case you are wondering why am I being such a prude not writing s**y etc. like DD network, it is because I am not sure what AdSense will do with the contextual advts that it shows on this site. So I am playing it safe for now till I figure these things out more.

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