So I wanted to wait about a week to get a good idea of my initial impressions before I wrote a review on the Apple iPhone here. To make a long story short, I’m happy with my purchase. It’s the best phone I’ve ever had. There are some things that I really like about the phone, and other things that I think could be improved. Last Friday I stood in line with all the other Apple fans. Everyone seemed to be pretty excited for the product. With all the hype surrounding the product and a six month wait I can’t really blame them. I was actually going to pass on the first generation and wait for the second so I had bought a Blackberry Pearl a little over a month before. I was telling myself I’ll just wait, but as the June 29 date approached I realized I was going to get an iPhone. I showed up at my local Apple Store at around 6:30 PM. I figured I wasn’t going to camp and if I didn’t get one that day I could just wait. After waiting about half an hour I got through the store with an 8GB iPhone in hand.

I cracked open the small box and there was the iPhone unit. The package also included an AC adaptor, USB cable, dock, headphones, cleaning cloth, and a little bit of documentation. The unit was a lot smaller than I thought it was going to be. I had first seen the iPhone at Macworld it was in the case, so I had an idea, but it always seems like you can get a better feel for a product when you can touch and see it as opposed to just see it. The iPhone has an 8GB flash drive, 3.5-inch widescreen multi-touch display, 480×320 resolution, quad-band GSM, Wi-Fi, EDGE, Bluetooth, and a 2.0 megapixel camera.

I plugged the Apple iPhone into the dock and it was recognized in iTunes 7.3. I was able to add the iPhone data plan to my AT&T account and the phone activated successfully. I transfered about 2GB of music, 1.5 GB of photos, 3GB of videos, and the rest of the space was used for email, contacts, calendars, and the software that comes on the iPhone. There are a series of programs that run on the mobile OS X operating system: Text, Calendar, Photos, Camera, YouTube, Stocks, Maps, Weather, Clock, Calculator, Notes, Settings, Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod.

So as a phone, the call quality is pretty good. The address book is easy to use and it’s easy to be on one call and add another for a conference call. As far as text messaging, SMS messages work like an iChat window. The iPhone does not support MMS messages. I got one and it said to logon to the AT&T website. I couldn’t look at it from the phone either because it was encoded in Flash. That got me thinking maybe MMS messaging is all encoded in Flash and the iPhone will get support at a later date. Don’t quote me on that. I’m just speculating. As of right now no MMS. The calendar and camera work as intended like any other smart phone I’ve used in the past. The iPhone does not take videos, but takes nice 2 megapixel shots as long as there is enough light because there is no flash (flash as in a small lightbulb, not Adobe Flash - no pun intended).

Email is the best I’ve ever used on a phone. It is really just like email on a computer. After using my Blackberry HTML emails would render as text on the unit and at times I couldn’t even read it at all. I have 4 accounts synced with the iPhone. Sure it would be nice to have push email for all my IMAP accounts, but having it check every 15 minutes and a manual check is sufficient for me. Exchange email would be nice, but I only use it for email and I don’t consider email to be secure anyway so I’m happy with using IMAP for the Exchange accounts. One feature I would like is the ability to sync signatures or at least create them for each account as opposed to just having one for all accounts.

The Safari browser works pretty well. Yes I think EDGE is slow, but when I’m using my phone I take it as a phone. I just browse webpages when I have to and I’m not downloading large files like I would be on a computer. The zoom features are nice and easy to use. It’s nice that embedded quicktime movies open up fullscreen on the iPhone. Of course a Flash plug-in would be nice, but like I said I only use the internet on my phone when I need something important not so I can surf the web. I can use my computer for that.

As for the iPod functionality, it’s the best iPod Apple has ever made. The user interface is very intuitive. In list view its easy to scroll up and down by flicking up and down. Rotating the unit into Cover Flow mode is also easy to use. The touch screen responds appropriately and I didn’t find any glitches with music or movies. The button on the stereo headphones for pausing, fast-forwarding, and answering calls is a nice touch.

YouTube seems to work fairly well. Of course it’s a lot faster on Wi-Fi as opposed to EDGE, but I can wait an extra second or two. I don’t really use the site on the computer all that often and I think I just started using it a lot more now that it’s on the iPhone and the AppleTV.

As far as the widget apps: Stocks, Maps, Weather, Clock, Calculator, and Notes, they all function as well as they do on the dashboard in Mac OS X.

So overall, I’m pretty happy with the phone. I know Apple will probably add to the feature set of the current model, but as the model is right now, they’re off to a good start. I’m a happy customer and if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.