iPhone 3G Review
In my previous post you could read that I was the proud owner of a nice new iPhone 3G. Indeed: I was… Today I went back to the shop because it was already broken. 
If I shaked a little bit with the iPhone, I heard that there was a small piece inside it that was loose. The small piece had probably something to do with the speaker. When someone called me, the sound quality was really bad. The speaker made the same sound as the toy microphone of my nephew: a lot of echo and bizarre sissing sound 
. So now I’m without my iPhone for about three to four weeks… damn that sounds long.
Hardware
So my iPhone 3G experience didn’t started very good. But there are also a lot of positive things about the phone. One of the things that is really great is the crystal clear screen. The contrast and the resolution of the touchscreen are the best I’ve seen yet, and the colors are just wonderful. When I was in the shop today to hand in my broken iPhone, the store owner told me he hadn’t seen any movies on it yet, so he asked my if the quality was really that good. Good? More than good. If you haven’t tried it yet, or you don’t know how to put movies on your iPhone, let me give you one advice: subscribe yourself to the podcast of ‘Ministry of Sound’. At least once a week they have a new podcast with video clips, reports, etc. and then you can really see the quality of the screen.
Another thing of which I was surprised is the quality of the speaker. No, not the broken speaker that you hold next to your ear, but the one at the bottom of the device. This way you can easily watch movies with multiple persons, share music, have conference calls, etc. The sound is clear and loud.
A few persons had the remark: the iPhone is to big! Not really true in my opinion. The phone fits nicely in the side pockets of your jeans or jacket. It’s not heavy and the size is just good. One of the reasons for this is that the phone is very thin (half the size of my previous phone), and that compensates the width and height of the device.
And the last hardware part where I want to talk about is the build in camera. 2 mega pixels isn’t very much, but good enough for a phone. You can take clear pictures, even when it’s starting to get dark outside.
Software
Sending SMS is really cool; it looks like you are using iChat. It’s easy to find back old conversations, and the build in spelling checker correct you small mistakes. It even works very good in dutch.
The rest of the software is just like you expect: good products from Apple . A lot of people have blogged about this, so I’m not going to do that (everything is just easy to use and works very good).
GPS
The build in GPS can locate your position very quickly. In less then 10 seconds you know where you are, which is much faster then my current GPS. There is just one negative point about this: you must have an internet connection. The device uses Google Maps to display your position. Some maps are cached, but if you enter a new area the device want to connect to the internet to download new maps. This makes the GPS module useless if you don’t have a subscription for data transfers. Navigation software like TomTom Navigator would be much better. So hopefully we can expect this software very soon on the iPhone.
Other things
There is a weather application on the iPhone, but if you are living in Belgium it is useless. The weather information is provided by Yahoo and isn’t correct for Belgium. So an application that I’m missing is one of the KMI (the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium, which provides accurate weather predictions for Belgium). If you are a programmer with a lot of free time, you know now what you can create to make me happy 
.
I’m going to finish this review the same way as I started it: with bad news. There are still a few bugs in the iPhone 2.0 software. Sometimes the iPod functionality crashes. I had it now 5 times in just two weeks: too much if you ask me. Also downloaded software from the AppStore crashes. iPint (an application to drink beer with your phone ) is another application that crashes from time to time. The only way to solve the crashing is to remove the application and reinstall it. Hopefully Apple comes quick with the iPhone 2.0.1 update!
Conclusion
The iPhone is a very nice phone, but still with some small issues and bugs. If Apple can resolve these issues, they will make a lot of people happy (or al least me). It’s an expensive product, so you expect high quality in return. If my device is repaired and the software update solved the rest of the problems, that it is really worth it’s money. If you are still having doubts of buying an iPhone 3G, I would suggest to wait a little bit till the firmware update is released.
Oh yeah, another negative point: if I put my new iPhone next to my 5 year old Dell Axim X5 PDA, my PDA really looks big and ugly 
.