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I have an iPhone in my hands since last Friday before leaving California, when I bought it at the “Company Store” in Cupertino, Infinite Loop 1, Apple’s headquarters. It’s funny, they asked me if I was from Europe and I said “Yes, and I will unlock it of course, don’t tell Steve!”. They weren’t concerned at all… I’m wondering how many iPhones are there in Europe, unlocked, and bought in the US.

I just wanted to share my first impressions with you, after three days of usage. Alec Saunders did the same and while I have to agree with him about many points, I also have to disagree with some of them and I’m more with Stuart Henshall, who left a comment to Alec’s post as well.

Pros

User Interface: stunning. I think the best UI and user experience ever found in a device like this and highly customizable

Email: great, both with Gmail on Safari and with Gmail using the integrated email client. Very fast and usable.

Keyboard: I have to disagree with Alec. I used a Nokia E61 and I can say that I’m much faster using the iPhone than the Nokia.

Browsing: stunning. Again, it’s the closest browsing experience to a personal computer I’ve ever experienced in a mobile phone. Much better than Symbian, much better than Windows Mobile.

Third party apps on Safari: using Facebook or Twitter on the iPhone is very easy and effective. I definitely don’t miss my laptop.

SMS: the threaded view is very useful and makes SMS as easy as IM

Wifi: very fast, even if on a laptop is much faster given the same network conditions and position of the device

Stability: you really feel it’s something made by Apple. The OS seems stable and it’s really fast.

Cons

Bluetooth: cannot use it to perform common actions like sending a photo or files in general to my MacBook, something that I do very often with my Nokia N95. I still need to investigate more about that, but it seems that it can only be used with headsets for audio.

3G: ok, we know that it’s not 3G, but I can say that unlike Alec, I found the browsing experience with Edge not that bad (even if far slower than Wifi).

Contact List: even if after having checked it, I realized that Alec is right that you cannot quickly look for a contact by typing the initials. At the same time, it’s true that you can do that when you have to use the address book to make calls, sending emails or sending SMSs.

Three: in Italy, it works with Vodafone, Tim and Wind only. No way to use it with Three, the 3G operator, because their SIMs don’t work on a not-3G phone. Btw, Three is MY operator, so I’m using it with another SIM…
There is much more, but the points above are those that immediately come up after playing with it for a couple of days. I’ll write more pretty soon.

apple, iphone, luca filigheddu, review