Phone
The sound of the iPhone is much clearer and generally better than my old RAZR.
What I really like is a built-in microphone in headphones that allows making and answering calls without holding phone next to your ear. Second is handling of the incoming call while listening to podcast or music: it fades aways and after finishing the call, it slowly fades back in. Very nicely done.
But the best phone feature is seamless integration with my address book, which thanks to synchronization that works very well always the same as address book on my Mac. It offers classic "wheel search", list of recent calls, list of favorites and dial keyboard. What is really awesome is the easy to add or update information: for example, you receive a call from a friend that just got a new phone. After hanging up, with single click on the recent entry you can assign the just received number to an existing contact. And it is always that single address card you use - with address (that you can show in Google map with another click) or email addresses that you can fire up with single click..
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Email
My email information was transferred from Touch as part of the activation process and started to work right away. Very good and functional user interface.
I also found the mobile Google page (http://www.google.com/m) to be very useful - it adds easy access to small screen optimized versions of the Calendar and Reader. I use Reader a lot, the best feature being that articles I read on ANY device (MBP, Linux desktop, iPhone or even some of the many VM's I am using)
will be marked as read ...
There more than enough reviews and opinions on the coolest gadget in the telephony space so what is point o adding another one ? I was originally quite anti-iPhone anti-Rogers for - IMHO - pretty strong reasons, so it is interesting to review them and see how they survived the reality check.
That maybe not be the strongest reason ... but am going to do that anyway.
Activation
I have ordered the phone by calling the 1-888-ROGERS1 and as I mentioned, the shopping experience was for a change a great one ... That was Tuesday morning and to my big surprise, the phone was delivered n Thursday afternoon.
As I noticed on Apple Website, the SDK for developing 3rd party applications for iPhone/Touch will be available in February. This solves the biggest problem - offline reading - because with SDK, storing a downloaded copy will be trivial. It also will most likely fix the annoying lack of updatability of calendar and add few more interesting apps.
It is only matter of time until the other eBook formats will be be readable on iPod - such as CHM or PalmDoc (non-DRM-ed version).
So, I have finally got it. Only the 8 GB version as the 16 GB were sold out, but I just could not wait for another week :-). After playing with it for about 1.5 hour, I like it even more. The readability of Safari Web sites is excellent - I started to put together some links. Did not try too many sites yet, but the Dzone reads OK :-). Also the PDF book reading is very good - but that is no news. I guess I will have to put up some internal Apache access to my PDF eBooks from my bed :-).