iPhone 3GS: First Impressions

Last Friday, I made a split second decision to go and get myself the iPhone I've been hankering after for months on end. Himself said later that night that the kitchen looked like I'd just dropped what I was doing and headed out the door. Which, um, is pretty much exactly what happened.

Hey, I may be incredibly dithery when it comes to making decisions but once they're made I don't hang around.

I'm mostly delira with my new 16GB toy, but there are a few irksome things about it that I do not love:

1. I bought it in white, thinking that the black was boring and everywhere and very bloke-y and white would be a bit different. However, I now understand that far from having a white-backed phone with a black screen, I have a white-backed phone with a black screen with a great lump of chrome between the two that ticks me off mightily. The black is more streamlined. It is more chic. It is not a teensy bit chavvy looking and way too girly. (It's exceedingly unfortunate that I forgot how much I dislike girly tech gear until after I'd torn open the box.) I dislike the white so much, I have another tab open in Mozilla at the moment to order a cover for it ASAP. Please. Don't make my mistake.

2. The way the SIM card tray works is pure stupid. For my money, it's not a bit intuitive. You get this little paperclip type gizmo that comes complete with a diagram that makes no sense - ok, stick the very tip of it in the little SIM tray hole and... what? Use it as a lever to hoist the tray out from the body of the iPhone? It was only when the paperclip slipped in Himself's hand and was pushed all the way down into the hole in the SIM tray that we totally accidentally figured it out. Oh, it ejects! Great. Next time you're going to be so scabby with your instruction manuals, Apple, maybe don't skimp on the arrows. Or alternatively go all out and use your words.

3. This business of having to hook it up to iTunes to get started is a pain in the hole. I didn't really appreciate that this was a "must do", since the laughably teeny "Finger Tips" quick start guide that comes with the phone makes it look like an optional, wanna-sync-your-music-and-contacts? extra. I brought my iPhone away with me to Galway last weekend where it was about as useful to me as a National Geographic subscription would be to the dog, since I hadn't also brought my haz-iTunes-laptop. I didn't think I needed it. Sure didn't I have a shiny new superPhone?

4. Oleophobic coating my ass. I cannot keep it free of fingerprints, but at least I finally understand my purpose in life: to spend my days in a vicious cycle of wipe/smudge-with-fingerprints/wipe. Aaaah. No amount of handwashing to make sure that every last molecule of natural oil has been stripped away before touching it seems to make a difference. I now have a third Mozilla tab open to look at screen protectors, which I'm hoping will help and which I hear Steve Jones is set to outlaw shortly. And here I thought I was a control freak.

5. It's too wide for me to operate single-handedly - I can't grip it in one hand and use the thumb on that same hand to navigate, which is a first for me. And my hands aren't *that* small.

6. No buttons = no possibility of doing anything without looking at the screen. I used to be able to dial numbers and send surreptitious texts on all my old phones purely by touch.

7. The letters on the keyboard are kinda teeny tiny and very crowded in portrait mode. Even for my fingers, which wouldn't need one of Homer's dialling wands for any other phone.

8. Don't plan on leaving home for more than a couple of hours without your charger. Even with just light to moderate use, I'm only getting one day of battery life - and I'm switching it off completely at night.

Now, according to the online User Guide, my iPhone is missing some stuff. Like, a dock, so that it could stand upright and thus out of the way of scratches when charging or plugged into a computer. And a polishing cloth, so that I would have a dedicated piece of fabric for wiping away those effing fingerprints all the livelong day.

But hey, what am I bitching about? Didn't I get two supremely useful white Apple stickers instead?

Score.