<p>My kids (and son-in-law) got me a gift card for an I-phone 3G for Mother’s Day. The cell phone I have now works well. Also, Verizon works better in my area then AT&T. However, having my music on the I-phone would be convenient (I often end up leaving my I-pod in my gym locker). I don’t want to turn into an old fuddy duddy who is afraid of new technologies, but I guess I’m ambivalent about the I-phone. My kids also purchased tutoring sessions (I think that’s what you call it) so I can learn how to use the phone. Here’s my questions: do you I-phone owners out there think the phone is wonderful? Tell me why.</p>
<p>I love my iPhone and am giving them to my kids for their 17th birthday. I didn’t even know how much I’d like it til I got it (I got it for my work). There is an app for everything you can possibly think of and then some. I basically only use my computer for work-work anymore – I can do everything on the go. Drop me a private message with your email and I’ll email you some more.</p>
<p>As for using it - it’s so easy and intuitive, once you get a few basics down. I am befuddled by Blackberries, they aren’t intuitive to me at all. If you can navigate this forum well enough to post, you can easily handle an iPhone.</p>
<p>One thing is the touch-screen keyboard. I really like it, but some other people don’t and prefer the click-type of a Blackberry. Of course, that’s just personal preference, but I find the design of the iPhone to be generally very well thought out and appealing. You <em>want</em> to play with an iPhone in a way you don’t with a Blackberry, etc.</p>
<p>I have always had Apple products, but when my ipod video died I bought an ipod touch which I really like. ( very similar to iphone, a little slimmer, no microphone)
Many Apps which are convenient, however, we also have Verizon and while I seriously thought about switching to At & t, I have read too many complaints about coverage, so I opted against it. Verizon I expect will eventually be offering the iphone, but not for a while.</p>
<p>If the gift card is from ATT, I don’t know what to tell you, but if it is from Apple, perhaps you could get a new ipod to see if you like the technology?</p>
<p>My iPhone experience has been a lot like Pizzagirl’s. I’ve had mine for a little over a month now and I absolutely <em>love</em> my iPhone! I am a long time AT&T customer (I was with them before they went to Cingular and such) and I have never had coverage issues anywhere. If you’re not going to make your phone work for you, then don’t bother with an iPhone – or any smartphone for that matter. The beauty of it for me is in what all the phone can and does do for me. It’s become a tool I can’t do without! My D, who was seriously “anti iPhone”, after exploring mine now says that she understands what all the hype is about and wants one. It’s a great device, really!</p>
<p>I am inheriting my son’s iphone in about a week. It is a great device. He is getting the new one.</p>
<p>I am now on my second iPhone, having bought the original on the first weekend and having traded up a few weeks ago. The iphone has been an incredibly useful tool to me over the last two years.</p>
<p>Let’s take a college visit as an example of where it can be useful.</p>
<p>1) Prior to the tour, I load the addresses of the hotel and college admissions office into my contacts file so that I have the address and phone number at my finger tips. </p>
<p>2) When I am driving to the campus, I can have a passenger use the map application to get me off the right freeway off ramp and turn by turn up to the hotel. </p>
<p>3) The next morning, I decide I want a decent (e.g. not hotel or fast food breakfast). I click on the Urbanspoon application and get suggestions and reviews on great breakfast places in the area. </p>
<p>4) After using the map function to get me to breakfast, we have an hour to kill. We use the google map satellite view to find a near by running track and off we go for a short jog to release the tension.</p>
<p>5) Now we head over to the school - where DD can’t remember the name of the prof she was supposed to meet with. Into email she goes, pulling up the email and she makes it in time for her meeting with the prof. </p>
<p>6) While I’m sitting around in the campus commons coffee shop, waiting for DD, a song comes on the sound system. Great old 60s song - but I can’t remember the title. So I pull out shazam, hold it near a speaker - and it tells me the title and guides me to the itunes listing so that I can download the song.</p>
<p>7) DD comes along and says we are supposed to go to the North side of campus to meet so and so at the dorms so that we can see their room. Out comes the iphone and using the compass app, I know which way is north and off we go.</p>
<p>8) After seeing the dorm room, so and so suggests a restaurant for dinner. So I use Open Spoon to make a reservation and we are all set.</p>
<p>9) Late that evening, we are about to make a run for the airport to catch our flight home and a text comes in from American, canceling our flight. We go onto AA.com, determine that there isn’t a flight until noon the next day. I switch over to UAL.com, book a couple of seat on United and off we go to the airport.</p>
<p>Now I made all of that up to fit it into a single day - but I have done every one of those things on one college tour or another.</p>
<p>I have an iPhone and love it. Then again, my situation is different from yours. All of the phones I’ve had in the past have had issues (never getting service, shutting off randomly) and I am locked into AT&T until I have enough cash to get a plan separate from my parents. </p>
<p>I live in an area where Verizon is much better than AT&T (go to school where they are equal) and would say I’d much rather have a Black Berry with Verizon than the iPhone with AT&T. If you look online you’ll find blogs and other things complaining about how bad AT&T can be in places like SF or NYC (it used to be bad in DC but now is alright) with dropped calls and whatnot. Rumor is Verizon might get the iPhone some time in 2010 too.</p>
<p>Regardless, I love my iPhone and all of its great features. I just wish the battery life was a little better.</p>
<p>I have an iPhone. ATT coverage sucks in our area, so the phone doesn’t work in, for example, my house. Though I like surfing the internet on my phone and having Google maps tell me where I am and how to get where I’m going when I’m lost, and I like having all my music on my phone, I still wish I’d chosen a different phone.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I was in Boston for business recently and just based off my iPhone, was able to quickly visit and scout out several Boston suburban campuses (Brandeis, Wellesley, Boston College). I had access to everything I would have had if I’d been sitting at a computer.</p>
<p>The other thing is that if you need to while away the time someplace waiting for someone else (as in scualum’s example), you could watch a movie, your favorite TV or read a book – all on the fly. Literally, you could go into Amazon, look for a book that interests you, and poof, you have the book within a minute. I bought the last season of The Office, which I love but never actually get to watch, and I’ve been going through those episodes whenever I have had downtime. Not to mention, of course, you can go anywhere on the Internet. It has truly changed how I use downtime waiting for others.</p>
<p>If you are on Verizon, want 3G internet access, like gizmos…try the OMNIA by Samsung. I love mine-touch screen, music downloads, even radio!, maps, word, and the great reception of Verizon services. I think it can do more “things” than Blackberry Storm. I have an OMNIA-very intuitive-I can read the Stock Exchange in real time-fabulous!</p>
<p>I got an iphone for my son right after they came out. DH loved it so he got one. I started using his in preference to mine–a year and a half ago. I bought one of my own shortly after that… I actually never use it to listen to music, but I have a LOT of apps, find the user interface very intuitive. I think it’s a great product. </p>
<p>The weirdest app I have is a free flashlight one that I use to find my way to the bathroom at night when I’m in hotels. Don’t need to turn on the light!</p>
<p>Have read some things about moisture/humidity making the iphones not work and invalidating any warranty. Anyone with experience on these issues? My friend swears by her iphone & used it to send photo postcards of their trip in Spain to everywhere for $1.99 apiece, laminated.
Would love thoughts of others about this. Have used AT&T way back when but have heard good things about Verizon. Am tired of T-mobile for now.</p>
<p>I bought an iPod iTouch. I couldn’t figure it out and returned it to Costco and bought an iPod Classic.</p>
<p>Mine is soft and fuzzy and beautiful. (Not actually soft and fuzzy, but I love it as though it were.)</p>
<p>I can check my work e-mail, my home e-mail, I can access my work calendar, I can text my husband, I can take pictures, I can listen to music, I can set alarms, I can keep my shopping lists on there, it has GPS on it so I can enter an address and it’ll tell me how to get there (great for rental cars!), I put my wedding photos on it so I can show them to people (beautiful large screen), I have all my contacts on there, I can use it as a flashlight, I can use it as a level to hang pictures, I can check weather all over the world, I can find AAA discounts within three miles of me, I can find cool restaurants that I’ve never tried before, I can keep up with my friends on facebook, I can read the news on the bus on the way to work, I can do crossword puzzles, when we can’t find the dice for our Monopoly set there’s an application for dice, I can pull all my RSS feeds, I can watch TV shows at the airport, I can check stocks, I can find out the stats for recent earthquakes, I can record voice memos, I can check traffic before I hop on the freeway, I can remember that it’s a friend’s birthday and pull up their address so I can send them a card that very day…</p>
<p>It’s beautiful. I love love love it.</p>
<p>Best thing was last September when we were in the throes of Hurricane Ike here in Houston and all communication was very, very down. I had just gotten my new iPhone, and at no time during the entire hurricane did I completely lose connectivity. Different parts would go down, but I could always get to e-mail, text messages, phone, or internet service-- at least one of the four. I vote it “most useful tool in a disaster,” for sure.</p>
<p>It is <em>not</em> a fantastic <em>phone</em>… but it <em>is</em> my favorite little machine ever. I don’t spend hours and hours on the phone, anyhow.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Edit: Having lived in Houston with mine for a year now, it’s about 65 degrees in my office and about 105 with 95% humidity outside, and since I bus to work, I will frequently walk straight from the freezing arctic tundra of my company headquarters directly out to the sweltering sauna of downtown Houston. No troubles so far! I was at the Apple Store yesterday where the guy next to me at the Genius Bar brought his iPhone into the store claiming not to have known what happened–it just stopped working! The tech rep used a little otoscope-looking thing to check in the different iOrifices and showed the guy how the little indicators had changed color to suggest that his phone had been immersed in a liquid. The guy looked sheepish and admitted to spilling a drink on it. I’m wondering how many of those moisture/humidity claims are people just staunchly refusing to admit that they dropped their phone in the potty…</p>
<p>The great gadgets *might *make you forget it is a pretty poor telephone. Be prepared to have lots of people complaining about the sound quality. </p>
<p>All in all, it is a good device, but if *this *is the best phone on the market, please have mercy on all of us.</p>
<p>I haven’t found it to be any different from my previous AT&T phone (which was a plain Motorola Razr). It seems to make calls just fine. Then again, I’m in an area with good AT&T coverage.</p>
<p>Examples of apps I have that are incredibly useful (beyond the obvious of texting, email, phone and internet):</p>
<ul>
<li>RemindMe (serves like a post-it note for the cover of the iPhone)</li>
<li>Tripit and FlightTrack - enable me to track if flights are late / delayed</li>
<li>Fedex Mobile - track packages I send to clients</li>
<li>ICE - provides all kinds of emergency info (who to call, allergies, etc.)</li>
<li>Pandora, Slacker and Stitcher Radio - 3 types of customized radio programs</li>
<li>Flixster - can find movies around me (even when traveling)</li>
<li>Mint.com - track my financial accounts</li>
<li>myATM - find an ATM around me (both my bank and others)</li>
<li>BizExpense - track my business expenses as I incur them on the go</li>
<li>my city’s train / el / bus schedules</li>
<li>Amazon Kindle (plus other readers)</li>
<li>references for area codes, zip codes, and translating</li>
<li>White Pages and Yellow Pages</li>
<li>AroundMe (finds whatever I want around me, Starbucks, a gym, a grocery store, etc.)</li>
<li>Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter</li>
<li>WSJ, NYTimes and my city’s major paper</li>
<li>any content from iTunes (including movies, TV shows and full iPod)</li>
</ul>
<p>To have all this literally in the palm of my hand is pretty amazing.</p>
<p>DD has the Iphone…the newest one. While I love my blackberry and am not thinking about switching it is hugely convenient that the Iphone has features of several devices which the blackberry really doesn’t touch.
For example, the Iphone has gps, the Iphone has taken the place of her Kindle, the Iphone can act as a conceirge. You tell it you want the nearest Chinese restaurant and it finds the place, gives you a phone number an directions. the above posters list will give you an idea. The blackberry just doesn’t do all that as easily as the Iphone.</p>
<p>Monthly cost–anyone with info about how the monthly cost for an iphone is? My friend says she & her S have iphones while her D has a regular cell & the 3 of them pay just under $200/mo. Is that typical? Currently, our bill is just over $70 for our 3 phones.</p>
<p>I have an iPhone and I like the way ‘scualum’ illistrated it - the device (calling it a phone’ doesn’t do it justice) can do many things. On a recent trip I used this device -</p>
<ul>
<li>To make phone calls, of course</li>
<li>To receive/send text messages</li>
<li>To browse the internet (full ‘regular’ browser rather than the limited cell phone type ones) to see what hotels were at what exit/town and to make hotel reservations as we were traveling</li>
<li>To navigate the roads using the built-in mapping and GPS functions</li>
<li>To check on work as well as personal emails while traveling</li>
<li>To check on the status of a server at work by VPNing into our network through the built-in Cisco VPN together with a free VNC app. This capability together with being able to access corporate email allowed me to not need to bring a laptop with me which was very nice</li>
<li>To see what sights we might want to see in some upcoming cities/towns as well as see what times places opened what they cost, and how to get there</li>
<li>To take photos of different places we were at and then instantly email them to grandma so she could also see where we were (the grandmas really loved this)</li>
<li>In some boring area to drive the passenger could play some games on the device</li>
<li>To plug into the ‘aux in’ connection of the car to play music </li>
<li>While we were driving in some random place, to do the 24 hour check-in on Southwest airlines to get the coveted ‘A’ boarding pass (passenger did it while I kept driving)</li>
<li>To watch movies on (about 5 hours worth and had battery left over) while I was on the flight back</li>
</ul>
<p>We discovered that using the GPS mapping function drains the battery quickly so we stopped at a Best Buy and purchased a car adapter (I haven’t needed one until then)</p>
<p>All of this is somewhat useless if you’re in an area that doesn’t have AT&T coverage but it seems that most places have it okay. The main thing to make sure of is whether your home, workplace, and possibly a couple of other areas where you spend a considerable amount of time have reasonable coverage. If not, then skip anything from AT&T. There will always be ‘some’ areas where there’s no coverage but this applies to Verizon as well - at least around here where there are lots of hills/valleys.</p>
<p>Given all of what I said, some people simply will only use a phone to be a phone or possibly phone and texting device. If this is all someone needs and will use, then the extra expense of the monthly cost of the iPhone plan isn’t worth it.</p>
<p>HImom - My iPhone (single phone on that bill) is around $70/month. Extra regular lines (not iPhone) on AT&T are I think $10 each but confirm what the cost would be if any of the phones was an iPhone. I read that AT&T was considering offering the iPhone at some lower monthly cost plans albeit at limited data rates (it’s unlimited now) but don’t know the status of that.</p>