I’ve had an iPhone 3g for a week now, and my experience has likely been typical.
I ordered my phone(s) — one for my wife, and one for me from AT&T. I moved 4 lines from Sprint and had to do it through AT&T because of the family plan (and some of the phones are not iPhones, I provide a phone for my parents, and one other line.)
AT&T was fine– polite, seemingly competent, and they delivered the phones when they said they would. In my situation at least, AT&T has much better coverage where I keep my home office in the Boston area than Sprint ever had, and that’s been really pleasant.
The iPhone 3g is truly amazing– but not without a few rough edges.
In my view, the mobile browser was the ‘killer app’ of iPhone ‘1.0′ and clearly, without any doubt whatsoever, location sensitive information mapping (that actually works) is the breakthrough of iPhone 2.0.
This has been tried a few times before, I specifically remember a module for the ill-fated Handspring springboard slot the size of a small can of tomato sauce that attempted to do location sensitive mapping — and failed. Certainly at the end of the century, hardware and storage just didn’t make a thing like this possible.
Obviously the location thing has struck a chord with a huge number of developers, as there are a pile of apps in the app store that utilize the GPS — and a bunch of small startups that have sprung up hoping to own this space (all to likely be trumped by Google, I think, ultimately). So far on my iPhone I’ve got ‘Where’, ‘Urbanspoon’, ‘Showtimes, ‘Yelp’ and for a while had a ‘beer drinking simulator’ that showed all the liquor stores near your current location.
While these are good, only the Google Maps app can combine this type of searching generically with a button for directions, and I think they end up winning (Although the movie theatre apps do a nice job of carving out a vertical slice where it makes sense to use a specific app).
With the other apps– once you get to the integrated map part, you either can’t do driving directions (restriction of the developer kit) or move or zoom the map– all things that feel like the next natural step.
One of the first things I did with the phone when I picked it up was to use it to find the nearest Fedex dropoff, during a thunderstorm (before leaving the AT&T store I looked up the Fedex location, and monitored the driving directions as I travelled– very easy and slick). This has been a common thing to do.
I then spent the first weekend downloading a number of apps, I contributed to the 60 million downloads in my own way (and buying a few as well, spent about $14 in total, mainly for terminal apps, so I can ssh into some systems I need to get to) playing, learning, enjoying.
By the way, the other killer app I’ve found is Stanza for the iPhone a free book reading app, with functionality to download Gutenberg and other free books right onto the device from wherever you are wirelessly– no sync required. This is amazing.
But, not everything is wonderful in iPhone 3g-land. There are a few more problems than I expected with the device. I believe that the addition of 3rd party apps to the iPhone OS has caused some instability in the overall usability of the device, namely:
* The 1.0 iPhone interface, with a limited set of apps flowed like butter. This is more like margarine– still good, but not quite as smooth and tasty.
* At times I do feel that the device gets sluggish– especially when switching between some apps.
* Some apps crash, or worse, freeze, requiring or leading to a reboot, probably once or twice per day.
* Many apps are buggy, or seem unfinished
* Sometimes sync is slow, seems to do a full backup more than I’d like.
3g seems to work as advertised. I can get nearly a couple of Mb/s on 3g, nearly 200k on Edge, and on my FIOS 20Mb/s wifi, only about 6Mb/s (which is likely some kind of power/performance tradeoff, and plenty for being on a local network).
Given the enormity of the thing that Apple has done here, I am not at all surprised that there are bumps in the road, which are likely to get addressed by some changes to the underlying operating system. I find it hilarious that someone compared Windows Mobile as being more stable than the iPhone OS– the problem with Windows Mobile is what happens when it is stable!
My other peeve with the iPhone UI as it is (maybe I just haven’t figured out how to do this) is that I can’t send a contact or copy it elsewhere (perhaps the infamous cut and paste issue). As nice and simple as this interface is, I think back to the much maligned Newton OS (cue the link to the bospdaug 12 step program), which had the integration of data ’soups’ between apps down cold 10 years ago– and in relative terms correcting for the ten year difference in processor speeds and general tech, did it a lot faster and smoother.
Any problems with the 3g, we’re dealing with the enormous thing that has been built here, and the very short time that developers, both 3rd party and Apple have had to experience it.
The problems are surprisingly few, considering!
As developers have had little time to work with the device to understand it– and some restrictive language in the developer license keeps the lid on testing and collaboration– the iPhone OS group has likely also had little experience with ‘real life’ devices having 10, 20 or more 3rd party apps on board chosen at random by the user community.
To put this instability in perspective, one of the first things I did with the iPhone was to make up a set of telephone ringtones based on some downloaded mp3 files of various UK and European 
telephone ringer audio samples (my iPhone rings like a UK Trimphone from the 1970’s now, kind of like getting a call from Cmdr. Straker at S.H.A.D.O moonbase ).
I found a free online site that converted sound files to iPhone ringtones, downloaded those files, dragged and dropped those files into iTunes, and then to the ringtones on the iPhone, synced, and voila, there they were.
A buddy of mine visiting from the west coast has a blackberry, and when he heard my ringtones, wanted them for himself: We could NOT figure out how to get those files onto the blackberry! We spent over an hour and a half downloading software, googling for instructions, installing literally thousands of files through the mac blackberry link software, rebooting, grasping at straws– and eventually gave up.
The blackberry is a rats nest of switches, settings, downloads and other odd configurations. Too many buttons, and a fairly unusable and very confusing user interface.
Even with the current set of burrs on the initial 3g experience, Apple is going to eviscerate the RIM customer base in the coming months.
It’s that good.
I am looking forward to iPhone 2.1 though!
