So how good is the iPhone at being a phone?
 I guess I’m going to have to wait and see because I’ve seen reports claiming that battery life is both excellent and yet cripplingly shorter than advertised. I think a lot of people might expect the battery life to be shorter due to the amount of use you’ll put into this device with watching videos and listening to music in addition to making telephone calls. I know my K800i managed to last about 16 hours before needing recharged and battery life drops off dramatically should I spend 10 minutes playing the Golf game or, ye gods, making a phone call. That battery life is shorter than advertised? I think it’s one of those things – every manufacturer advertises battery life far in excess of what is actually achieveable with a functioning device. Apple in my experience tends to be a little more honest than most.
 I’ve also seen reports that the audio quality is both better than and worse than another brand name phone or three. My take on this is that I’ve never really blamed the phone for poor audio quality. I can blame trees, geography, tunnels, the crap placement of cell towers, the position of mountains, the weather and the general piss-poor network that Orange seems to be vending these days, but I’ve never noticed much difference between handsets.
And how many taps to make a call?
MacNN’s second impressions post describes it like this:
From standby mode, you first need to hit the home button to turn the screen on. Once the screen is lit up, you need to scroll your finger across a slider to get to the menu. From there, choose the phone icon and click Contacts. Next, scroll your way through the Contacts listing and choose the person you want to call. Once you are in their menu, choose their number and the iPhone will call.
My K800i compares:
Two button presses on the chiclet keyboard to unlock. Tap the joystick down to open Contacts. Then either scroll (patiently) or just to skip through to the first letter of a name by tapping again. Could be up to six or seven taps just to get the name. Then if the number selected is the right one, you can click to call. If not, then there’s a joystick tap sideways to select the right one first. To call my kids requires 9 key presses or different keys and some with different timing. To call my Dad’s mobile, 12 key presses.
The iPhone seems like a lot less work. And probably looks better too.
Got two iPhones the first night and the phone quality is pretty good, very comparable to other AT&T phones I’ve had. Our house does not have great covererage but that was true before–at work it’s great and the visual voice mail and caller ID look great.
Everyone I have shown it to, actually not shown, just let then use it for a few minutes, is totally wowwed.
The only real issues are non wiFi network speed which can vary from quite slow to pretty quick, considering. WiFi is very fast.
All in all an amazing combination of features. Try driving along, as I do, listening to a song on the iPod, surfing the web to a site showing live camera of my likely traffic jam, updated every 30 seconds, and then when the phone rights, just touch speakerphone as the music fades, talk, then have music return afterward. Ha.
Any word yet on what Belfast provider might be?
PS I came here looking for syncbridge. Is it no longer available?
We’re looking forward to it and hoping that anyone but O2 picks it up. A 3G iPhone on the Three network would be quite compelling.
SyncBridge code is no longer available. You might want to try gSync or Spanning Sync in the interim.