signal & noise

I held out for about four weeks. Then the AT&T store near work had them in stock on a Tuesday afternoon with nobody in line, and that was that. Eight gigs, black, $599 plus the two-year contract I swore I’d never sign.

A week in, the short version: the screen and the browser are as good as everybody said, and the phone part is fine but nothing special.

Safari is the reason to own it. Pages load as real pages, not the stripped “mobile” versions, and pinch-zooming into a column of text on the train still feels slightly ridiculous in a good way. On EDGE it is slow. On my home WiFi it is genuinely usable, which is not something I have ever said about a phone browser.

The keyboard took about three days. I was hitting the wrong letters constantly for the first two, and then one morning it just stopped being a problem. Trusting the autocorrect is most of the trick.

Things I don’t love:

• No copy and paste. I keep reaching for it.
• No third-party apps. Apple says web apps are the answer. We’ll see.
• The battery is fine for a phone and terrible for a phone you use as a computer.
• I have already dropped it once. It survived. My heart barely did.

Would I tell someone to buy one? If they were already thinking about an iPod and a new phone at the same time, probably. If they need a phone that types email all day, the BlackBerry people are not wrong yet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 9:14 am and is filed under Reviews, Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.