Our family AT&T contract was up for renewal and I went phone-shopping two weeks ago. Actually, my 8-year-old little sister was bugging us to get a cell phone for her (I will rant about this separately). At any rate, after looking through their selection of phones, I noticed that the ones I liked were all close to the $150 mark anyway, so I might as well get an iPhone which does so much more.

I choose the $199 black 8GB model, which took about a week for them to order and ship to the store. It’s almost my first full week with the phone and I’d just like to talk a bit about my experience with the phone. I know everyone is sick and tired of iPhone 3G reviews so I’ll keep it short and crisp.

Price

I paid $200+tax up front for the phone, and am committed to a $30/mo data plan for 2 years. It’s a pretty hefty investment if you add up the monthly charges, but I think it’s a reasonable price (that is, you can’t get much better for the same or lower price)

Network Performance

This is a real mixed bag, as we all know from the articles all over the internet on this one. First off, reception I feel is average or marginally above average. My house sits in a low-coverage area that really separates the good phones from the bad ones. Nokias consistently do well in my residency — I can walk around my house freely without worry of dropped calls — and Motorolas seem to do the worst (I have to walk outside to get any reception).

The iPhone 3G sits in between these two. With 3G enabled, I have dead spots inside my house where the calls will drop. Without 3G, calls get choppy in such areas but do not completely drop. I don’t know if this is just that 3G calls time out faster or EDGE is just more reliable, but definitely turning off 3G yields better reliability in low-coverage areas.

Otherwise, when I’m out in the city, 3G coverage is excellent. Data is truly near broadband speeds with minimal latency, and voice calls come in uninterrupted while browsing the internet on 3G. Overall, I’d say right now network performance is so-so, but I think this will get better in the near future.

Battery Life

From the standpoint of a cell phone, horrible. From the standpoint of a mobile PDA / internet tablet, excellent.

Right now I’m still in obsessive-compulsive usage mode (it comes out of the pocket every 2 minutes), and I end the day with a bit under half the battery capacity remaining. I’m charging it nightly because I’m not sure if this is enough to last me the next day. Compared to the typical cell phone, this battery life is simply horrible, but compared to a laptop hooked to wifi or a Nokia N800 tablet under constant use, I’d say a day or two of continuous use battery life is quite excellent.

Durability

I’ve had generally bad luck with previous generation Apple products in terms of scratch-proofness and walked into the iPod Touch / iPhone family with big worries about scratching. Not only is the display’s clarity more important than ever for viewing large videos and reading small text, but now it’s the primary form of input. Fortunately, Apple switched from polycarb coating to a scratch-resistant glass material for the new generation. I’d rate it as “scratch-resistant, but still benefits from protection.”

Let me first start with the year-old iPod Touch:  I’ve had a plastic case and cellophane screen protector on my Touch since day one, and the protective layers are heavily scratched and damaged, but the device is perfectly fine. The screen protector on my Touch is not 100% covering, so when I removed it for replacement I was able to do a comparison of with vs without. The protected area is, of course, spotless while the unprotected areas gathered a few extremely small scratches. I feel they would be visible if directly over the screen and be slightly detrimental to functionality, so the screen protector was worth it.

For my iPhone, I started without any protection for the first 3 days. I kept it in my pocket and did everything with it, including shopping trips, bike rides, and jogs. At the end of the three days, if I look at the screen at an angle with a flashlight, I can see extremely small hairline scratches starting to form. I bought an InvisibleShield for it after people recommended it as the best screen protector. The material is certainly unique compared to the run-of-the-mill screen protectors (it’s a bit more grippy and thicker), but equally difficult to put on without messing it up. The increased thickness of the film contributes ever so slightly to distort the screen clarity, but considering its protective benefits, I’ll live with it.

I also got a leather holster case for when I wear pants without deep pockets (I’ve lost gadgets to shallow pockets before), and noticed a very unique property of the invisibleShield: It regenerates (not really, but that’s a cool way of explaining it)! The holster is a bit tight and when I took the phone out, I could see some of the seams of the holster etched into the screen protector. After leaving it to charge for an hour, I looked at the screen again, and the marks were gone!

Typically I carry the iPhone in my pocket with the screen protector on, and after 2 days of heavy usage I don’t see any damage to the film. We will see.

Cross Platform Compatibility / Standards Compliance:

Who are we kidding? There is none. It syncs with iTunes on Windows XP or Mac OS X. That’s it. Yeah if you jailbreak it you can do stupid SFTP/SSHFS tricks, but that’s not a practical solution to advertise to the average joe. Apparently the USB communications protocol is a SSL/TCP-over-FIFO deal, which probably means a FOSS USB driver is far from reality (and probably not legal anyway)

Overall Usefulness

I think this is probably the best $200 (ok fine, + $30*24mo) I’ve spent. For me, having always-available internet in a convenient device combined with a phone means I can have all my means of communication on one device, which makes me feel less of a dork at airport security, emptying 5 or 6 gadgets from my pocket into the grey trays. The device is well-designed, the entire user experience is well-polished from start to finish. Although I wish for better interoperability with Linux and other FOSS platforms, I will spare Apple that rant for now. I highly recommend the iPhone 3G to those looking for a cell phone + internet tablet combination device. It will be interesting to see the Android/OpenMoko phones when they come out to see how they compare.