My contract is up at the end of April, and I was looking around at the current crop of phones on the market and the iPhone obviously stands out. I already have an iPod touch and was wondering if it is worth switching to an iPhone and selling the touch or just getting a bog standard phone and keeping the touch.
So other than the ability to make phone calls, what can the iPhone do that the touch doesn’t?

My concern with an iphone would be battery life. My son has an ipod touch and the battery life isn’t very good and if it was used as a phone as well then you wouldn’t get much life out of it.

just be one device in your pocket, ability to use maps pretty much anywhere (or any app for that matter that needs web access) without a wifi network in earshot… etc… basically web/app stuff that would otherwise need a wifi network on the ipod.

you’d prob need to charge every evening, based on what i’ve heard.

I’ve got a 1st generation 8GB iphone – coming on 18 months old. I get two days of use out of it before it needs charging and I’ve not been precious about charging cycles etc. That’s two days of mixed video watching on the train (maybe an hour or two), listening to music throughout the day, emailing, texting and calls.

My wife’s Nokia of the same age is worse and she doesn’t get the multimedia experience!

Can’t comment on the 3G model – I think if you have all the bells and whistles turned on – mail pushes every 15 minutes, GPS on all the time etc then battery life is obviously going to suffer. My Garmin 705 only gets 15 hours of GPS use and that’s all it does…

Battery life can be an issue. And from what I’ve heard from some developers who have the 3.0 Beta software on their iphones that isn’t likely to improve when the new software comes out in the summer.

However, i Love my iPhone and it’s perfect for me. MMS is coming in the summer (yes. Duh! How the hell they missed that off the list I’ll never really understand) and proper blue tooth too! As for battery life, I use mine as my alarm clock and have a dock by the side of my bed so it gets charged every night. Plus on the way in to work I have a charger/transmitter in the car so it gets another top up on the way in and on the way home. So lifestyle-wise iPhone fits me very well. I can see that if you are out and about with no way to charge up on a regular basis that the battery may become and issue though.

Like you I had an iTouch first and had phone in one pocket and iTouch permanently in the other. So the iPhone was a great buy for me as I now have a pocket for spare change again 🙂

Strange thing the iPhone.. It’s quite polarising. Some people find it excellent for what they do with a phone and and PDA/music player. Others find it a complete waste of time. You just need to work out which side of the line you are on 🙂

I absolutely love my iPhone. So many useful applications (especially for cycling with the gps etc)

Battery life is improved a lot if you turn the screen brightness down….

Ive got a 3g iphone, had it a month. I think they are brilliant, they do have some crappy features as mentioned. rubbish camera, no mms, bad bluetooth but overall especially with the unlimited browsing I think they are the best phone by miles.

I have an iPhone, which I use for all my Internet at work and am typing this on it. Personally, for the sake of battery life I use an iPod too, mainly because I had one. For tunes whilst running and stuff I use this though, as it means I have my phone with me…

Had mine for about 6 months now, I have found it to be awesome, I am what I would call a heavy user and my batter can last around 24-36 hours push enabled and loads of texting/e-mails to my lovely lady plus I use iTunes a lot during the day.
All the apps are good, gotva nice msn program too.
One thing to note this summer mms and better Bluetooth among other updates are comming as an update this summer, there is also talk of the generation3 phone comming out.

I know the iPhones take a lot of stick but I won’t use anything else now.

I was in the same position a few weeks ago and it was between the Blackberry Curve and iPhone.
At the o2 shop 2 separate assistants recommended the Curve over the iPhone however that very afternoon the new OS 3.0 was announced which for me leveled out the playing field.
I went for the 16GB iPhone and have thus far been very impressed. Battery life is indeed a fair bit less than the Sony K850i I had previously however once I get home I sync the phone with Outlook for my calendar etc. and charge it that way. Another option that I hadn’t considered is the dock mentioned above. I think I’ll get another one of them today.
If you adjust the brightness and turn the 3G on and off as required it helps the battery life a lot
As a percentage, my actual phone use has been very little. There is soooo much more to do with it.

Cheers

Paul.

Sounds like it might be worth it. Good to hear that the MMS thing will be sorted soon. The only thing I’ll miss from my nokia will be viewranger mapping and quickoffice for excel stuff. Are there any equivalent apps available.

Battery life is ok but is improved by turning off 3G (not necessary for phone calls). push e-mail ( if I’m away for a weekend e-mail not required) and wi-fi. Currently I have not put the phone on charge for 3 days. I have used wi-fi , push and 3G but turned them off again after use and had 3 hours of music playing as well.

Duh! How the hell they missed that off the list I’ll never really understand

Because no-one uses MMS in the states, so being from a US centric country Apple misjudged it’s importance in Europe. The free MMS app is great for receiving MMS on the iPhone, and it soon seems normal to email photos rather than use MMS anyway.

Free official Skype app released today too. Do read the limitations though:

http://www.t3.com/news/skype-coming-to-iphone-on-tuesday?=38516http://www.t3.com/news/skype-coming-to-iphone-on-tuesday?=38516

for anyone who’s interested, 02 do now have in stock 8gb refurb (basically brand new, repacked) iphones for free on a £35/month 18 month contract for CURRENT 02 customers.

There will almost certainly be a new iPhone model released in June/July, so if you can then it might be worth waiting till then.

Duh! How the hell they missed that off the list I’ll never really understand

As kelvin said, but also because apparently the network providers were worried about the amount of network traffic that iPhone MMS would introduce so they vetoed it.

I was given one! Using it now, it rocks.

Had the one I’m browsing this on since last November, after a Nokia N95 and an XDA Mini, and the iPhone blows everything I’ve previously used out of the water. It’s so easy to use, I only downloaded The Missing Manual for referencing obscure bits and bobs, otherwise It was usable straight from the box, the only phone I’ve never had to keep the manual handy. Regarding battery life, using wifi does eat the battery, and the GPS will as well, but the N95 was much worse, I had to buy a larger battery, which allowed the SIM to lose contact all the time, it’s GPS was useless without a BT receiver, I put some music on an 8Gb card and walked into town, and the battery was half used after three hours, against no noticable drop on the iPhone after eight or more hours. The camera is actually perfectly capable of taking good snapshots, and Photogene allows you to crop, sharpen, colour-correct, rotate, etc in camera, compared to the crap camera on the N95 which would never focus properly, (I’ve taken several hundred photos since November). If you get an iPhone, and I really suggest you do, I recommend a pair of UltimateEars SuperFi 4vi headphones, from earphonesolutions.com. They’re not cheap, at $124, but they’re the best ‘phones I’ve ever heard, and they have a mic and a pause/skip/answer button. Music on the iPhone with those is fantastic sounding. Then there’s all the other apps, ebooks, (I have over a hundred books on mine), and games, like Doom, (soon), Metal Gear Solid, Castle Wolfenstein…
Fantastic device, and the next gen one allegedly will have video, faster web, faster processor, more memory. Oh, and turn-by-turn GPS will be enabled in OS3, so TomTom will probably be available soon as well. It’s a no brainer, really.

I see your “Missing Manual” was obviously missing the bit about the return key 🙂

I think iphones are just ripping off what was there already, in the same way ipods did (and Windows did from Apple OS:). I’ve got an Orange SPV M2000, and it does everything an ipod does, and I got it for £60! It has a touch screen (I just use my fingers), Wi Fi, bluetooth, it’s compatible with Windows, so I’ve got all my applications on it, it’s got handwriting recognition, you can draw , I’ve got ebooks on it, has Windows Media Player on it (MP3s and videos),I’ve got MM on it(and a £20 New GPS smaller than a matchbox bluetoothed), did I mention it’s a phone. Battery life’s 2-3 days depending on what you’re using it for, but I got 3 batteris with it so just keep the others charged up ready. Want one? I can find and set them up no prob :0

There was a big thread about this the other day martin.

Basically the thrust of it was: yup there are plenty of other smartphones out there that have similar or better features, but (for us iPhone advocates anyway) nothing that works as well and as neatly as an iPhone.

How many of your SPV features do you actually use on a regular basis?
When was the last time you used it to surf the web or compose an email? When was the last time you installed some new apps on it?

I do almost all of my home internet surfing and email from my iPhone now – because the interface is so usable that I rarely feel the need to fire up the PC.

Ripping off what was already there 😆 How about vastly improving upon what was already there, feel free to stick your head back in the sand.

I think iphones are just ripping off what was there already, in the same way ipods did

Ripped off what? A Sony Walkman? A gramophone?

Graham S, I’ve just been upstairs doing an Excel spreadsheet for the last hour on the Smartphone – it’s got a pull down and/or a screen based keyboard. Memory Map when I was out on the bike today. Txting and phone today, mp3 today. Put Adobe on the other day when I started doing ebooks.

My point was it already existed and it’s cheap. I’m sure iphones are great, but I don’t think they cost £60 (+£20 gps) do they? (rs: if they do I’ll get my head out of the sand 🙂

DrJ; MP3 players, and Smartphones (try reading the threads)

Martin: fair enough, but in my experience you are in the minority.

Most people (in my experience) with flash phones or smartphones only use a tiny fraction of the features. Mainly because they just don’t understand them or they do interface is just too clunky and horrible to use.

turning off the bluetooth off (3G still on) my g/f phone improved the battery life no end, suprisingly power thirsty bluetooth module it seems.