I haven’t been posting much lately and for that I apologize, truth is that I haven’t had 30 seconds to sit down and write anything worthwhile in quite awhile due to my photography side-business mostly, but also with a new computer, painting, as well as getting my new iPhone which I wanted to talk about today.
This sucker is hard to come by, in fact when it was first announced up for sale in Canada last month I’ve heard that they only had about 30 or so in total to sell around PEI (nice…). Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen, but since I knew that I wouldn’t see one in stores for quite some time we decided to purchase it from Apple directly from their online store. The cost we paid?? (get ready for this..)… approx $750 each.
Yes, very expensive right? Well.. I would tend to agree and disagree – but let’s get on to the review portion.
PRICING
So as I said, we paid full retail for the 16gig iPhone 4. Total price came to just over $1500 for 2 of them. Very expensive indeed, however – these suckers are VERY much in demand and from what I can tell on ebay, last years model 3gs is still going for around $500 or so. It was announced on June 9th, 2009. At that time you could have purchased the phone for pretty much the same price as the iPhone 4 is going for now. So what does that mean?
Well, if you bought an unlocked phone at that time say for the same price of $750. It would have depreciated in value $250 over 15 months, or $17 a month. Not really that bad considering how badly most electronics depreciate these days.
Another bonus of ordering from Apple directly is that the phone comes “unlocked”. This means that I can go to whatever carrier I want and activate my iPhone, contract free. I’m pretty darn satisfied with my current network so I am in no rush or need to switch carriers – however when it comes to resale value – this helps as when/if I sell this on eBay, I can sell it to a MUCH broader audience than one which is locked to a carrier.
Roaming? Obviously for the same reasons I stated above – I can head on down to the US – pick up some sort of pay-as-you-go SIM card and activate it temporarily while I’m oot and aboot travelling. You can’t do this with a locked iPhone or locked any-phone. Another plus.
My monthly bill I’ll have to get back to you on as I haven’t had it long enough to realize any differences yet.. (I haven’t gotten a bill).
USE
In a word. Awesome. I love this silly thing. I’m a graphical person by nature anyhow and have always gotten a kick out of the best graphics and the “eye candy” so to speak so it goes without saying that I’m very smitten with how smooth the iPhone is and the “retina” display is unbelievable.
I’m still looking for the really useful applications and always on the lookout for more, I do like the fact that there literally is an app for everything. I wanted an application which I could share a grocery list with Liz – yep.. “there’s an app for that”. That way if I notice something that we’re missing out of the fridge? I just enter it in my iPhone and Liz gets a copy of it.. whomever goes to the grocery store first has all the items on their phone. I can do everything from trade stocks to find a Texas truck accident lawyer if I needed to. It’s amazing and the 250K applications for it put it at a huge advantage to the competition (Android).
PHYSICAL
This was very important to me as I bought my last Blackberry. I wanted to make sure that I could put it in my pocket and not have to worry about it being a big nuisance or being too large for my pockets. I was actually very surprised when it got here to find out it was not a heckuva lot bigger than my Blackberry Pearl. It was about 1/2” wider and 1/4” longer.. I put it in my pocket and it made no difference, but that leads me to my next point.
I was scared sh1tless of scratching the screen! I knew (from my buddy Tony) that I wanted to get an Otterbox case but until I ordered one and it got here, what was I supposed to do? Both Liz and I decided that we would try to leave on the protective films that come on both sides of the screen since we were able to use it just fine with those on it, the only problem was that mine started to come off a bit as I pressed the main button a bunch of times. I hurriedly bought the Otterbox cases but in the meantime I wrapped my iPhone in yes…. plastic wrap. No.. it wasn’t the best protection I could have used, but I just wanted to have something on the silly thing until I got the proper case.
Now that I DO have the proper case.. I find it a little bigger and bulkier.. but that’s to be expected I think. it certainly protects it 360° and so far I like the case. I am currently using a belt clip but I can’t see me using that much.. we’ll see.
SUMMARY
I’m very smitten with my iPhone. My car stereo is louder and better sounding when it’s hooked up to it. Browsing the web is a pleasure on it and so easy, I have even installed a few PDF books on it and can read those too no problem. Podcasts? While I never had much use for them in the past – I find that they are very informative and fun to watch in my spare time (which I don’t have much of lately anyhow).
I love it.. and will keep you informed if my opinion changes!