Tom & Alissa

So, I’ve been an iPhone owner and user for two days now, which, you know, makes me an unmitigated expert, by blogosphere rules. Here’s my observations so far:

Good:
- The design is great.
- I like the headphone/microphone combination.
- Data download is fast and reliable, and I seem to have 3G pretty much everywhere that I go.
- Very easy to download new apps.
- I set up four email accounts, using POP, IMAP, and Exchange, and they all work brilliantly.
- Once it has encountered your usual wireless networks, it connects seamlessly (unless the network is a stupid one, like the one we have at work).
- Favorite apps: Major League Baseball, Wordpress, Twittelator (like Twitterific, but with no ads and better design), and Evernote. Pandora is pretty cool, too.
- It’s not going to cost us much more to have the AT&T family plan with unlimited data and 1400 minutes than it did to have just the voice plan at Verizon. Buh?
- Browsing the web is a pleasure. I can do pretty much everything I could do on a normal computer.

Bad:
- There isn’t really a way to set my podcasts to download wirelessly. This is a bummer. I don’t like to have to plug it into my computer.
- Apparently you can only really sync music and video with one computer, which is not true of the iPod.
- No Skype capability (well, I suppose you can probably hack it to work, but it would be nice if it worked out of the box).
- Have had some crackling on the line - rare occurrence when I was a Verizon customer - but Tom tells me AT&T is adding towers in NYC, so I’m hoping that will be cleared up soon.
- It took a phone call today to AT&T to get my number officially ported over (I could make calls, but not receive them). To their credit, they immediately took care of it with no hassle.

Overall, it’s a nice little device, and definitely a step up from the Blackberry.