A Week With The iPhone As My Only Mobile Phone
After network unlocking my iPhone last week I started to use it more as an actual phone, rather than just as an iPod Touch with an always on internet connection. This made me aware once again of the faults and restrictiveness of the iPhone, so I set about looking for ways to overcome them. Once I found ways round most of what bugged me about the iPhone I decided to use it as my primary phone for a week to see how well I coped with it.
My main gripes with the iPhone and the solutions I used to get round these limitations are listed below, all of them require jailbreaking, so out of the box with just apps from the app store the iPhone is still a POS in my opinion and there is no way I would be able to use one as my main device.
Copy and Paste – I have used copy and paste for years on mobile phones, mainly to copy text from an email and paste it into an SMS message, or to save an SMS/email as a note. To get round the lack of copy and paste I installed an app called CopierciN, this allows you to copy text from SMS, contacts, notes and emails and paste them into a new SMS, note, email or safari object. It isn’t as good as true copy/paste but it’s good enough for what I need it for.
No SMS Forwarding – This really pissed me off, I’d receive a joke in a txt from a friend and couldn’t pass it on to others. I installed biteSMS which allows sms forwarding as well as adding smilies and adding a contact from your address book all with a swipe of the finger.
No Background Tasks – Backgrounder solved this problem though apps that require a lot of resources and memory will still close after they have been sent to the background.
No Video Recording – Not that I would record video much because of the crap camera (no jailbroken app can fix that) but if I want to I now have Qik for recording and streaming live video and Cycorder which is a standard video recorder like you would find on any phone released within the last 5 years.
No MMS – WTF is that about, I don’t send as many MMS as I used to do but I do still receive quite a lot and having to log into the networks website and view the MMS online whenever I received one was a PITA. Thanks to SwirlyMMS that’s a thing of the past. I can now receive any MMS sent to me straight to the phone AND can also send them. This is a paid app, it has a 14 day trial, after that I think it cost $8, I’m still on the trial but will be registering it next week, it’s worth every penny.
So after fixing up the iPhone to more or less work like a mobile phone should, what are my view…… well it kicks ass. I love it now, I haven’t missed using my Nokia’s at all, well except for the camera on the N98-8GB, I have really missed that. I’m going to carry on using the iPhone as my main mobile device, I’ll be leaving the E71 at home gathering dust and I will probably still take the N95-8GB out with me but only for the camera. Whereas before, my iPhone was only used as a media player/web browser, my N95 will only be used as a camera with a data connection.
I have been a long time user of S60 Nokia phones ever since the 7650, but I’m afraid it looks like that is going to change, well until the N97 gets released any way, but I have a feeling that that won’t even pull me back to Nokia.
