30 Days With The iPhone

Here’s a higher quality version of the video.

Last Sunday marked the first full month since the launch of the iPhone. Yes, I was one of the early adopters and bought one the day of the launch on 6/29. Since I had a choice of 5 places within 1/2 mile of my home to make a purchase, I was pretty sure the lines would be manageable (I avoided the Apple store at the mall and went to an AT&T strip center store). There were about 20 people in line. The group of folks in line chatted about technology and all tried to guess just how many phones the store would have in stock. Directly behind me in line was a very friendly young couple and their beautiful baby girl. Chris and Sheri Caldwell are attorneys that live in The Woodlands area just north of Houston. After introductions, we struck up a conversation about technology and real estate. They are considering listing their home and have been searching properties in the Dallas area. When I started working on the idea for this post, I remembered that Sheri gave me her business card. I emailed them last week to get their thoughts on the first 30 days with their iPhones.

Sheri’s Response: We have been really happy with the iPhone this first month. The features the iPhone offers have been really nice, especially Safari and Google Maps. We have enjoyed the ability to quickly find stores and restaurants with a couple of clicks. Recently, the iPhone came in handy while traveling for business. On my way out of town, my flight was delayed and I was able to watch a couple episodes of the Office while awaiting my flight. The next morning I used Google Maps to calculate turn by turn directions to my meeting. The meeting ran late and I was able to reschedule my flight home using Safari. Having the convenience to do all of these activities in a mobile device has been great!There are a couple of minor glitches that we have had to work through. Mainly, the e-mail has not functioned consistently. We have used several e-mail accounts to determine which one works the best. In my opinion, Yahoo! seems to be the best option, and Chris has been most happy with his mac account. The e-mail issues seems to be less noticeable now.

Chris has enjoyed finding new applications for the iPhone. He recently found a way to control our home stereo through the iPhone. Because both of us are technology nerds (I am using this term loosely), we love having the latest and coolest technology on the market.

With regards to real estate, I think the iPhone could be beneficial to an agent. For example, having the ability to showcase properties from an iPhone while with a client could be useful. Also, I could envision an iPhone application that would allow users to search real estate properties and view property pictures and details on the iPhone (similar to ebby.com). Additionally, the iPhone’s easy access to e-mails and text message would allow an agent to stay in constant contact and manage multiple e-mails with one device. I have had a chance to check out your pod cast service and it is really cool! I can definitely see how this would be helpful for real estate agents and those buying or selling a home. I am sure that it is exciting to be on the ground floor of this technology.

I count myself among the 90% of iPhone customers that are very satisfied with the purchase. The Wi-Fi access is really great and extremely stable. The large screen displays videos at a resolution that Apple claims is twice that of the average computer monitor, and I have to agree. The ability for developers to create applications to run through the web browser will no doubt provide an endless variety of productivity and entertainment tools. If you’re in city with good wi-fi access, you’ll probably rarely use the AT&T EDGE network for data and the web. The built-in iPod is without a doubt the best iPod yet. The sound quality is amazing. You just cant get that from any other kind of PDA or music enabled cell phone. The camera that comes with phone takes good photos and sending photo messages is a breeze compared to other phones I’ve used.

Visual voice mail is a real time saver. Just pick the message you want to hear in whatever order you want to hear them. No more tapping the pencil on the table while you wade through 15 messages to get to the one you actually wanted to hear. As Sheri pointed out, Google maps make it easy to get where you’re going. I like the bookmarking feature of the map application as well.

The YouTube application isn’t what most might think. The content is a select amount of favorites and “most watched” from Google. You can’t search for a video the way you would in a normal web browser. Since YouTube’s web database of videos are Flash based, you can’t view their regular inventory of videos.

If a video is encoded in Quicktime, .mpg4 or .m4v (podcast) format , the iPhone automatically recognizes it and formats the video for wide screen viewing. Video podcasts look really sharp and clear.

E-Mail works great with all of my accounts, including my POP email, g-mail and more. I don’t do much text messaging, so I really don’t know how to compare the SMS feature of the phone to any other. The keyboard only takes a short time to get used to.

After 30 days with the iPhone, it’s hard to imagine ever going back to a plain old cell phone or PDA again.