User's iPhone review: the must-have apps and the creepy GPS

There's good news and bad news about the new iPhone, early users say. Kevin Konikowski, interactive designer for Network World was among the first to purchase an iPhone on Friday. He has had a couple of days to play with his new phone and shares his impressions of it in this guest blog for Microsoft Subnet: I have been using an iPhone for the past year and was lucky enough to snag one of the new iPhone 3Gs Friday morning. While Keith Shaw is currently reviewing the new iPhone, I'd like to give my first impressions. I've been using the new device and it's new software over the past three days and it has certainly has had its ups and downs. [Editor's note: watch for Shaw's formal review of the phone's enterprise features to publish soon in the Cool Tools blog.]

AT&T now requires the iPhone to be activated in-store - a huge step down from last year's model which you activated in the comfort of your own home using iTunes. The downside to in-store activation isn't the waiting (although that was still a bit painful). The real issue is that the sales clerk now opens my box, unwraps my phone from the plastic, and puts his greasy Egg McMuffin hands all over the back and front of my iPhone before I even get a glimpse of it.

Coming from the previous model, the iPhone 3G is surprisingly more extravagant looking, with moderately shiny black back and chrome accents. Its new shape appears far thinner than the original (although it is in fact, slightly thicker), and it feels better in your hand than the first generation iPhone did.

With the new 2.0 software, Apple has definitely paid more attention to the small things. For example, photos you capture with the camera are automatically geo-tagged with GPS coordinates, a simple and obvious feature not usually found in consumer cell phones. The GPS is quite accurate. It is very creepy to use the GPS with Google Maps' satellite view - showing an image of my house with a dot pinpointing exactly where I am inside my house, and following my footsteps as I walk around. It makes me wonder if Big Brother is watching.

The App Store is where the new software really shines, however. Filler apps aside (which there are a ton of), there are some incredible apps available. Things is a fantastically designed GTD to-do application that works exactly how you would expect - and as a result you are able to organize your work more efficiently. It works hand-in-hand with the desktop application for the Mac of the same name. Particularly innovative are the applications coming out of Tapulous. Friend Book lets you "handshake" two iPhones - physically make a handshaking motion with the two devices - causing the two iPhones to trade business card information automatically. Twinkle combines Twitter with GPS, geotagging your tweets and displaying all tweets happening around you. It's a great example of some of the social networking abilities of the iPhone 3G.

I tested out my friend's Exchange server - Exchange is simple to set up - simply type in your Exchange server's address, your domain, user and password. Everything else is automatic - you are instantly given the choice to sync Contacts, Calendar and/or Mail. Changes are pushed instantly - a meeting invitation I created in OWA appeared within 2 seconds on my iPhone's calendar.

Although the iPhone, as everyone knows, has its fair share of small issues, and launch day definitely did not go as smoothly as possible, it is definitely a step up from last year's iPhone. With the new App Store, innovative developers will hopefully be able to steer the direction of the device in new and exciting ways.

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