iPhone

I got one, thanks largely to a wonderful birthday cheque from my grandmother. And it really is a thing of beauty. And I’m not going to repeat what everybody else has said. But I will say that the email functionality could do with a bit of work.

The main problem is that there’s no “select all” command. If you’ve already read most of your emails on your computer at home, for instance, then you’re very likely to want to mark all those emails as read on your phone when it downloads them. But you can’t, not without selecting them one by one. And the same thing goes for deleting emails: there’s no way of deleting them en masse. If you don’t want vast numbers of emails clogging up your phone’s hard drive, then once again you have to laboriously delete them, one by one. And although you can play around with the music and photos and videos on your phone through the iTunes interface, it gives you no access whatsoever to the emails on your phone — so you can’t mark them all as read or delete them all that way, either.

There’s no select-all when it comes to the content of mail messages, either — which means there’s no way of deleting a large chunk of the email you’re replying to, for instance, beyond just sitting there with your finger on the delete key, watching the text slowly disappear word by single word.

I hope and trust that these issues will be fixed in a future software update, and they by no means encroach on my enjoyment of the phone. The little things work wonderfully: the way that if you disconnect the phone from your computer, for instance, it will simply and automatically resume syncing your music when you return; the way that music fades out so that you can take a phone call and then picks up where you left it when the phone call ends; or the way that the keyboard knows what you’re typing, and makes the most likely next letters bigger than the least likely next letters.

Mainly, though, I’m just happy that I’ve finally found a phone which will simply and seamlessly sync with the calendar and address book on my MacBook. I certainly shan’t miss my Treo in that respect. And I wish my friend Shane all the best of luck in getting his phone up and running: apparently if you try to switch from Cingular to AT&T (yes, I know they’re meant to be the same company), you can end up with no phone service at all for 24 hours. Lovely. I switched from T-Mobile with no difficulties at all.