Day 2 of the 3G iPhone

The post yesterday got a response from an Anonymous writer who said the launch was a disaster and that anyone who could not see that was mentally deficient. I am not sure what prompted that response but can think of several possible explanations. #1 - - The writer has an old phone and is locked into a 5 year contract and thus cannot consider a new phone. #2 - - The commenter tried to buy an iPhone but was turned down on the credit check. #3- - The scribbler is just angry about something else. #4 - The scrawler has a Zune (one of the legendary but unsold Mp3 players - which may reach a million sales in a couple of months) and is embarrased. #5 - The commenter's mom won't drive him to the Apple store because he was grounded for writing rude comments on the Internet. I am not sure what the explanation is - none of those, however plausible, are entirely satisfying.

There are two things to think about the launch - the immediate- where Apple did not do well - although did a number of things to help mitigate the problem - and the long term. Ultimately the product's success depends not on the first day but on how well it sells. On Saturday and again this morning the Apple stores had tons up people lined up to buy. If the product is a disaster then I guess I don't know what that means in the concept of the blog-graffiti artist who graced my site. Best estimates are that in the first weekend Apple may have sold more than a million phones. That is pretty good for a disaster. One other estimator thought the number in the US alone was 800,000. In the store I bought in there were at least 1000 sales on the first day. AT&T down the street also sold out. That seems to have been common - despite the snafu on the authorization process - which as I said by the time I got through the line took less than 15 minutes.

But now that I have used the phone for two days, here are my impressions. The software, especially managing email, is significantly improved. You can now easily dump a series of messages. It has integrated search functions. The map feature is useful and very helpful and with a couple of the Free applications it allows a whole series of networking possibilities. The web browser is faster although results vary. I did a side by side of a common page and it took about 5X for the original phone in terms of load time for a site with photos. But later in the day the Edge was a bit faster and the 3G is not uniform even in California. The calendar also seems to be better integrated between my laptop and my phone. I have not yet checked out MobileMe which I will do when I get back to Sacramento but it looks good. Finally, yesterday, I used some of the new features and they do eat battery a bit more than the first phone but my charge was not out by the end of the day. (That was with moderate web surfing, mail and light phone calls.) We'll see as I use it in business this week.