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Ok, here’s the summary: Wow!!

Overall I really love it so far, and although I experienced the famous disappearing bars issue first hand, I am really not concerned. One negative so far I noticed is the camera. There are comparisons to other smartphone cameras that say iPhone 4 is better, so maybe I just expected too much… Here’s best shot I managed today, judge for yourself (click for original). This one was outside, but inside photos not as nice, even with flash…

I listed below main positives that I did Not see in mainstream media. I feel that these are really Biggest innovations and they don’t get nearly enough coverage:

• Long Battery Life – Yes, it easily lasted 3 days with pretty heavy usage, including WiFi on all the time, steaming video over 3G and over WiFi, games, surfing, etc. This is amazing technological achievement and was main selling point in my considerations versus Evo and other competitors.
• Fast Internet – I felt that surfing is way faster, but couldn’t explain it. Today I found technical details, and I immediately ran my own SpeedTest to confirm: 4 Mbps down and 800kbps up!! Just in a random mall location! Interestingly enough, there was HTC Evo on Sprint 4G network on display at the mall today, and Internet on it didn’t feel any faster; in fact whole phone didn’t impress much…
• Reader Friendly Display – This is the Secret Feature; Sure everyone is talking about Retina display, but the truth is the screen is not only very sharp, it also feels softer, lending itself to effortless reading! The fonts are paper quality, think laser printer, and the backlight can be adjusted to soft luminance, making reading a joy! This definitely makes iPhone an ePaper competitive reading device – think 10 hours battery life, beautiful soft display AND colors! And of course interactions and video, what more do you need?

Overall – Amazing device and so far I am really satisfied with my purchase. Organizing icons into folders is fun and allows for quick access as well as ability to see what Apps I have in each category, to help me cleanup things I may not be using. I didn’t try the voice recognition features yet, but certainly planning to. I also noticed that typing is easier for some reason. Somehow it is even better at recognizing buttons I want to click, and I find myself able to type faster. Another win for Apple and shows us that closed hardware/software combination can achieve some amazing heights.

Yep, my iPhone 4 arrived via FedEx today and so far all I did was Shamelessly Fondle It all over. It is in the long process of synching with iTunes, and filling it up with Apps and Stuff.

So, Not much to report yet, but you know now that I decided to lock myself in with Apple and AT&T again, for perhaps as much as two years. Yes, Android EVO 4G from Sprint was really tempting option and I even tried to have educated discussion about it on Twitter. But my big concern was battery life and with my heavy usage it most likely wouldn’t last a full day even…

Versus advertised 10 hours video and Wi-Fi surfing on iPhone 4 with their custom CPU! And yea, there’s an App for almost anything, hard to resist that aspect also. And Gazillion games, many of which I paid for and now get to enjoy on two devices.

The new packaging is small yet still impressive – see picture with Sprite for perspective.

Stay tuned for actual usage reports!

I’m back, and just posting quick update on little “big” things that are going on with me. Filing this one under “Random Thoughts”, FYI.

Microsoft announced officially last week that they are discontinuing Microsoft Money product. This Really saddened me, frankly. Something in the way they presented it made me especially sad. I was always expecting MS-Money desktop software to die, and to be replaced by cloud based solution (like Quicken.com and MSN Money). But instead of telling us to use Web solution, they just told us to “Go Away”…

Worse yet, I have been buying Home & Business edition for many years, to manage our small business, using their wonderful inventory management tools and invoices, etc. What replaces this? Nothing, really… Only super expensive and complex accounting packages, which I really hate (and don’t need for our tiny business)!!!

Ok, onto next rant… iPhone 3.0 came out, just installed it today. Where is my Video!? I really expected them to provide some video capture support for older handsets. Seriously, I don’t need fancy video editing in-phone, but I should be able to capture low-resolution clips!!! Phones with far lesser CPU were able to do this easily for years – Apple, I didn’t expect this level of incompetence, seriously! I am looking forward to finally be alerted if someone is trying to IM me on Yahoo Messenger or ICQ, etc. I hope it works, as finally latest OS should allow it, but don’t know which Apps implemented this yet… I’ll report on this later.

Final rant of the evening is about email and Twitter. I had a case in the office recently, someone replying to an email with “screenshot” of the issue. All he wrote was “I will check into it”. This resulted in 500KB+ email being blasted to hundreds of people by poor Microsoft Exchange server (and poor people who have to keep cleaning their mailboxes). Ridiculous! We need a better email system, and at least publically Twitter does some of that. Needs more evolution, but exchange Must Die and quick. We must figure out a better way to communicate, both inside the Enterprise and over public Internet. Well, I can blog my ideas on this in the future, if there is interest (hint, post comments!)

There, Rant Done! I’ll try to come back to regular insightful blogging in the near future

Meanwhile, I leave you with MORE RANT! Windows 7 64 Bit Release Candidate STILL doesn’t install on my main PC. No love for me, very sad… Thinking of replacing my Motherboard or something, but it’s annoying to go through all that trouble and expense…