Good things come in good packages. The maxim is definitely true when one thinks of products from Apple. Take an iMac for instance. It’s big but flat, smooth and all aluminium-ish. And it comes with a keyboard that is thinner than Michael Jackson’s nose.
Take also the iPod, for example. It is getting sexier and slenderer with every successive generation, a consistency that would make Oprah envious with jealousy.
But deep down, an iMac is nothing but a normal Intel computer. And an iPod is nothing more than an MP3 player. In the wrong company, these 2 products could go terribly wrong. Case in point: Any Windows PC and Microsoft Zune. In fact, everything that Microsoft does these days go terribly wrong.
Which brings me to the subject of my review: the iPhone.
I’ve been using an iPhone for a month now and I’m sad to say that I just wished that it has more phone in it. As ever, Apple has got the packaging right but for this product, they’ve got the phone part wrong. I can’t forward an SMS to another person, perform mass SMSing, MMS a picture or sound, send or receive vCards. Heck, I can’t even archive my SMSes! It is like living in a beautiful apartment with rooms that have windows that open up to brick walls, toilets that have non-standard sized toilet paper dispensers and a kitchen that is completely sealed shut from the dinning room.
But this is not to say that it is a bad phone. It really isn’t. The iPhone is absolutely one of the sexiest phones out there in the market. It’s sleek, slender and smooth. The interface is fast and responsive. I really like the flicking and pinching thingamagik where you can flick and pinch on the touch screen and things either go up and down or big and small. And oh, yes, it turns heads, especially if you are hanging out in the local Mac store because it isn’t officially sold here yet.
Making an iPhone work here was quite easy.
After ripping out the wrapper, I tried cracking the phone in the office. Apple’s exclusive (money grabbing) tie-ups with selected telcos (currently at&t in the US and O2 in the UK) means that these phones are SIM-locked and they won’t work with SIMs from other operators. Which means that technically, the iPhone, in its original form, is illegal here as per the regulations set by MCMC, our telecommunications industry government watchdog.
Seeing that this is the case, I’ve decided to set things in order. I’m gonna unlock my iPhone because I’m a patriot….right….
Unlocking the phone is easy. The site i used is hacktheiphone.com and instructions are very well laid out there. In fact I count myself lucky that i got the 1.1.1 version that came with a tiff bug in Safari (Hah! Cupertino, you missed one!). The latest iPhones version 1.1.2 is a little more harder to crack but it’s not impossible.
Even with all the imperfections, the iPhone is still a spectacular phone. Nokia definitely has a lot of catching up to do. Functionally, Nokia phones work beautifully. Packaging wise, the N-series is now beginning to look more and more like Microsoft Windows 1.0 as compared to the original Macintosh OS. And while like Microsoft, Nokia can take comfort in the fact that they will still sell more phones than Apple, we all know which phones the good guys will be using in the future seasons of the TV series 24.