Apple Musing

Monday after work I spent a nice hour and a half at the Apple Store Regent Street waiting to get a new iPhone 3GS. The staff there were coping well, you had to register your name with a concierge and wait to be called (you could go away for half an hour or so as the wait was around an hour).

A quick warning to UK people after a contract phone. The Apple stores stop selling contract phones at 7:30pm each night, moving to Pay As You Go, because O2 close down their activation phone banks which means there would be no one to call if there were any problems.

I was buying a Pay As You Go 16GB black, good as they were out of White phones and 32GB models. The plan was to swop the SIM in from my old phone. I chose this route, rather than buying out my contract or waiting till Jan to get another subsidised one, so that I will be out of contract when the next one is out next year.

Once my name had been called it took only 10 mins for a helpful genius to activate and charge me for the new phone. He swapped the SIM and I was done.

After a strange musicless journey home with a fresh phone I was eager to try the restore process. The new phone dropped into the dock and after a couple of clicks in iTunes was restoring. It was only 45 mins later that my new phone was indestinguishable from ny previous phone. Even my paused Tetris game and the open tabs in Safari were there.

I will post more later but I'll just say that so far I am loving it. Even with apps not compiled specifically for it there's a feel of more speed and smoothless. HSDPA definitely helps and my calls have sounded wonderful. There was a scary moment yesterday when I lost all signal (see image above showing "No Signal 3G") when other iPhone 3G users sitting next to me were fine, but that was a momentary glitch yet to be repeated.

The £440 was well spent, especially when I think about just how much I use the iPhone.