I was fortunate to get my iPhone at 2:30pm Thursday, launch day. I was like a new kid at Christmas. But, after the last couple of days, I gave some good and bad impressions.
My first disappointment was the fact that it did not address the location problem while using my MicroCell. While I love the 5-bar 3G coverage in my home, it makes location based apps useless when it thinks you are almost 300 miles away near the Savannah coast instead of half-way between Atlanta and the North Georgia mountains.  But this MicroCell has benefits that far outweigh the annoyances. For example, for the 20 or so hours a day that I average at my house, the signal is so strong as to eliminate any of the reported interference issues. I had to get out of the house Sunday and out where reception was lower even to duplicate the antenna/reception issue.  And the free calls made on the MicroCell has dropped our family usage of minutes down to about 45 minutes of charged minutes per week.  I’m expecting 1200 of our 1400 minutes to hit my rollover bucket in two weeks before dropping my plan down to the one with lower minutes.  My only real complaint with the setup is that the iPhone still gets whacked out GPS locations when connected to the MicroCell.  Guess it is better than the reception/antenna issues though!
The camera is also a plus and a minus. It takes really great images. But the images it takes are not consistently showing up in the camera roll when you launch the photo app to share them. If you re-launch the camera app and select the photo thumbnail in the bottom left, they all show up.  Seems to occur after adding things to the camera roll like screen captures or things added there by other apps.  Another frequent issue is that when I launch the photo app, it automatically loads an email pane to email the last photo in the roll that it recognizes.  Even if you cancel it and discard the draft email, it comes back the next time you launch the Photo app.  Not sure what that issue is, and I cannot duplicate this on a regular basis, but I’d expect a quick software release to address these issues.
Speaking of camera, there is a huge drawback to FaceTime that I have not seen publicized anywhere.  It does not work over a WiFi network protected by a WEP key (according to 1st level Apple support person).  Apple’s solution?  Change your network security or go to a Starbucks to use FaceTime.  While the process appeared to be seamless in the Steve Jobs Dog & Pony Show, I started my first call to Apple’s FaceTime test line at 10:04am and was on my 4th call with an “escalation” team 90 minutes later and still not getting any “face” in my FaceTime and my battery level had dropped by 30% or more.  All told, the process took 2-hours and ended up with Apple blaming my router, even though they could not tell me what ports were possibly being blocked and I’d told them that I don’t do any kind of port-blocking on my router,  and suggested that I drive to a McDonalds or Starbucks.  They wanted to verify that “they problem is with [your] router”.  I told them that my router works fine with every other piece of equipment (12 at best count) that attaches with it and that it isn’t Linksys’s fault that Apple came out with call technology that requires wifi but will only work on some routers (and unsecured ones at that).  They’ve promised me that they are working on it.  Yeah, right….Picture me holding my breath!
All is not bad though.  My two favorite aspects of the OS are the folders and the “multitasking”. Until more 4.0 apps start building save-states and such though, it is of a quick app launching though.  It just gives you a quicker way to re-launch many of the apps.  That is a plus too though. On my old 3G, it took me 12 seconds on average to launch the app and have it check Gmail messages and display my inbox.  Now it takes between 3 and 4. With Pandora and other apps that are programmed to handle the new iOS 4 features though, it works incredibly well.  With the folders, I am never more than 3 taps from any of my 240 apps.  And the little widget on the “multitasking” bar for playing iPod stuff is incredibly handy.  It remembers exactly where I am in an audio book and will start playing from that spot in just a second or two.
Battery life is something else that I am really enjoying.  I’ve fully run it down and re-charged it three times now.  Usage and standby time is still increasing with each cycle.  Over the day yesterday, an average day for usage, I got 21 hours 39 minutes standby and 6 hours 14 minutes of usage.  I expect that to increase some, but it is still a whole lot better than what I had been experiencing with my old 3G.
Overall, I am really happy with the unit and would give it a grade of a B-minus.  The unit has a solid feel to it and there is nothing cheap-looking about it.  It isn’t perfect.  Lots of my issues could be (and likely will be) addressed with firmware and/or software updates.  The antenna issue is a huge design flaw though and is likely not what Apple had in mind when they wanted to change the way folk’s used cell phones.  But for most of the stuff I do at the place I spend most of my time, it is a big improvement over my 3G.  Would I pay the $600 price for one outside of a discounted phone upgrade price though?  No. In fact, depending on what they do (or not do) to address the reception issue and FaceTime issue, I might actually be tempted to go with an Android.