It's a phone, maybe your cup of tea or not.
After many months saving i could finally aford my first iPhone (i've toy'ed around with a few but never had one of my own), i'm not going to try to deceive you, i've used many phones in my life, this is one of the prettiest. So, let's dissect this phone using as reference the ratings given by eBay on the review:
Putting aside the fact that if you're a developer you must run all your code through Apple (and pay for the right of being a iOS coder), the features are correct, its snappy, web browsing is quite fast (Safari is one of the best optimized mobile browsers ATM) and has all my requirements (mainly a broad 3G band coverage), so, 4/5 to that (i'd loved to being able to remove the dreaded Passbook and other features i don't like from the desktop).
iOS is simple, anybody can use iOS, even my dog could use it, so, 5/5 on that.
Battery life is quite good, considering there is no real multitasking and application resource usage is quite draconian (try to load a page, press home button and load another app, try to look for the whole page being loaded up when you finish, i dare you), so that's 4/5 (sorry fanboys, guys like Nokia still have better battery implementation in Symbian, still, don't get angry, Android is usually equal or worse).
And here's the dreaded category, "value for money".. make no mistake, this phone IS EXPENSIVE, period, you might argument that "you pay for quality" but there's earth-shattering quality here, it's a solid phone, HTC, Nokia and almost everyone has solid phones over the 300+ range, nothing palpable in this phone makes it worth 500+ (and i'm willingly forgetting about the "scuff gate", the supposedly "manufacture error" of the first batch of iPhone 5). Now, if the "wow, i have an iPhone" or "i look so cool sending SMS in this" is worth the difference, this phone is for you. So, 2/5 here, in my humble view, the pricetag should be around 400-500 to get a 5/5 here, luckily for Apple, their users don't care about what i think.. :-).
Summing up: good phone, good features, good battery life, based on its features and materials alone, incredibly expensive. If you want a solid phone, like it and don't care about the dent in your pocket, go for it, you'll love it.
Still, there are excellent phones out there with a better price/value ratio that are able to do everything this phone does.Read full review
