iPhone 5: The First Hour

• Biggest disappointment so far: The “slate” metal edge seems really delicate. Look, it’s already scratched and nicked, just from a light fall — pretty ugly. I never dropped my iPhone 4 or 4S. The iPhone 5 is a little slippery, and fell a few inches onto a tile floor. This is what happened. (Yikes.) I’m still never going to carry this thing in a case, but I really hope it isn’t polka-dotted in a few months. And if this starts happening a lot — this is a $850 appliance here, it should be durable — it could actually be a real problem for Apple.
• The iPhone 5 is lighter and thinner than I expected. The denser iPhone 4S really does feel a little heavy after holding the new iPhone for a few minutes, even though there isn’t really that much difference between the two. I thought the reviewers were being absurd when they said this, but it’s really true.
• The new, taller screen is great. I already prefer this to the old one.
• The new Lightning jack is much smaller than I expected. I like it.
• Setup was pretty smooth, especially because Verizon already knew which number to port from AT&T. (I ordered direct from Verizon.) But it wasn’t perfect: iTunes synced the Kindle app from my wife’s phone/account, and it still doesn’t transfer music over from your last iPhone. Maybe I should just sync with iCloud?
• LTE is amaaaaazing. Let’s see how fast it is in a month, but for now, it’s everything I dreamed of.
• I’m cautiously optimistic about the reports that the Verizon iPhone 5 SIM slot is unlocked for GSM networks. I’m going to France next week, so it’ll be awesome if I can somehow get a prepaid nano-SIM for this thing, instead of using my unlocked iPhone 4S. We’ll see..
• The EarPod headphone things are fine if you don’t care about sound quality or isolation, but I’d never use them. I’m an Etymotic HF3 guy (with old-school ER6-14 eartips).
• Night photo from the roof: All right! (Cropped, but not retouched.) But panorama mode doesn’t work at night — everything’s super dark. I’ll give it a better run during the day. (Also, Instagram isn’t ready for this screen yet? It seems the team just moved into Facebook HQ, so I’ll give them a pass this time, but let’s go!)