The Adventures of Systems Boy!

Just wanted to quickly post that the complaint I had about Mobile Safari's browser cache being pointless appears to have been a bug.




And, happily, that bug has been fixed in the 1.1.4 update.

Yay!

Labels: Applications, Hardware, Internet, iPhone

I love my iPhone. It is increasingly important to me for getting things done. I use it for everything: appointments, reminders, fact-checking, contacts, text, entertainment and, of course, as a telephone. It's boosted my productivity immensely, yet made my life easier and better in so many ways. I'm not sure how many products I can say that about.

Nevertheless, I have one persistent gripe when it comes to the iPhone, one thing that just pisses me off and confounds me every time I encounter it: Mobile Safari's cache is simply too small, to the point where it almost seems pointless to have cache at all. Case in point: I open a web page. It gets cached. I open a new window, and a new page in that new window. It too gets cached. Unfortunately, this new cache invariably wipes out the previously cached page, so that when I navigate back to the other window, the first page has to reload. And, just for the record, these are mostly text-based blogs, sometimes with a picture or two. It doesn't always go down this way, but more often than not it does. This defeats the usefulness of both cache and the multi-page interface available in the browser. I'm not sure what the point is.

I'm sure the browser cache equation rides a fine line between usefulness and unnecessary disc overuse. But for anyone who uses the Edge network on any kind of regular basis, I think they've got that balance wrong. And I can't help wondering why they don't give us a setting — just like in any other desktop browser — for cache size, within a sensible range, of course. Or, if not that, simply make the default a bit larger. The current one is pointlessly small.

UPDATE:
Fixed!

Labels: Applications, Hardware, Internet, iPhone

I recently had a problem with iCal syncing to my iPhone: Calendars would sync fine from the Mac to the iPhone, but any event entered on the phone would not sync to the Mac. Moreover, calendars deleted from iCal on the Mac — calendars that no longer existed — would still be available for syncing in iTunes. Clearly there was a problem with cached data of some sort, somewhere. But where?

After a lot of trial and error, and hunting around — I tried resetting iTunes preferences, iCal preferences, and anything else that might present an easy fix — I finally figured out where all this data gets mashed up. There are two folders in your home account that are responsible for syncing the databases between your iPhone and your Mac. The first one, as far as I can tell, just contains a backup of your iPhone data. It is:
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync

The second is where all the syncing action happens:
~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices

To fix my problem, I renamed these two folders. They'll get recreated the next time you sync your iPhone and you can keep these in case anything goes wrong. Then start up iTunes and reset all the items under the Info tab for your iPhone. (Fortunately, items under the other tabs seem to have been left alone, at least in my case. YMMV.) I still couldn't see my calendars in iTunes at this point, but I went ahead and just hit the Sync button. And it worked.

Everything now appears properly in iTunes. New calendars show up; deleted ones disappear. And syncing calendars between my iPhone and my Mac works perfectly now.

UPDATE:
Reader Ferdinand points out that Apple strongly discourages the removal of the SyncServices folder. Instead they recommend resetting your SyncServices with the instructions in this article for Mac OS X 10.5 or this one for 10.4. I'm quite happy I didn't have any problems, but if you need to mess with your sync services, I strongly recommend following Apple's advice over my own.

Labels: Applications, iPhone

So I really like Leopard. It's nifty, but not without it's problems. I thought I'd take a minute to post some of the issues I've had with the new OS.

So far I've only had a few complaints. Actually, my initial experiences were quite positive. I did an Archive and Install, preserving user and network settings, on my work machine, a Quad-Core Intel Xeon tower. I left all my old preferences in place and used my old home account data. All this went off almost completely without a hitch. The only snag, oddly, was my Final Cut Pro Studio suite, which needed to be re-serialized. Beyond that, smooth sailing.

Upgrade Woes
That upgrade went so well I decided to do the same to my aging PowerMac 2.7 GHz G5, and for the first time since I bought it that machine felt slow. Dog slow. Problematically slow. This was cause for concern. But what finally convinced me that there were major problems was what Leopard did to my iPhone. Oh, the horror!

Addresses
On the first iPhone sync with Leopard, all my addresses got completely borked. Each address was there, yet the name field was blank and there was a lot of information that didn't make the transfer. Fortunately I had a backup, and I was able to get back up and running. Oddly, the second sync worked perfectly, and only the latest contact info on my phone was lost.

Photos
Importing photos from the iPhone to iPhoto was also problematic on the upgraded Mac. The import took an extremely long time, and the imported photos suffered from strange color shifts and banding. They were unusable.

At this point I decided to do a fresh install. This worked much better, and my computer has been running much faster and handling iPhone syncs much more reliably. As part of the fresh install process, I also started with a fresh home account, which may have helped as well. But this was not the only source of problems, as I verified their existence on a clean account as well. Still, better safe than sorry, I figure.

In any case, for whatever reason, older hardware seems to like a fresh install. Things have been working reliably now for a few weeks. I'm happy.

AFP and MPD
My other beef with Leopard has to do with AFP mounts in the Finder. The way the Mac OS has always dealt with such mounts in the past is that when you mount a shared drive, you authenticate as a user with access to the resource and the drive mounts as though the authenticated user had mounted it, even if that user is different that the one who's logged in. So, for example, I could be logged in as SystemsBoy, but authenticate to a server as JimminyCricket. The server will show me the available shares for JimminyCricket, not SystemsBoy, even if they have different access privileges to that server. If I unmount the share, I can then reconnect to the server, this time authenticating as SystemsBoy, and then I see the shares available to SystemsBoy. This is actually more useful than it sounds. I have numerous identities that I use on my network. This allows me, for instance, to be logged into a machine as a non-admin user, but still connect to a server as an admin user and have admin access to those resources.

In my initial experiences with Leopard, however, the behavior had changed in a way that was potentially sucky. In Leopard, when I'd connect to a share I'd authenticate as a user, just as in the past. And the share treated me like the authenticated user, just as in the past. But once authentication had taken place, Leopard remembered the user credentials even after ejecting the mount. At this point, when attempting to re-log in as a different user, the Finder would refuse to forget the previous login identity and authentication would be bypassed. The server would simply remount as the originally logged in user.

This behavior could be a convenience for users who only use a single identity on client and server. But for those of us with MPD (that's Multiple Personality Disorder, smart guy) it's a real problem. We'd now find ourselves unable change our login identity on a server without a reboot, or until some period of time has expired. Crap!

Now, I have to say, this was happening to me without fail a few weeks ago, and it was really annoying. But now, for some odd reason, the behavior seems to have reverted back to it's old self, asking for authentication each time I request a server. It's really quite strange. I know this was a problem, because I noted it in my log of Leopard issues, but I'll be damned if I can reproduce it today. I suppose it's something to watch out for, but I'm glad to see that it seems to have cured itself. In any case, clearly there are bugs in Leopard, however inconsistent and occasional they might be.

~/Library
Leopard is a bit of a hard ass when it comes to your Library folder. The Library folder is where all the user's settings are stored, and Leopard takes steps to insure that it's always there. In fact, it disallows you from renaming or moving the folder. Try to rename it and it simply won't highlight; try to move it and you can only copy. This is both a blessing and a curse, I suppose. I mean, from an admin standpoint, I never really have to worry again about users removing their ~/Library folders. But then again, I never really did anyway. Conversely, it requires a trip to the Terminal to move a user's Library folder and test any problems therein, which is a fairly common troubleshooting step. I guess we break even here, but I think I preferred the old way of doing things. It just made my life easier.

Uh... So far that's it. Compared to my Tiger Beefs from a couple years back, that's nothin'. Hell, compared to any new software release that's frickin' amazing.

I'll say it again: Leopard is a pretty damn sweet release.

UPDATE:
I continue to have AFP problems on my Intel machine. They're different from those detailed above, but no less annoying. Earlier, I attempted to connect to a server and the process hung. I had to force quit the Finder to get out of it. And just a few minutes ago I connected to a server and copied a group of files over to my local system using a "command-c" copy, only to be denied for permissions reasons. Dragging and dropping the same batch of folders worked properly. And now, after ejecting and reconnecting to the same share, both styles of copying the same, exact folder work just fine. So clearly there are some AFP bugs that need to be worked out in Leopard. Nothing life-threatening, but surely annoying.

Labels: Applications, iPhone, Leopard, MacOSX

It seems I only have time for these brief posts. Tons in the pipe; time for none. Life must be... I dunno... Good or somethin'...

Anyway, I just updated my iPhone to the latest 1.1.3 firmware. You know, the one with all the goodies. It's pretty damn hot, I must say. The most useful thing will be the ability to send text to multiple folks. But the faux GPS is pretty damn cool too.

The other thing I updated was my iTunes, wherein I discovered this little nugget:


Looks like you can finally drag and drop music right into your iPhone and create iPhone-specific playlists — ones that live right on the phone and nowhere else. At this point I'm so used to the old way of doing things that I'm not sure what to do with this feature. But something tells me this new found freedom will be a boon at some point in the very near future.

Just as soon as I have some time to use it.

Labels: Applications, Hardware, iPhone

Here's the thing: two months ago, people like myself — early adopters — put our faith in an amazing company and plunked down $600 clams for a completely new, completely revolutionary and completely untested product. That company is Apple Inc. and that product is the iPhone.

Yesterday — a mere two months later — Apple dropped the price by $200. Some of us were outraged. Some of just said, "Hey, them's the breaks." And some of us — and this is where I find myself — some of us felt not outrage, nothing so dramatic, but we did feel slightly cheated. We felt like we'd paid a premium for a product because we just couldn't wait to get our hands on the damn thing, and now it turned out that that product wasn't really particularly rare and precious after all. Rather, we got burned to the tune of $200 for our love of technology, and if we'd had it all to do over, we'd have waited. Two months of early access did not feel long enough to justify the extra $200. We felt vaguely exploited. Like lab rats. We felt we'd lost out on the deal, and that people were laughing at us.

Steven Riggins says we're just pissed because we're no longer special. And I think that's true, though I don't see that as a bad thing. When folks like me bought the iPhone we did feel special. Hell, let's face it, in some circles we were special. And we worked it. We showed that phone off like it was nobody's business. All of which was great for Apple. Now they go and drop the price, and yup, we look like schmucks. And I'm suddenly far less proud of my iPhone. (Okay, I'm not — I can't stay mad at you baby! But you get the idea. I no longer feel like bragging.)

Apple needs it's early adopters. We are its best marketers, and without us there is no product launch. And for a company whose reputation rests so heavily on its end-user experience — that is, on how its customers feel about their products — it behooves Apple to treat us like we're special, at least a little bit. I don't see that as childish. It's the game Apple is playing themselves. They appeal to our emotions and we respond. Emotionally. I don't want to feel like Apple made a fool of me. I want to be able to brag.

Steven Riggins might not get that, but fortunately Apple does. They're giving us $100 store credit (which, I can tell you, is going straight towards a set of iPhone A/V cables). Perfect. That's exactly what makes Apple an amazing company. They understand the emotional side of technology. They don't poo-poo it. They don't belittle it. They embrace it.

Someone just came to my office, and the first thing they said was, "So, are you mad about the iPhone price-drop?" I just turned my laptop around, showed them Steve Jobs' open letter, and said, "Nope. I'm fine with it."

Addendum:
Saturday, September 08, 2007
There seem to be two camps forming on this issue. There are those who completely understand the backlash and feelings of misgivings held by iPhone early adopters (among them, Steve Jobs), and there are those who think we're assholes, bitches or crybabies for ever having had the gall to show off our $600 iPhones. You know what? From where I sit that's total bullshit.

We showed them off — or at least I did — in large because people asked us to. But also because we were excited about being a part of this cell phone revolution. This was not done cynically. We never said, "Nyah, nyah! I have an iPhone and you don't!" If anything, we said, "I have an iPhone, I love it, here's how it works. You should go buy one as soon as humanly possible." We evangelized. For Apple. And now we feel a little screwed by them. Emphasis on feel. This is completely unscientific, and completely subjective. But we feel taken advantage of. I think it would have been different if it had been even three months. Three months is a quarter of a year. It's some kind of milestone. But two months? What's that? It's nothing. It's a joke. This is not about money. It's about how early adopters were made to feel. And the fact is that many of them were made to feel shitty for being early adopters. And I say again, for a company whose reputation lies so squarely on making it's customers feel good, the timing and size of the iPhone price cut was a tacky, insensitive move. The $100 rebate, however, will go a long way, I think, towards helping folks like me — folks who weren't outraged, but who did feel a bit burned — feel good again about adopting early. I think that's important for both Apple and its customers.

Labels: Hardware, iPhone

Apologies to any readers who aren't interested in the iPhone. It's my little obsession for the time being, so please just bear with me. Exploring it has been a seemingly endless journey, but I believe I will have soon plumbed the thing's depths. Also, with the semester starting soon, and all our cool new goodies in the wings, I should have some other, more network- or desktop-systems-related articles to post in the near future (I am still a SysAdmin, after all). But until then, here's yet another iPhone post (as if the thing needed any more press).

Briefly, I wanted to mention that I did attempt to return my iPhone, using as a pretext the camera's white balance issue, from which mine certainly suffers, and for which I'd heard replacements could be had.


I was persistent (read: pesky but polite) enough to have a Genius take a quick look at the problem. He told me that his did the same thing, and that the issue would be corrected in a software update. That was Tuesday evening, July 31, 2007. Lo and behold, the next day Apple released their first iPhone software update.


Yesterday I installed the update, and I'm pleased to say, though the white balance issue has not yet been addressed, a number of other issues have. Firstly, the phone (mine anyway) is much, much more stable. My iPhone was getting to the point where I almost could not surf the web with multiple pages open without a crash. I mean it was bad to the point of me really not wanting to look at the internet at all anymore on the iPhone. Now, however, I find myself able to open several pages at once (including TUAW, which would consistently crash the browser before completely loading) without a crash. In fact, after a day of heavy use I have not had a single crash, where two days ago I was crashing on a very regular basis. This newfound stability is delightful.


Secondly, MobileMail, which had previously only showed the top-level folders of my IMAP account, now properly shows all subfolders. This is excellent. I get a lot of server messages automatically sent to me, and without subfolders I had no way to file them. Now, though it can be tedious, it's possible.


There are apparently a whole host of other undocumented improvements. iPhone Atlas has a partial list. They claim that the earpiece and speaker volume has been improved. I cannot verify this as I haven't made or received a phone call since the update (because I am an asocial loser). But if it's true, it would take care of one of my top 5 issues with the iPhone.

With this update — particularly with the improved stability — I find myself less concerned about my dropped, cracked iPhone. It seems to be undamaged and working quite well. At this point I've pretty much made the decision not to make another attempt to get it replaced. Aside from a few scratches and a small crack, which I hardly ever notice anymore, and a fairly troubling white balance problem with the camera, the phone is perfectly fine. So I'll stick with it for now. If Apple does not fix the white balance issue with next software update, however, I may have another crack at it.

Labels: Applications, Hardware, iPhone, Systems

Internet communications involve a vast multitude of tiny but complex transactions all working together in a concerted effort to transmit and receive various kinds of data. We all know this. But at no time has this fact been more evident to me than during my visit to my mother's backwoods home in Maryland, where the AT&T cellular service on my iPhone has ranged from intermittent to nonexistent. From time to time, however, I can get a connection just long enough to fire off an SMS, but using any other service that requires the Edge network is like watching the internet in slow motion. Surfing is a non-option. And sending email takes significantly longer in this slowed-down world of spotty service. But I found it surprising initially that SMS is able to get through where mail cannot. My first impression would be to assume that both would go about at about the same speed — both consist primarily of text data and are fairly lightweight. But email is clearly the more complex transaction, requiring the contacting of and authentication to mail servers and often the exchange of said data over secure channels. I'm not sure how SMS works, but it's something much, much simpler and more direct. And when everything is going in super slow motion these differences become painfully apparent.

This trip was to be the ultimate test of my iPhone's capabilities: could I survive a weekend at my mothers without a laptop, using only the iPhone instead? Would it hold up on the train as an entertainment device for the two-and-a-half hour trip? Would it function adequately as an internet appliance for light surfing and emailing? Would it work as a telephone?

Surprisingly, it worked well enough in every capacity but this last one: I could not use my iPhone as a cell phone at my mother's. I eventually discovered that, when laid flat on its back, the iPhone was able to generally maintain a connection to the AT&T network, so SMS, email and surfing were possible though the latter two were often painfully slow. Still, they were good enough to get me through the weekend. Where the iPhone fell down was as a cell phone. As soon as I'd lift it to my ear (sometimes sooner) it would drop any call I might be attempting.

This is a major disappointment. I was expecting the other functions of the phone to be limited, but I was pretty sure I'd be able to use it as a phone most places in the U.S. It worked plenty well in the Adirondacks. But at my mother's house (the phone seems to get healthy reception a few blocks away) I simply can't use my cell phone anymore. This was never a problem with Sprint. Indeed my folks have used Sprint without issue for years here.

Moving to AT&T was a calculated risk. One that, at least in this case, did not pay off. At this point I can only hope that either the iPhone's reception somehow gets significantly more stable in the vertical position in remote areas, or that AT&T's service eventually broadens to encompass the greater Annapolis area. Until then I'll be stuck on Sprint for the holidays.

So, in conclusion: the iPhone does actually replace my laptop as a portable internet and media device for short trips; unfortunately, it doesn't replace my cell phone. And that just blows.

This post written on my iPhone

Labels: Internet, iPhone, Systems

So I've had my iPhone for a few weeks now, and I've had a chance to travel with, accidentally lock and drop it. Thought I'd report on the state of the iPhone after long-term, heavy use.

AT&T and My SIM Card
One of the most common questions I got after my initial iPhone review was how AT&T was compared to Sprint. Mind you, I have grown to absolutely loathe Sprint and their treatment of long-term customers, of which I had been a member. Pretty much as long as I could ignore AT&T I figured I'd be happy. And if I did have to call them for some reason, as long as they weren't complete assholes to me and didn't try to charge me for stuff I didn't buy, again, happy camper. Well, I did have to call them.

At some point, while fiddling around with my iPhone's settings, I decided to try locking the SIM card. Locking the SIM is a security precaution: Should your iPhone wind up in nefarious hands, the SIM card is password protected. What I didn't know was that, out of the box, the SIM card is already password protected with a password known only to AT&T, initially. So when I tried to change the password, it asked me for the existing one. When I provided the wrong one, it locked me out as it's meant to do. Shit.

From then on the phone refused to let me make any calls or use the Edge network. I had to go onto a regular old computer to go to AT&T's website. Here I tried to log into my account, which I apparently had not set up yet. I had sort of assumed this had been set up for me when I activated my phone, but no. Setting up my AT&T web account required going to the site and doing so. Unfortunately, this didn't get me very far, though it did get me to a forum article that described the problem I was having and its solution. In the article was a link to an AT&T utility that would reset or send me the SIM card password. This tool worked perfectly except for one fatal flaw: It sent my SIM card password to my phone via SMS text. Uh, guys... That's not gonna cut it...

Loathe as I was to contact AT&T over all this — or customer service in general, for that matter — looks like that's what I was going to have to do. So I gave them a call (on a friend's cell phone, of course). After navigating the inevitable voice-based menus, I was told that my wait-time to speak to customer service would be two minutes. Not bad considering Sprint was usually upwards of twenty. In about a minute, though, I was speaking to a human. Not only that, but said human knew exactly what I was talking about, and how to fix it. He stayed on the phone with me while I entered the old password and set a new one, and after that everything was right back to normal. The whole call took under five minutes. Amazing!

I've heard AT&T has been making a great effort to improve customer service. And, while I still hope to avoid them in the future, I'll be a lot less resistant to giving them a call based on this recent experience. I can't say the same for their website, though. Finding info there seemed to be quite a painful affair. But, so far anyway, we're light years ahead of Sprint.

Travel
Over the last few weeks I've also had the opportunity to do some light traveling and testing of AT&T's cellular coverage in remote areas. I drove to the farmlands of upstate New York this past weekend, and I used Google maps for just about everything. I had taken along a paper map as well, in case I couldn't get cell phone reception, but I rarely needed it. Google Maps just freakin' rocks, and even in farm country, the AT&T network seemed to hold up pretty well. Not perfectly, mind you — there were certainly a few spots where I had spotty coverage, or none at all. But considering where I was, I was pleasantly surprised at my level of coverage.

Drops
One major bummer happened along my travels: I dropped my iPhone for the first time. I had gone swimming and brought the thing along with me. After my dip I went to pick the iPhone up off the pool chair where I'd left it — with a shirt to keep it from getting wet — and it slipped out of my hands and landed on the concrete, face down. The indestructibility of that glass is near-legendary at this point, and I'd only dropped it from a height of maybe three or four feet, so I honestly wasn't even worried. Imagine my horror when I got back to my hotel room and discovered not only scratches, but a small crack in the lower right hand corner of the glass. Yup. A crack. Fortunately, this is nowhere near the touch-sensitive areas of the screen, and the phone continues to work perfectly.


I've since managed to drop it from full standing height face down onto a hardwood floor, and it has emerged unscathed, so I don't think my first drop was typical. Still, dropping the iPhone can indeed crack the glass, so if you're worried, or prone to dropping phones a lot, and you want to keep your iPhone in pristine condition, you may want to consider getting a case for it. Me, I'm trying to just accept the fact that the phone will not stay perfect forever, and that shit happens. After all, what's a few scrapes and scuffs, right? Builds character!

Yeah... Okay... Whatever...


Anyway, I still love the damn thing. In fact, I have to say, maybe the most frustrating thing about it is how much I like it. It's the reason I bring it to the pool. It's the reason I drop it so much. Hell, it's even the reason I locked up the SIM card. I just can't seem to leave it alone.

So, yeah, still happy, cracks and all.

UPDATE:
iPhone Atlas has posted an article on options for cracked iPhone screens. It's pretty much what I'd expected, but what I didn't know is that Apple has a repair program for the iPhone, and they'll reportedly repair any iPhone for a flat rate of $199 for the 4GB model or $249 for the 8GB model. Why the price is different for the 8GB model is beyond me, but there you have it. Thought I'd let you all know.

Labels: Hardware, iPhone

It's funny. I just read Ars Technica's exhaustive-as-usual iPhone review, and in the conclusion they write:

It's clear to us that the iPhone wasn't meant, at the outset anyway, as a smartphone for smartphone people (who typically end up being business people). Instead, the iPhone was meant as a smartphone for everyone else: average people who, until now, had no reason or motivation to get a BlackBerry or something similar that may have been more difficult to use and had way too many features for the average phone user.

Why is this funny? Because the Ars crew and I completely disagree when it comes to the things we love and hate most about the iPhone. Particularly Safari — it's their "home run," but my least favorite part. This discrepancy is primarily a matter of perspective. I am a typical, non-smartphone using cell phone user. Or at least that's where I'm coming from. I'm used to surfing the web on a computer and using a phone as a phone and contact device. So everything that improves upon the telephone experience is a boon for me, but I never surfed on my phone anyway, and compared to my computer the iPhone just can't stack up. Smartphone users, on the other hand, have been frustrated by this crippled, mobile version of the web on their phones for years, so the iPhone's version of the web is a huge boon for them.

What's amazing, though, is that in the end we both come out fairly pleased with the device on the whole. Ars gives it an 8 out of 10. I'd give it a 9. But overall there is enough good about the iPhone to please both the cell phone crowd and the smartphone crowd. Now that's what I call balance!

If you really want a thorough review, I highly recommend the one at Ars.

Labels: Internet, iPhone

I bought one on opening day. I hadn't intended to, but sometimes the hype gets the better of even me. Well, hype and a burning hatred for my then-service provider, Sprint. So I bought one on opening day, over a full week ago. And I can honestly say I haven't been happier with a purchase since I bought my first Powerbook. In fact, this puppy basically is my new laptop. But it fits right in my pocket.

(A side note: A few days ago I got a bill from Sprint. Not for the early cancellation fee like I expected, but a bill for service that I'd paid several days earlier on a phone number no longer under their purview. This will not be the first time they've tried to charge me for a phone that's no longer in service. When I first moved to New York, it took me three months to cancel my previous phone. Their service has gone steadily downhill ever since. Sprint, this is why people hate you and will spend hundreds of dollars to switch to another service. Assholes!)

A lot has been said about the iPhone thus far. And I pretty much agree with most of it: the iPhone, with the exception of a few forgivable oversights, is a revolutionary, market-changing, life-altering device, and easily the best cell phone ever.

This sort of praise has been near-universal among iPhone owners. And for good reason. The iPhone is all those things. But it's the little things that people love and hate about the iPhone that vary from person to person. So I wanted to add my two cents, my voice to the chorus as it were. And I wanted to see if I could do it all (or most of it) on the iPhone itself. So, for a week I've been taking notes on the iPhone on the iPhone. And I'm typing this entire article on my trusty iPhone, between meetings and lunches, totally on-the-go style and shit, using the Mail application.

So far so good.

Google Maps
What probably surprised me most was how endlessly useful and well-integrated the Google Maps feature is. My first day with the phone I had dinner plans. I knew the name of the restaurant, but no one could tell me the address. Did I fret? Did I worry? Did I complain? Heck no! I just Googled it. On my cell phone! But not only was I able to easily retrieve the address, I also got the phone number and URL for the restaurant's site, and this information was easily added to my contacts for later easy retrieval — calling, browsing, want have you. Now I find myself looking up every place I ever call for take-out and adding it to my contacts because it's so damn easy and downright fun. Nearly everything about the iPhone works as easily and seamlessly. It's one of the true joys of owning this phone.

Camera
The next surprise for me was how good the photos look. The camera on the iPhone may not have many (ANY!) features, and the images may not hold up to a dedicated digital camera, but it comes a lot closer than any phone I've ever had.


Color and contrast look quite nice under normal lighting conditions. I've actually managed to get some really nice shots — shots that on my other phones would've looked like total crap.

And of course those shots can easily be assigned to contacts or wallpaper with the press of a few virtual buttons.


Contacts and Syncing
And speaking of contacts, all my contact information transfers seamlessly between my Mac's Address Book and my phone now. Windows users may be used to this, but it's another first for me. Synching my phone and my Mac now is not only doable but fairly easy and trouble-free. My only complaint is that, while Address Book syncs are two-way and multi-computer aware, most of the other sync functions hinge on the typical iPod paradigm, in which one computer is the master to which the iPod syncs. This is unfortunate — I have a bunch of computers I'd love to sync up — but not terribly surprising. And as long as the contacts can sync with multiple machines I can live with it.


Oh, one other complaint: locating a contact is a fairly straightforward affair — go to your contacts and scroll the list. Not bad. But I have hundreds of contacts, and this glut of contacts cries out for a search function. Apple's Address Book application has search capabilities. The iPhone's version of Safari has it too — start typing a URL and Safari makes appropriate suggestions based on history and bookmarks. Indeed, my previous phone — a Samsung A900 — even had this capability. It was just dog slow and a total pain. I was really hoping Apple would improve upon this functionality. Instead they chose to leave it out. Not a deal-breaker, but a bit disappointing. I do find myself wanting this feature on a regular basis.

While we're at it, do the same for the Calendar application.

Mail, Folders, Drafts
Mail syncing is not what it sounds like either. That is, account settings get synched but not the mail itself. In fact, the mail client is a stripped down version that (with my IMAP server, anyway) only shows top-level folders — Inbox, Sent, Drafts and Trash. No subfolders are visible. No rules are applied. No spam is filtered. Nevertheless, it's handy as hell to have constant access to my latest mail, and to anything I might be working on — like this article, for instance. In fact, the more I think about it, I'd rather save the organizing for my computer, so this is totally fine, and probably a good thing in the end. Typing in Mail, as throughout the iPhone interface does take some getting used to, but I'm already pretty proficient with two fingers after only a week. The only weird thing in Mail is that saving drafts requires a press of the "Cancel" button, after which you are prompted to save the draft. There is no "Save" button. (Though there does appear to be an auto-save, which I just learned after my first Mail crash — yikes!) I find this behavior very unintuitive and more than a little scary.

Notes
Another pleasant surprise has been the Notes application. I'm a big note-taker, and I find myself using it constantly. It couldn't be much more bare-bones — or much uglier — but I use it all the time. And again, typing is generally quick and trouble-free.

Safari
Having real web access has proven pretty damn handy as well, though without WiFi it's kind of painful. In fact, surfing the web is probably the least satisfying thing about using the iPhone. For one, Safari crashes on me with a fair degree of regularity. (And by the way, the other apps almost never do.)


And, though it's a fairly full-featured browser (I for one am glad there's no Flash most of the time), pages not designed for the phone can still be difficult to read. The New York Times, for instance, which sometimes uses a fairly wide column for articles, almost must be read in horizontal mode. Fortunately — brilliantly — the iPhone provides just such a feature. But surfing the web is just generally not the rich media experience I was hoping for. It has been useful for cheking our network and the status of certain servers. And it will be great for when I want to read sites that consist mainly of text. But really, who has time to read these days anyway?

Battery
I've also been quite happy with the battery life of this phone. I haven't actually talked on it for any length of time (that will require a call to Mom), but I use it for notes, mail, Google and checking the weather all freaking day (I can't keep my hands off the damn thing) and my battery seems to consistently last a full two days, though barely. My old phone would die in the middle of any call over a couple hours and needed to be recharged nightly. 'Course my old phone couldn't check mail, weather, Google or take notes either — at least not without jumping through some major hoops and incurring some major charges. I guess when I think about it, one of my favorite things about this phone is that it's not my old phone. Doing anything on that phone was a chore. Most everything on the iPhone is either dead easy or downright fun. Who'd've ever thought you'd hear a cell phone described as "fun?"

But I digress.

The Phone
The phone part of iPhone is fine. Nothing to really write home about, but fine. The nice thing about using iPhone as a phone is, of course, the interface. There is no talk button. When receiving a call, as everywhere else on the iPhone, you're presented with a list of contextual options — "Answer" or "Decline" if you're using other features of the device. I actually wasn't sure how to answer my first call. The phone was locked, so I unlocked it and then panicked a little. "Now what?" Turned out, I had already answered by the simple act of unlocking the phone. Nice!

Sound quality, as reported elsewhere, is clear but a bit quiet, especially given that I live in a big, noisy city. It's much better with the earbuds, but I'm not usually in a position to use them, especially when I'm out and about. I do hope they fix this with a firmware or software update. I have a feeling they will. Still, sound is clearer with less background interference than my previous phone. So overall I'm pretty pleased with the phone portion of my iPhone.

Improvements
The iPhone is by no means perfect, of course. Though I'm about as happy with a version 1 device as I think humanly possible, there are just a few things I would love to see improved. Everyone has their priorities. My list goes something like this:

• Contact and event searching
  Like I said earlier, this would be really nice if implemented well.
• Better backspace placement
  I am always hitting the backspace button inadvertantly (though I am getting better).
• Cut/copy/paste
  This a given, and probably the number one complaint about the iPhone. If Apple could provide this with a software update, everyone would be pleased as punch, I'm sure.
• Disk access
  I was pretty bummed that I can't use this iPod/iPhone as a hard drive. It's the one thing even my old phone can do. Give me access to that 8 gigs, please. (There is now iPhone Drive, though I'd rather not have to pay to access my own hard drive, thank you very little.)
• Volume increase
  It would really be nice if we could turn the iPhone up a bit for calls. Plenty of volume for the iPod, though.

That's about it. I'm really a pretty happy camper.

Final Thoughts
All kinds of new, mind-altering experiences have come my way since getting this phone. For one, people actually talk to me at parties now. The iPhone is actually so cool it spills over onto me. It has a surplus of cool. Cool to spare. And for the first time ever, though I've never been an iPod person, I've actually put on headphones and used the iPod functions of this phone (I may now be hooked like the rest of the world). I'm not sure why I tried it, really. I guess I just like the thing that much. It's just so damn touchable!

But the most telling event happened the other day while I was using my computer, actually. I was looking at a web page and wanted to scroll down. And for just the briefest of moments it was all I could do to keep from using my finger.

This is big, folks. Really big.

This article written on my iPhone
(but edited on my computer)

Labels: Hardware, iPhone

Just got done watching the iPhone Activation Video — 'cause with the announcement of the very reasonable service plans I've pretty much decided I'm getting one of these puppies — and I noticed a bit of an error in the video. The demonstration iPhone in the video is apparently an 8 GB model and starts off with 7.27 GB of storage.




But by the end of the video its capacity has increased tenfold!




Well, that cinches it. If the iPhone's capacity magically grows as you add data, it's surely the most wondrous device ever, and certainly worth having.

I'll take three!

Labels: Hardware, Humor, iPhone

The new ModBook, from Axiotron and OWC, finally realizes a dream long held by Mac lovers: the tablet Mac. But seeing this Franken-computer in action only makes me realize that it's a product that's doomed to failure.

As cool as the idea of a tablet computer seems — and make no mistake, these ModBooks do look pretty cool — all I can think about when I see them demoed is how incredibly inconvenient they'd be to use for most regular work — for most anything I use my laptop for. What do I use my laptop for? Email, billing, troubleshooting, surfing, writing. Almost everything I generally do on my laptop requires text input, for which a WACOM is poorly suited. What do I not do on my laptop? Draw! Let's face it, the WACOM is a drawing tool, and I just don't think most people use a laptop for drawing. And I don't think they want to either.



Graphics people tend to use desktop systems as their main rigs. There are a lot of reasons for this: they need a faster computer; they need a larger viewing surface; and, perhaps most importantly, they just don't want to draw or design on-the-go. Ever try to draw something in your sketchbook in the car? Or on the train? On a plane? It sucks. Drawing is not a portable activity.

So, the scenario goes, you buy this ModBook, and not only do you have to draw on this small screen, on this underpowered machine, but you also have to handwrite your emails, your terminal scripts, and your blog entries. The ModBook cripples both the functionality of a portable computer and that of a drawing tablet. It flies in the face of both these products' very reason for being. And it costs a bundle to boot.

I'm not sure what the intended market is for these machines. But I can say with almost 100% certainty that they will fail, because I don't think that market is very large, if it exists at all. The ModBook adds either a layer of complexity or a lack of functionality to everything you might want to use a tablet or a laptop for in the first place. I predict that graphics users will find it underwhelming, and regular users will find it frustrating. Who does that leave? Um... People with a lot of expendable income for electronic toys they'll never seriously use. A novelty market at best.

It's almost too bad the ModBook was released alongside the iPhone. The iPhone shows us real and good reasons to use a touch-screen interface on a portable device, and some really brilliant and innovative ways to implement this. It totally shows the ModBook up. Compare the two, and the ModBook comes up looking like a product without a purpose.

Apple was right when they said that no one would want a tablet computer. Seeing the ModBook only drives the point home. With a vengeance.

Why did we want that again? I forget.

Labels: Hardware, iPhone

That's all I really have to say about it. I totally, unreservedly want an Apple iPhone. It will most likely replace my aging 867MhZ PowerBook. And my cellphone. And my wireless provider. And my iPod. And my portable hard drive. And... And...

Yeah, I want one.

Labels: Hardware, iPhone