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iPhone 3G so far
Aug. 3rd, 2008 11:18 amMy iPhone arrived at the AT&T store Thursday last; I picked it up and took it home. Other than the two week wait, the process took about an hour total time including driving there and back twice.
Turned it on at home and it immediately asked to hook up with one of the two WiFi nets in the house -- typed in the password and off we went surfing. Several hours later, service switched from Verizon to AT&T and I could make and receive calls.
I looked into MobileMe (Apple's attempt to centralize sync services in the cloud.) After a bit of fiddling I realized there were too many problems for someone who doesn't use all of the Apple applications -- I use Entourage for email and contacts, Google Calendar for calendars (shared with Paul), and Adobe products for photo management. Just using iTunes for sync works okay, once I set up iCal to subscribe to our Google calendars and set sync services in Entourage to sync to the Mac Address Book and iCal. After that, my contacts and our calendars made their way to the iPhone via iTunes. Set up my Bluetooth headset and the Prius' handsfree, and everything works. I don't really need or want push email.
Some less-than-perfect aspects: the iPhone, like the iPod, compromises functional UI for elegance. The onscreen keyboard is not good for long messages, and Apple has seen fit to cripple Bluetooth profiles for portable keyboards, probably to avoid cannibalizing laptop sales. But that doesn't explain why the stereo BT profile is also omitted - stereo BT headsets for music would be great (if they could get hi fidelity.) Ultimately this kind of appliance is most useful if its size limitations can be selectively overcome with UI addons - big screens, head-up displays, keyboards.
As a phone, it doesn't fit the hand well, and the AT&T signal strength in the house is weak enough that the iPhone's middling reception is a problem. The many comm chips eat power, so with everything connected the phone doesn't last through the day; keeping it in standby will be important.
One of the handiest features is the Google Maps / GPS application; it helped us yesterday when we forgot to bring an SF city map with us apartment-hunting.
Today I'm packing up my old Motorola phone for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bjarvis, who's same-model phone is having hardware issues. I still have to buy accessories, since the AT&T store had no cases left, so I'll look online.
Turned it on at home and it immediately asked to hook up with one of the two WiFi nets in the house -- typed in the password and off we went surfing. Several hours later, service switched from Verizon to AT&T and I could make and receive calls.
I looked into MobileMe (Apple's attempt to centralize sync services in the cloud.) After a bit of fiddling I realized there were too many problems for someone who doesn't use all of the Apple applications -- I use Entourage for email and contacts, Google Calendar for calendars (shared with Paul), and Adobe products for photo management. Just using iTunes for sync works okay, once I set up iCal to subscribe to our Google calendars and set sync services in Entourage to sync to the Mac Address Book and iCal. After that, my contacts and our calendars made their way to the iPhone via iTunes. Set up my Bluetooth headset and the Prius' handsfree, and everything works. I don't really need or want push email.
Some less-than-perfect aspects: the iPhone, like the iPod, compromises functional UI for elegance. The onscreen keyboard is not good for long messages, and Apple has seen fit to cripple Bluetooth profiles for portable keyboards, probably to avoid cannibalizing laptop sales. But that doesn't explain why the stereo BT profile is also omitted - stereo BT headsets for music would be great (if they could get hi fidelity.) Ultimately this kind of appliance is most useful if its size limitations can be selectively overcome with UI addons - big screens, head-up displays, keyboards.
As a phone, it doesn't fit the hand well, and the AT&T signal strength in the house is weak enough that the iPhone's middling reception is a problem. The many comm chips eat power, so with everything connected the phone doesn't last through the day; keeping it in standby will be important.
One of the handiest features is the Google Maps / GPS application; it helped us yesterday when we forgot to bring an SF city map with us apartment-hunting.
Today I'm packing up my old Motorola phone for
bjarvis, who's same-model phone is having hardware issues. I still have to buy accessories, since the AT&T store had no cases left, so I'll look online.
