Ted

Jan-Paul van den Bos on How to Sync Entourage, iPhone, and iCal: "At first it seems if setting..."

Rick Hightower on How to Sync Entourage, iPhone, and iCal: "Thanks. This helped a lot. I..."

Joy on How to Sync Entourage, iPhone, and iCal: "Hi - in iTunes, I don’t..."

Matt on Don’t want to be in there.: "Well, the fact that it passed..."

Josh on Movies.app - Find movie showtimes, reviews, and tickets on your iPhone: "Movies is great, but I think..."

Matt on What’s going on in there?: "the republican congress is realizing their..."

Craig Melnick on How to Sync Entourage, iPhone, and iCal: "Hi, I tried the above, and my..."

The thing that people invariably ask is, “How is it?”

I don’t know really how to answer this question. I usually “It’s amazing” and “It’s going to change the game.”

There’s so much more in my head about this incredible device. Rather than talking about every feature, here are the key points I’m thinking of. And by the way, I am not going to assume that every design decision has some world-domination or other nefarious reason behind it. Only Steve knows the answer to those things. I’m just an influential end-user.

The keyboard thing

I understand the idea of moving to a more standard input method. However, if you think about the fact that typing an SMS went from searching among 9 keys, to 26+, I’m not sure about this innovation. I want it, I love it (it works great in terms of getting the words right), but I just can’t SMS with one hand (yet?). The best SMS phone I ever had was a Nokia 3390. Black and white, small raised oval keys. I could bang out messages right and left.

Can we get an “option” for a T9 pad?

The MMS thing

So the phone only sends text messages, no picture messages. And just as I was getting the hang of using MMS now that (a) there is a critical mass of phones that do MMS and (b) the plans to do them have become affordable. And the iPhone takes it away. Yes, you can e-mail photos, but you cannot MMS them to another phone. And that’s a difference. I’ve read about the phone e-mail address workaround. Not the same.

Bring MMS back.

There’s a little side bar here about where this will all go - will SMS go away and be replaced by e-mail as the mobile communication tool? I am happy to watch and see what happens here. The key thing about SMS is that it is short - it has to be. It does pop to to the top of the queue. It has limited retention in phone memories. All of these best simulate a real conversation. E-mail, not so much, and in fact, E-mail distorts conversations like crazy.

So, I’ve talked myself out of it. Let’s stick with the SMS/MMS paradigm. And here’s my idea for dealing with it in the meantime - getting a special e-mail account that you only use on your iPhone, at one domain, and get all your iPhone friends to use that same domain - then you can pump out the multi-MMS and multi-SMS like it’s nobody’s business. Who wants to try this with me?

The Camera

This is got to be on the list for an update. You can’t change any of the exposure settings, and when you e-mail a picture, you can’t select which account it’s going to come from at the time of e-mailing. I think this is all because of the MMS problem. Yes, I can still moblog, so all is well.

The Web Browser

It’s nothing short of incredible to have a robust browser at your disposal. So many avenues are opened up. Safari is just great, and it’s great on a mobile platform. I want what everyone else wants - Autofill and maybe even keychain access. It’s a little bit on the crashy side, but I’m really not complaining.

The RSS thing is interesting - there is a bit of an RSS reader within safari. that’s fast and functional. Newsgator also has a mobile edition that you can get to from settings. There’s also this more custom iPhone RSS reader. I think this is a really promising area for the iPhone - RSS reading.

The iPod

Great. For the longest time (several days!) I couldn’t figure out how to silence it if I needed to do something else quickly. I kept unlocking the phone, going to the iPod and pausing. Now I find out it’s a simple click of the microphone button on the headphone cord. Apple, Inc., you did it again!

The Wi-Fi network thing

This is genius. You know all of those places you go, like the gas station, or the port a potty at the State Fair that say, “Wi Fi enabled” and you say to yourself, “Yes, let me go get my laptop and sit here and log on.” Well for the iPhone, it totally makes sense. It’s really cool to watch it jump on an open WiFi network (and, um, for better or for worse, I have now mapped out my entire neighborhood’s security issues). A lot of our city buses are now Wi-Fi enabled. I’ll never pull out a laptop, but I will pull out an iPhone! (and actually, the new MacBookPro is so cool, the one with the LED display, that pulling out the laptop isn’t out of the question anymore…)

That’s all for now. It’s a great great device, made by really talented people. I enjoy it every day.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.