Living with the iPhone

Let's face it, the iPhone can do a whole bunch of things, some necessary (like talking, texting and emailing) and others not-so-necessary (like the rolling-a-make-believe-ball-into-a-peg-fame) pretty well. But, you would hope that one of the more basic features like the weather function would work better than it does. Sure, the icons are pretty and easy to understand. One of my favorites is the ambiguous sun-with-raindrops icon, so you know that it's supposed to rain and be sunny, right.... The forecasts are not detailed, and have questionable accuracy at best. I've been noticing this trend for months now, but this should't be the case as weather forecasting and even simple reporting is going to get more relevant as weather (i.e., global warming) becomes a greater and more pernicious factor in our lives (think about it: tornadoes in the midwest that have record wind speeds, snow in the Dakotas in late April, hurricanes that wipe out countries).

As such, because the interface is simple and only provides basic forecasts and conditions, you would hope that the iPhone weather feature would be at least accurate. Think again. I've seen it almost everywhere I travel. Today, for example, for San Francisco it says it's cloudy, when it's sunny. It said it was 61 degrees when it was 51 degrees (earlier it said it was sunny when it was cloudy). In Australia, I remember the forecast being sun and rain on alternating days. In reality, it was ... Read more

Sure, it's not new that people get interrupted at dinner by a cell phone call. In the past, it must have been a pager, or maybe in olden days, a courier pigeon. But with the increasing number of people getting iPhones (I have to admit that a scion of my friends are over it and are eagerly awaiting the next iPhone) what's happening is now I know what types of messages are interrupting that long-planned catch-up dinner with that over-scheduled friend sitting across the table from me. Whereas before you knew there was a message, now (thanks to the limited number to iPhone tones available) you can have a pretty good idea that Johnnie Q. Public is being texted, has a new e-mail, maybe missing an iCal appointment, or has new voicemail. Even if your iPhone is on silent you can hear the vibration, persistent buzzing (a call), short buzz (everything else).

Of course, this brings up a new set of disclosures, expectations, and etiquette that I'm sure Emily Post would reject out of hand: don't answer; switch off your phone, stupid. OK, maybe not the "stupid" part, but I'm sure she'd lean toward giving your dinner date your full attention. But we all can't be Emily Posts, nor should we. But what are the guidelines? Do you tell the person or persons you're eating with who texted/called/e-mailed you? I kind of want to know who interrupted my dinner. Who ... Read more

There comes a point where every early adopter realizes they are no longer really adopting anything unique any more. This happens when a product becomes saturated, more available and more universal. For me, as I've seen over the past few days, that point has come to pass - at least in San Francisco.

Walking around, eating out, and driving around San Francisco, all I see are iPhones. But it's not only the young yupppie/guppie types any more. Rather, there are kids, young professionals, middle-aged folks (not so many older folks though), men, women, white, Black, Latino, Asian, you name it and they are touting an iPhone. Have prices fallen drastically? No. Has that SDK come out yet? Not in an appreciable way yet. But nonetheless, visual evidence indicates that Apple and AT&T are on their way to selling millions of units this year, even if it's not 10 million.

This would explain, perhaps, why it was so easy for me to get another replacement iPhone when I thought I'd have to buy a new one. Unlike my last iPhone which had a portion of the touch-screen die (cell death is what the Apple rep temred it), this time I dropped my iPhone during a 20-mile training ride for the AIDS LifeCycle. It was my fault, plain and simple. The iPhone still 'worked' in a sense as it powered up and displayed its main menu. After all, it's tough enough to have been rolled ... Read more

Recent iPhone ads have touted the utility of having the iPhone on a trip. Vacationing with the iPhone is a great convenience, but also makes it harder to vacation.

Using the quasi-GPS and Google Maps, being able to make dinner reservations, forsaking tour guidebooks and printed itineraries it great. On a recent long weekend to Hawaii, my friends and I discovered and confirmed the utility of the iPhone features on the road. So much so, we didn't even bring our laptops, which is a big deal for some of us. Really, it is. The only physical complaint I had about the iPhone was getting sunscreen and sand on it. The only user-interface issue: dragging and dropping the "pin" in Google Maps as it sometimes got tripped up and I wished for some "reset" function to clear out all the locales we looked up.

In a larger sense though, at one point, I kind of wanted to throw my iPhone into a pineapple patch or a volcano (there were road closures do to hot lava flows). But while the iPhone is touted to merge phone, camera, iPod and PDA. Doing so, however, makes it hard to truly disconnect and unplug - spam emails follow you, work emails come too. Sure, this is true with any phone or mobile device. But doing so is both liberating and daunting as it takes me a particular amount of will power to switch off my phone and to keep it off for an extended ... Read more

A Sequoia voting machine rebooting, and rebooting...

(Credit: Kevin Ho)

With all things touch-screen in an increasingly touch-screen centric world, I was given the "plastic or paper" option for casting my vote in the California primary on this most super of Super Tuesdays. So, not liking the marker fumes and being used to touching everything on the iPhone anyway, I opted to vote "plastic."

The polling place had 10 conventional optical-scan voting stations with real paper ballots, but only 1 digital voting machine. San Francisco uses the Sequoia voting machine and, well, here's my story:

The clerk handed me a plastic card to insert into the machine. The idea is that you insert the card to activate the ballot and machine. Easy, right? Umm, no, not so in my case. Instead of the black screen of death, Sequoia's red screen of death (irony that the Communists would laugh at) popped up when I inserted my card into the machine's slot. Nothing moved--neither touching nor talking to the machine worked. What's worse, the card was now stuck in the machine as there was no eject button or function. The clerk who handed me the card was confounded. I was having flashbacks to that movie, Man of the Year, with Robin Williams being elected on a computer glitch. I had a thought that I'd have to cast a dreaded "provisional ballot"--at least my name isn't Chad and I'm not pregnant.

Not to be deterred, ... Read more

Polar Bear Farm, working with a reversed engineered SDK, have created two prototype applications that caught my eye. Of course, this coming from someone who thinks hacking involves coughing and jailbreaking involves Folsom prison. But with that said, the New Zealander guys (and they are literally guys) from Polar Bear Farm demoed a search function for iPhones that searches contacts and calendars. Beyond that, and more ambitious are their video recording feature (still in development) and even more ambitious peer to peer poker (with other players) using your iPhone as your hand of cards instead of actual physical cards. While the video compression details haven't been worked out (each second being about 3 MB is a bit excessive) and the poker applications a twinkling in their eyes, outfits like Polar Bear were my first exposure to the types of outfits really innovating with the iPhone. I wonder what's in the pipeline....

Video recording iPhone applications from down under - Polar Bear Farm's offering

(Credit: Kevin Ho)

iSkin's offerings: typical

(Credit: Kevin Ho)

Much like CES, the vast majority of iPhone accessories were limited to carrying cases or skins, which is surprising given that this was the event where the iPhone was introduced. While entries from iSkin and CaseLogic were there, these entries from Gilty Couture caught my eye. A gold-plated case ($99) and a diamond-encrusted (not real diamonds, right?) case ($135). However, not sure what the taste factor would be here. When we rolled up to the booth it looked as if a deal was going down, so you may see these soon.

Blinged out iPhone cases from Gilty Couture

(Credit: Kevin Ho)

I still stand by my original post that the updates promised for the iPhone released today as firmware "update 1.1.3 "should be given a better number, maybe a 1.2?, to mark the great features and updates. Hoaxes and teasers aside, I can't contain my giddiness - mass SMS text messages are back! That and many other neat features tracks the industry-wide trend of users being able to customize their iPhones to greater and greater lengths. Installation, via iTunes (which itself got an update) was quick - within 10 minutes I was up and running.

The changes I've noted and used so far that have made all the difference:

Google Maps qausi-GPS. Pretty cool to know where you generally are while stuck in traffic. After hitting a button a circle appears to indicate where you are generally. Kind of looks more like a targeting device for Kang and Kodos but eh, I can see how this will be pretty useful.

Customized iPhone application homepages - without a hack! Finally, I can change my icons and shove Stocks and YouTube to the second page! I never used those applications anyway and, finally, here's a way to get rid of them, well, not seeing them. That and I've added Safari icon links to this newly freed real estate to The New York Times, Facebook mobile for the iPhone, SFGate and to CNET (of course). The best part of this new feature is the seizure-inducing icon-shake when ... Read more

Early adopters are an impatient lot, especially Apple boys and girls. With Macworld looming Tuesday (a 3G/GPS iPhone? I will so be in line to get one if or when it comes out) and with reports of impatient iPhoners being hit with a Trojan masked as "leaked" 1.1.3 firmware, you can see that the line between enthusiasm and caution can be thrown to the wind.

While there don't seem to be any lasting or major effects from 1.1.3 Trojan, it made me wonder, when the iPhone is finally opened up for "legit" third-party developer applications, how common hacks like this will be in the future and how many more people will be affected by them. The 1.1.3 Trojan involved tinkering and hacking, so average Johnny Appleseeds like me, weren't hit. But, I'm sure future Trojans will be more malicious and more insidious, just like PC-based viruses. So, whereas viruses were uncommon in the Mac world (or so I'm told), I would predict this to change.

After asking how current iPhones were affected when an official firmware update hadn't even been released, and after many confused IMs later with my iPhone guru friend Patrick, I was exposed to the nuts and bolts of hacking your iPhone. Apparently, the "shift" key and a disc image becomes important during a sync in iTunes that allows you to install neat things like Labryrinth (the rolling ball game over a pegged-hole game board ... Read more

It wasn't a whiteout, a brownout but a rather, a geek out that plagued those of us with AT&T service on iPhones or AT&T service in general. While our bars indicated full service, getting server access error messages in Safari was much more common than you would think, especially a convention full of guys on their cellphones. But with more than 100,000 folks concentrated in a relatively small area.... Service outside of the area, however, was more than fine and faster than I've experienced. SMS texting, as usual, was the reliable means of communication. What's more, voicemails I got were delayed by 12 hours or more and I wasn't the only AT&T person with these issues. Way to go AT&T.