I am back with a vengeance. Just like in 2007 I waited online and had a new 16 gig white 3G iPhone. The best part for me is this entry is coming straight from my phone via the new Wordpress App, available in the app store. Note to other bloggers it does not work with WP2.6 yet. Should have much more for you all soon.
I have been away for a bit. Once the newness wore off the iPhone, it was time to get to work. So I had to put my nose to the grindstone and get some work done. Fortunately my iPhone has been with me every step of the way, and invaluable to me. Through the first two software updates, through the price drop and the gift rebate we get, it is still by my side doing its job.
I have not had the time to spend tweaking it and working with it, and so have been using mostly the basic functionality, but to great effect. I hope to get back to looking into the world of the iPhone again and sharing with you all what I have found in the preceeding months.
It is too early to be enshrining the iPhone, but in my own personal Hall-of-Fame, I have owned few transcendent devices. As I have gotten older, I have gotten more reluctant to live on Technologies bleeding edge. However, the iPhone pulled me out of that for the first time in quite a while.
For my lifetime, and in chronological order:
Atari 2600 (~1980)
Palm Pilot 1000 (~1996)
14 Hour TiVo (~1999)
8 Gig iPhone (2007)
Not really many ground-breaking entries for someone who has been a gadget freak from a young age. Certainly I have used and tried many times more gadgets and electronics, but these are unique in both impact on my life, society, and long-term usability, functionality. With the exception of the Atarti 2600 I was also there for all of them from the very beginning.
Only two weeks out and it is impossible for me not put the iPhone in the same category as those other devices for me, in my own personal Gadget Hall-of-Fame. So what devices are in your gadget Hall-of-Fame? Does the iPhone belong there?
A couple of weeks back I wrote about me not being able to properly use Digg on my iPhone. Well my prayers have been answered, as Digg has an iPhone interface they are now beta testing.
Not really substantiated, but there is one rumor I found on EverythingiPhone that says we will see the first update for the iPhone next week.
Would be good if it were true.
I came across something I did not know and it would have helped me this weekend. When on the road, I wrote a blog post, but could not place it in the correct category in Wordpress, because the selection of categories is a scroll box. So yesterday when I started using BeeJive IM, I noticed you could use two fingers to scroll the chat box. So today I decided to do a quick test in Wordpress and yes indeed, you can scroll any box with two fingers. Simply place both fingers in the scrollable area and slide them up or down to scroll.
I do not know if everyone knew this, but I certainly did not, and that is what I get for not reading the instruction manual for the iPhone.
Lots of people have been trying to tackle the lack of an instant messaging application since even before the iPhone launched. Since I am not a big texter, but I do like to use IM, this was a big deal to me. Unfortunately, I am old school so almost all of my IM is done via ICQ. Some of the pre-iPhone sites that were doing this, only offered AIM. Other web-based IM applications like Meebo, were simply still too cumbersome to use on the iPhone. Now everything is right with the world. Beejive has introduced their ALPHA Instant Messanging Client. It supports Gtalk, AIM, ICQ, MSN and the rest. The display for chat mimics the text bubbles used in SMS on the iPhone. I got a chance to thoroughly test it for several hours today while in a car, and on Edge it was working wonderfully. It uses cookies to remember your settings, and you can login to all of your accounts at once if you like. It may not be a perfect integrated application, but for an application still in alpha testing, I am impressed. It has made it possible for me to legitimately use IM on the iPhone for the first time without any hassles.
Checkout BeeJive’s IM Client for the iPhone
Several people have complained about the responsiveness of the accelerometer in the iPhone. The key to making it work is to hold it perpendicular to the ground when rotating it and not parallel. Try it yourself. Hold your phone at a 90 degree angle instead of tilted or flat and it will rotate without fail.
Well I wrote a little blurb about my battery life this morning here. Then I came across this tip on MacRumors here. Essentially it advises you shut down your applications when not using them. The way to do this is to simply hold the HOME button down for 8 seconds or so while you are in the application you want to close.
For me personally I enjoy being able to flip back and forth between open applications. But to save battery life it does make sense to close down those you are not using. So if they do change this in the future, hopefully they make it an option. So if you are finding your battery draining faster than you would like and you have application that are open in the background that you are not using go ahead and close them down.
There has been a lot of discussion as it relates to the iPhone battery. I was not paying much attention to it the first few days, but once I buckled down I discovered a few things. For one it is not entirely clear how you get the gauge to actually start working on the settings screen. I did it by using only the wall charger. My experience tells me the USB charger is significantly slower then the included wall charger.
So once I got a full charge and got my timer reset I decided to see what kind of results I got. At first I kept it off for a day, but the battery was still at 50% so I kept it off a charge for 2 days.
The results:
~5% battery life remaining
Usage 5 hours 17 minutes
Standy 1 day 12 hours
So over those two days the phone was on or in standby the entire time. WiFi was never toggled off as I use it a lot and had no interest in turning it off. Most of my usage was e-mail, browsing, and some of the widgets. Did not use the iPod at all. On the second day I used it much less than the first day, as I only had a little over an hour of usage during day 2.
I don’t know if this match up with the specs as it is hard to mix and match usage, but I was not disappointed with the amount of time I got out of the device over nearly 42 hours. That is how long with my normal usage, WiFi always on, never turning it off, that it took to get the battery down to about 5%. As for the percentage, personally I am quoting a number based on a visual guestimation. If there is an actual way to see the % of battery life left I would love to know what it is.
Finally, I think it might take a couple full charge ups before the battery is workingup to specs. The first day or two it seemed my battery ran down quickly, but after I got a few good charges into it, it seems to be lasting longer. Based on some of the complaints I have seen from others, this seems entirely possible.
