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?
AT&T has announced that they will be providing free access to their over 10,000 WiFi hot spots to their broadband customers.
Subscribers to AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet Pro and Elite are eligible for the offer, as well as AT&T FastAccess Xtreme with either 3.0Mbps or 6.0Mbps. Customers can log on immediately to Wi-Fi hotspots using their broadband username and password.
Good news for me. I have the 6.0Mbps plan from AT&T and now I will have free access to all the WiFi points of AT&T that is excellent news for sure. That is what I call synergy.
You can find out where AT&T has WiFi HotSpots here.
Well I found out how many web browser windows you can have open on the iPhone at once. It is eight. As someone who has sometimes over 100 Firefox tabs open at any given time, I was sure to hit the limit on the iPhone sooner rather than later. 8 is still workable for the iPhone, but I didn’t even think about it having a limit to be honest, now I know what it is.
Hot off the presses with the 1st Generation iPhone, now is the time to be heard. I do not have many issues, but the ones I do have I hope can eventually be addressed. So I came across this address where Apple is openly soliciting our feedback. I advise everyone to share their thoughts with Apple in an intelligent and level-headed manner, and let them know what they can do to improve the iPhone experience for you.
My list of issues right now are: 64-Bit Vista Support, and IMap folder support. I would love to be able to create IMap folders, and move e-mail into IMap folders. I also would like Message Filtering.
One of my last hurdles to overcome in fully utilizing my iPhone was setting up e-mail. I have been essentially dreading it as my set up has me getting a lot of mail every day, with a significant portion of it being spam. I have essentially been relying on Thunderbird to deal with SPAM which is not the best solution. After mulling it over for a day or so, I came upon a solution.
I decided I would try to utilize Gmail as a Spam filter for my E-mail. Then I would either pick it up from Gmail or forward it back. My original plan was wanting to forward it back to the same address. This is doable, but I would to muck around with my mail on the server, and my main mail account is actually hosted on a shared server that I do not own, not on one of my own servers. I attempted some half-hearted hacks with Cpanel, but suffice it to say it did not work how I wanted it.
So while still trying to crack the nut of having Gmail sending mail back to the same account that was forwarding to it in the first place, I decided to try the Gmail setup on the iPhone directly. You have to use POP3 with Gmail and the iPhone. This is fine, but the problem for me was that it does not honor the changed “From” field when sending mail. So when I sent mail even though I wanted it to show coming from “me @ mydomain.com” it showed coming from “Mynick @ gmail.com”. This simply was not workable as it made my e-mails potentially confusing to recipients. I really needed a solution that would allow me to send out mail and have the from and reply-to line set to what I wanted, so it would appear to be coming from my original address.
I finally settled on using a second email account. I just set up a second account on my server and had Gmail forward the mail to that account.
So to explain how it works:
Mail comes to my server at “me @ mydomain.com”
My server automatically forwards all mail for “me @ mydomain.com” to “mynick @ gmail.com”
Gmail takes all that mail runs it through their very good spam filtering, and then forwards the remaining messages to “me-secondary @ mydomain.com” and then also archives the messages on Gmail.
I receive the messages at “me-secondary @ mydomain.com” with IMAP both through Thunderbird, and through my iPhone.
So far it has been working excellently. There is no filtering or ability to create new folders on the iPhone, so I have to do all that on Thunderbird, but it has not been a big deal so far. Gmail has been doing an amazing job filtering out the spam, leaving me with a reasonable inflow of mail that can be effectively used on the iPhone. I will ocassionally go to Thunderbird and run my mail filters, but I can access the same mail from both locations now.
The only thing I had to change on the iPhone was what some of my default boxes were. For Trash and Sent boxes, I had to choose the ones I was using on Thunderbird, to sync them up. When people get messages from me it shows as coming from my original address and replies get sent back to the same address.
One thing I completely forgot about was when I was at the Apple Store getting my phone last Friday, one of the Apple employees told us that Applecare would be available in July. He did not tell us what it would cost, but other people have said they were told it will be $60.
So expect to be able to purchase AppleCare for your iPhone in July for $60.00 if you so desire.
It is not exactly like I have been hating the iPhone since I have had it, but the reality is with any new toy, there is a bit of a glow after getting it and basking in the “Wow that is cool” to where it either becomes something you keep using or something that ends up in a drawer. My iPhone is not going to end up in the drawer. The first thing I did when I woke up is grab my iPhone, check my e-mail and then go browse one of my favorite iPhone forums at MacRumors. I got my e-mail set up last night after some trepidation. This is something I will write more extensively about later on. Anyways, the point is I was able to grab my iPhone and have it be used in a productive manner, and this will continue.
I essentially had a Eureka moment where I said, “This is very cool and very useful.” It is likely going to do impact my life in a way I had only hoped 40 hours ago.
I wish I had realized sooner that iTunes 7.3 and 64-bit Vista did not work together. I spent the first two hours as an iPhone owner trying to make it work. Right now no 64-bit Windows will work with the iPhone. I have not seen anything as to if or when this might change. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
