Bringing Up Bobbin

I've found true love, on the dark side

My iPhone is awesome. I used it today to surf the web and write a comment on my sister's facebook wall while sitting in the dentist chair with a mouth full of cotton waiting for my gums to stop swelling so they could finish seating my crown. Good grief.

I used it in the... ahem... bathroom earlier today in lieu of my usual magazine. I'll just leave it at that.

I took it with me to the grocery store last night, and I swear I have never seen such a look of pure lust on a teenage girl's face as I did when she glanced down and realized that I had an iPhone sitting on the counter. She looked at me shyly several times between sideways glances at my phone and I was almost certain she was going to ask if she could see it or touch it. But she refrained. However the desire was clear on her face. Pure lust. A teenage girl. For a piece of technology. SWEET.

This is the only device from which I have ever browsed the internet for more than 30 seconds other than my PC. It is just so easy to do.

Today I discovered Facebook's iPhone site. And Amazon.com's beta iPhone site. To be clear, the iPhone browser, Safari, lets you access any web site you can access from your PC and view it in all it's richness and glory with ease, but there is something to be said for web sites that are optimized for the iPhone's physical form factor. And so along those veins, while I already have created and published one blog entry directly from my iPhone, I learned that Movabletype.org, the publishing platform this blog uses, has an iPhone plugin for editing / updating from the iPhone that has compelled me to decide I absolutely must upgrade to MT4. As. Soon. As. Possible. Saturday or Sunday to be sure.

Any complaints I have had about my iPhone experience appear to be en route to swift resolution by end of this month. And the rest have just faded away with increased use and familiarity.

My main complaint at first was the fat fingering. But I have found that the iphone's capability to spell-check / word-complete on the fly real time is actually pretty accurate so I've learned just to let it do its job and stopped backspacing to correct mistakes. And 99% of the time it inserts the word and corrects the spelling appropriately. So that has quickly become a non-issue, and my tapping speed has increased substantially as a result.

My second complaint was that I couldn't download songs and videos directly from my iPhone over the wireless network - I had to connect the phone to my PC and download via PC iTunes. I have since learned that end of this month, I will be able to access the iTunes wifi store online directly from my iPhone browser and download music and videos instantly over the wireless network (for the price of a song... or video, as the case may be :-)). So that is quickly becoming a none-issue as well.

As a bonus, I've also learned that on October 2nd in participating starbucks in select cities/regions (Seattle, of course, being one :-)) I will be able to instantly identify and download whatever music track is playing at the time that I am in Starbucks waiting for my non-fat no-whip peppermint hot chocolate and chonga bagel with 2 cream cheeses. Breakfast time just got a whole lot more expensive; more often than not I find I like the music I'm listening to. Of course, the first 10 or so downloads will be purely in the name of research, of course ;-)

Is there anything my iPhone can't do? Not much. I use it to check traffic, to check weather, to take pictures, to send text messages. It lacks the ability to connect directly to Windows Live Hotmail from within the native email application (yahoo, google, mac and other pop3/IMAP mail access is available - so this is more a shortcoming of Windows Live Hotmail than it is the iPhone's. Yeah yeah yeah. Shut up.). I would also like the ability to choose an alternate search provider for Safari - google and Yahoo are the only choices, and I want my Windows Live Search, dammit. I can get around it by navigating to windows live search myself and having it handy in my bookmarks for one click access, but it is still slightly more effort than just tapping in the search text box at the top of the screen. And so... yes.. I use google when I need to search. Because it's just there.

I miss IM, but I access the web version using the browser so I'm good there. The Windows Live Messenger Beta browse experience is quite good (on any device; not just iPhone :-)) so I don't feel cheated for lack of an IM application on the phone itself.

I haven't had time yet to download any of my music or photos from my PC yet - but plan on doing so this weekend. And then I can ditch my mp3 player (I have no idea where it is anyway) and use my phone on my walks.

I sync my work outlook calendar to it so I always know where I need to be and when.

Oh yeah... and I use it to make and receive phone calls too :-)

By far the best device I've ever owned. and the only one I've ever used and actually become dependant on (and quickly too) for anything other than phone calls, the occasional text message, and IM (my IM usage on my phone has dramatically increased from what it used to be; and it used to be fairly significant).

The only bummer was the amount of money I had to shell out for it, and the loss of my business discount that I had been enjoying on my monthly bill (iPhones are excluded from employee/business discounts) But... I forked over the cash in the end, so clearly that wasn't a deal-breaker for me either :-)

I have only one other frustration with the iPhone, but that's not a topic for discussion here :-)

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