Obligatory iPhone post

[chipotle]

As tugrik mentioned, I did indeed get an iPhone.

It’s almost superfluous at this point to describe it, in part because so many people had their minds made up about the thing before it shipped. The best comment I’ve seen was this, from Michael Mulvey:

Why there’s an iPhone craze:

This is real simple and doesn’t require a long-winded explanation.

The iPhone is the floating car we imagined we’d be driving in the future.

The Jetsons, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Minority Report …the iPhone is that touchscreen gadget they all used (metaphorically speaking) to communicate with. As John Gruber points out (so obvious we all didn’t catch it), the iPhone is the first mobile device being promoted for its interface, not hardware.

Either that makes perfect sense to you, or it sounds nuts. Some people in the latter camp have moved to the former camp by actually using one. (I’ve heard from more than one person who really wasn’t interested in an iPhone until they had some time to play with it.)

I will tell you the most valid criticism, which contains many problems rolled into one observation: this is a version 1.0 product. It could be faster and cheaper, it could do more, it could do what it does better. There are a handful of poor design decisions, and a few long-solved problems have become unsolved by the new UI.

I will tell you the least valid criticism, too, because it is true yet misses the point entirely: there’s nothing the iPhone does that hasn’t been done by something else. The point is that there’s nothing else that does anything how the iPhone does it, and that’s been the focus all along.

I have an old smart phone and an old iPod and have been thinking about upgrading both of them as it is. For me, there wasn’t a lot of downside, save the timing financially. (It’s a fair amount of money to drop just before a convention.) But the price isn’t so out-of-line with getting a new iPod and a new smart phone.

---

tugrik also mentioned I had some activation problems. When I first tried to activate the gadget, it told me, essentially, that with my credit approval I needed to go down to AT&T and pay a deposit. I went down to AT&T, where I was told the deposit was: $0. They had no idea why it didn’t go through.

There are a lot of news stories floating about right now talking about widespread activation problems. The thing is, AT&T’s credit process, transferring phone numbers, and the other minutae of activation doesn’t magically change with the “i”; 5% of activations are probably always harder to work through than usual. What’s changed is the method, sheer volume, and particularly media attention focused on these activations. It’d have been great if it’d all worked flawlessly, but that doesn’t happen much on this planet.

---

Oh yes: Twitter Twitter Twitter. Thank you. (The iPhone doesn’t have instant messaging, but reading/sending “tweets” is very easy. Again, I’m “chipotlecoyote” there.)

Comments

[jakebe.livejournal.com]

Good points, all. :) Against my better judgement, I was wondering if I could play around with your iPhone before the writer's group tonight. I had never seen one in action and I'm really curious to see how it works.

That being said, I really think it'd be a good idea to wait for a next-gen iPhone to come along; it's not really worth paying the premium to get it first, and I'd like to see them fix a few of the problems before I plunk down over half a grand for it. ;)

-J

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

The "next generation" thought certainly came to mind, but for me, I knew it'd be a step up from everything I had regardless. I suspect the issues that are fixable in software will fixed be over time; I really don't have many issues with the hardware -- for all the whining that's gone on about them using AT&T's "slow" data network, for instance, it's actually been pretty usable, and it switches to wifi when it can.

One hardware problem that will annoy me, though? The earphone jack is recessed, which makes it impossible to plug in most headphones without an adapter. Whoever thought that was a good idea needs to be soundly beaten.

[ja-ren.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it'll work just fine as long as you use Apple brand headphones.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

The Apple headphones do work with it, of course, although they've always had straight and thin plugs. Unfortunately, they've also always kind of sucked. :)

There are adapters out there, though, and I've heard tell of more than one person already who's carefully shaved away plastic on their existing headphone plugs to make them fit.

[ja-ren.livejournal.com]

Bah. None of the really cool wireless devices ever get Canadian carriers. :/

Carrier Locking

[(Anonymous)]

Unless Apple provides a mechanism for unlocking their phones, I have no interest in getting one purely for professional reasons. I work for Mighty Magenta (T-Mobile), and so I get my gadgetry at a fairly sharp company discount. The iPhone may indeed be the next great leap forward in terms of user interface, but if it doesn't work on my network it doesn't matter how great it is; I simply won't buy it.

Frankly, I think network-locking is one of the great crises of the cellular industry, and I expect there to be a lawsuit at some point in the future that says that locking a phone to a carrier is an anticompetitive practice in the same way that mandating that you use a Bell phone on the bell hardline system was. However, we're not there yet.

Kristy

Re: Carrier Locking

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I'd certainly have preferred an unlocked iPhone (or an unlocked any other phone). Unfortunately, the iPhone has one other gotcha in addition to that: like the T-Mobile Sidekick, it requires support hardware on the carrier end above and beyond just providing the network to get full functionality. I don't think it's quite as drastic about it as the Sidekick, but it's enough that it'd be a significant drawback.

I suspect eventually unlocked phones will become more of a norm here, but at this point, we don't even have a de facto standard for the network technology, which makes it somewhat problematic. I'm given to understand unlocked phones are more common in countries where nearly all of the carriers you're going to encounter are GSM.

Re: Carrier Locking

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

It's true that we have a number of competing standards (CDMA, GPRS, GSM, and I'm pretty sure there's one more) and those certainly aren't helping us much. Unfortunately, I don't see an easy fix for this that doesn't require government legislation and doesn't cause at least one company to explode. I think it's going to genuinely take an act of Congress to force wireless carriers into the same network, and even if they do that, we're still at odds with the rest of the world; they set up their network in a band that we had established for military communications.

I have other reasons for not liking the iPhone, but they revolve around the fact that AT&T is their carrier, and AT&T is linked with all kinds of dubious NSA activity, warrantless wiretapping, and other government fraud. Charges have never been brought in court, but the evidence is pretty well documented if you google for "AT&T NSA wiretap." That may or may not be enough to convince anyone, but I know WorkingAssets has a petition going around convincing Apple aficionados to avoid the iPhone because of the AT&T connection.

Kristy

P.S. Sorry for anonymous comment; I didn't realize I wasn't logged in!

Re: Carrier Locking

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I'm aware of some of the NSA issues, yes. My somewhat cynical observation is that having been in the (land-line) telephone industry during the '90s as an engineer, AT&T is simply the company that got media stories written about it. All those rumors about phone switches having back doors specifically designed for government wiretapping aren't just urban legend.

It's also worth noting in passing that the AT&T of 2007 isn't the AT&T of 2005 or even 2006, when a lot of those complaints were being bandied about; the parent company was SBC a year ago, and "AT&T Mobility" is Cingular, which wasn't, as near as I can tell, involved with the NSA to start with (http://news.com.com/Some+companies+helped+the+NSA,+but+which/2100-1028_3-6035305.html). I am not, at this point, convinced that there's really sufficient moral justification for holding formerly separate company A responsible for what formerly separate company B did once A and B are both bought by C, even if C chose to give everybody involved B's name because they think it's cool.

[typographer.livejournal.com]

Yes, but will it improve my curling score?

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Only if you get the optional Moderately Obscure Sports Package, I think.

[cerice.livejournal.com]

I just knew you would not be able to resist......

[tommicat.livejournal.com]

Hmm, would it make sense for me to sign up to Twitter? I'd only use it really to message with you as I hardly get internet access on a daily basis.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

That's one of those "it's up to you" kind of things. :) Twitter is probably better than instant messaging if you don't have frequent internet access, since it doesn't really *require* constant access. The downside is of course that the more people you know who are using something like Twitter, the more useful it is, and the fewer people, the less useful. :)