I went to the Solano Stroll today with the family. You can see an album of the photos here.The iPhone is working out alright. After a week with it, it's definitely an urban device. The special third generation phone features require a sophisticated network to support it. I got none of that support in Wisconsin for three days, but it does great things in the Bay Area and in the Minneapolis airport. Without the 3G support, you're expensive phone loses its mojo, transforming it into a standard old cell phone (while you still pay for 3G service).
Battery life is actually pretty good on a full charge. I spent about 4 hours on planes watching videos, mostly free TV shows from iTunes, like Battlestar Galactica. iTunes seems like that next great thing for watching TV, provided shows are posted in a timely fashion (I haven't checked).
Also, for podcasts, video is the way to go. Boardgames with Scott is vastly more interesting with video, for example.
What does kind of suck with the iPhone is portability. There are things I watch on my laptop that I would like to have on the iPhone, but haven't been able to figure out how to get them transferred over yet. For example, AVI files are the format of choice for a lot of video, and I've got a MP3 ringtone I would like to install. I'm sure I'll figure this out later, but it's not as seamless as I would like.
Applications are fantastic, and the free ones are often better than the pay ones. My installed apps include:
- Dice Bag
- eBay
- iFlix
- Showtimes
- WeatherBug
- Air Sharing
- GPS Tracker
- To Do's
- Where To?
- WhitePages
- Wikipanion
- Blackjack
- Labyrinth LE
I'm curious whether or not you had the Edge network in Wisconsin or were completely off the data network. Around here I'm on 3G about 70% of the time and Edge the other 30%. Edge is slower but still useful for data.
ReplyDeleteMy iPhone is taking a trip home next week. The ring/silent switch broke off the other day and the nearest Apple store is over two hours away in another state, so they're sending me a box to ship it to them in for repair.
I'm only supposed to be without it for a few days, but I'm steeling myself for the withdrawal...
Have you updated to 2.1? The software supposedly gives better battery life and fixes a number of bugs. In conjunction with iTunes 8 you get a cool new feature that Apple is using to drive more music sales - the genius sidebar.
ReplyDeleteAs to the video issue, you need to convert the video to Quicktime. There are a number of programs that can do so. Once in QT, you can move them onto your phone.
I was totally off the grid from what I could tell.
ReplyDeleteI upgraded while on my trip and noticed a massive improvement in battery life.
ReplyDeleteYou might find Mach Dice more fun as a dice app.
ReplyDeleteThis blog entry has a video of it in action. Very impressive.
http://d20.jonnydigital.com/2008/08/dice-now-available-on-iphone
When did the Solano Stroll become Mardi Gras?
ReplyDeleteYeah, she was the life of the party (parade).
ReplyDelete