iPhone First Impressions

So, I picked up an iPhone over the weekend. To all the people who waited in line for over 24 hours, I say: HAW HAW. To all of the people who waited in line for over 24 hours to buy multiple iPhones to sell on eBay, I saw: DOUBLE HAW HAW. I had to stand in line about 5 minutes to play with a demo iPhone and I had to stand in line zero minutes to actually buy one.

The phone itself is really nice. The applications are great, the data connectivity is a bit slow, but not noticeably different from my Treo. The ability to watch video podcasts someplace other than the Mac Mini under the TV is pretty nice. I had to perform a little email magic to get the email working the way I wanted (i.e. only messages addressed directly to me go to the phone, ignoring mailing lists and other mass-mailings.)

I only have two gripes. 1: the large fancy-schmancy completely-engulfing-the-ear headphones I use at work have an earphone plug that is not quite slim enough to plug into the recessed earphone jack, so I needed a $10 adapter from Belkin to plug them in. 2: when listing to podcasts in the car, I have to put the phone in airplane mode (turning off the cellular radio), otherwise I get that chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp interference through the cassette tape adapter. This isn’t that big a deal to me because I don’t use the phone in the car (stick shift + rag top = hard to drive + hard to listen), but I do have to remember to turn the phone back to normal mode when I arrive at work/home. I probably have a magnetic choke (is that what they’re called?) lying around at home or work that I can use to help clean up the signal.

Here is where I post “my first iPhone app.” Okay, it is less of an app and more of a mostly static page. I wanted my bookmarks to work like the applications on the home screen, with icons, rather than as a list of text. I also wanted the ability I have in Firefox of being able to quickly search different places (i.e. I can type “imdb Hackers” into the URL field to search IMDB for the movie “Hackers”), so I made something similar in JavaScript. It’s here: http://m.netninja.com/ as well as http://m.brianenigma.com/ (because some web filters still block Netninja.) If anyone wants to tweak it, the list of links, link names, and icon images is a simple PHP array and can be easily modified. The source code is at http://m.netninja.com/index.phps.

Next up, unless someone beats me to it, is a JavaScript-based programmer’s calculator. I need to be able to do, at the very minimum, base conversions.

Posted in: Gadgets iPhone

2 thoughts on “iPhone First Impressions”

  1. Hey, can you let me in on the secret to the mail magic? I want to filter some of the lists I am on.

    Also, you should have a digg button, man! This is not the first time I’ve wanted to add you to digg. Unless you SPURN all things Digg, in which case, never mind. Hi!

    and yes HA HA on the line waiters. It was the same for my husband. He covered the launch on Friday, and then walked into the store on Saturday and bought ours. No line, no wait.

  2. SPURN digg? No way! It just… uhhh… never occurred to me that a blog about my everyday life would be diggworthy. 🙂 But now I see that it may just be useful in the occasional instance. Now, there are links for digg, del.icio.us, and all the rest. Thanks for the idea!

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