Intuition & Elbow Grease

Following my previous post regarding the joys of owning an iPhone, I wanted to shift gears a bit and let you know that its not all smoked kippers in iPhoneland (as Ace Rimmer would say… not that he ever said it, but I could almost hear him say it)

It’s as if there were things that Apple wanted to do but maybe they just didn’t have enough room on the ole’ engineering barbecue.

These kippers ain’t quite fully baked:

1. Synchronization - So you’re telling me that each and every time I want to backup and/or synchronize my Apple iPhone to my Apple Macbook (both running the very latest OSX variants) that it’s going to take at least 35-45 minutes??? How in the world are we moving the backup bits, carrier-pigeon? I mean really now, us old-schoolers figured out a long time ago that a great down and dirty backup of a system could be had by using rsync (over ssh of course) That being smart enough to only synchronize the bits that were different. Now my macbook can do rsync. The iPhone is running OSX, so I suspect it could do rsync… I’m just saying; If I could come up with a simple solution like that, what’s the dealio here?
2. Bluetooth - So you go to all the trouble to build bluetooth capability into the iPhone, that’s just great! Now this is an easy one, there’s already a bluetooth stack for OSX that works pretty good, so you should just be able to re-use it on the iPhone, right? Right? No, I guess that would’ve been too simple. Instead you decided to hack it up so that it only supports bluetooth headsets. That’s like hacking up the IP stack so that the phone can only send packets to my macbook. While I do want to occasionally trade packets with my mac (hey, maybe to oh, I don’t know use rsync?) it sure leaves a lot to be desired. Same here with the bluetooth. I’d really like to be able to do crazy stuff like use my StowawayXT folding bluetooth keyboard (my absolute favorite traveling keyboard, btw) to type up a reasonably long email, or maybe get in a bit of coding. Bluetooth file transfers anyone? Hello? This one just seems like a no brainer.
3. Cut & Paste - Speaking of no-brainers… yeah, this one is so stupid, I can’t even rant about it. Just let me cut & paste already.
4. Todos - Remember how we were all gonna be a part of the iGeneration and enjoy our iLives using all of our iTools that Apple was so kind to provide to us? Calendars, contacts, even my bookmarks get synched (eventually) but not my todo list? How do you forget to add synchronization for todos? I’m thinking that a certain engineer that was responsible for this wasn’t taking full advantage of his iSkills and forgot to put ‘todo synchronization” on their todo list. Either that or adding todo synch would’ve added another 20 minutes to the synch process.
5. Disk Access - I can use my iPod as a usb drive.  I bought the 16GB iPhone thinking that oh, I don’t know, that maybe I could use some of that space for my own stuff.  (This is partially solved with MobileFinder - see previous post for linkage)  This would be so much easier if I could just enable disk-mode like I can with my iPods.  Gee, then I could even (you see this coming, right?) USE RSYNC TO BACKUP MY DATA!!!!

Thats the top five unsmoked kippers so far for the iPhone.  But I bet I’m not alone here;  What doesn’t the iPhone do that you think it should?  What could it be doing better?  Here’s one to chew on that nearly made it onto my list:  encryption.  How about some gnupg pki for signing and encrypting my email, or my data files that I copied onto the iPhone using disk-mode… oh wait…

So it’s been a month since I stood in line that was too long to purchase my 16GB iPhone, and I’ve been putting it through its paces. I even messed around with jailbreaking it. (short answer: not worth it for me) Overall, I am very pleased with the device! Would I recommend it to all of my friends? No, actually I probably wouldn’t. This is the perfect device for those folks who are used to carrying a PDA of some sort and are looking to consolidate devices. If you’re just looking for a replacement cell phone then the iPhone is most likely overkill. With the addition of a few apps from the App Store, I’ve now completely replaced both my trusted palm pilot as well as my Motorola RAZR with the iPhone.

Using the 3G network to check email and browse the web is not as fast as I would like, but it is definitely useable. It was a fantastic companion when I flew to Las Vegas last month allowing me to alternately read some great fiction by Cory Doctorow, listen to some of my favorite classical music and get caught up on some old episodes of Doctor Who. Battery life has been great; I don’t think I’ve seen the meter drop below 50% once in the past month.

The phone portion works great for me. I’ve been primarily on the 3G network when using the phone (usually with the included earbuds) and I’ve been quite pleased with the sound quality. To me the call-quality is every bit as good as the Motorola RAZR that it replaced.

The one feature (if you could call it that) that I loved about my palm pilot was the abundance of third-party apps. The iPhone’s 2.0 firmware and the App Store bring an abundance of third party applications for my downloading pleasure! I can even browse and download new applications directly from the iPhone. I wish it was that simple with my old palm pilot! I’ve downloaded, used then deleted several dozen applications and there are now just a handful (five to be exact) that I use the most.

My top five favorite apps so far:

1. Pandora (free)
   Streaming internet audio while I drive to work! I plug my iPhone into a cassette adapter, fire up Pandora, choose one of my stations and I get to enjoy and discover new music! Because of this app I no longer feel the need to sync more than a handful of songs via iTunes. With Pandora, I always have a great selection of music available anytime.
2. MobileFinder($2.99)
   Once a loooong time ago, I made the switch from using the Palm Memo application to using plain text files to maintain all of my notes and memos. Boy, has that decision ever paid off! This app not only provides an ftp server on my iPhone to transfer files back and forth, it also allows me to edit and create text-based files!  How could this be better?  How about adding scp file transfers instead of or in addition to the ftp server.   Maybe add the ability to assign a username/password to the ftp connection?  At least the server is only on for a very short time while I actually transfer the files from my desktop, but I’d feel so much better if the connection was encrypted.
3. Stanza (free)
   With all the talk about no one reading anymore, I was really concerned that I was not going to be able to find a suitable replacement for Mobipocket. Stanza is turning out to be quite a fine e-book reader! It handles the simple comforts like being able to change font and background colors to providing an online catalog that you can access from the application to download free books from Feedbooks, The BBC, Wired Magazine and others.
4. Twittelator (free)
   This is one of several twitter clients available, and so far it’s my favorite; narrowly beating out Twitterific. I like the fact that it can post my current location via Twitter (although I almost never use this feature)
5. WeatherBug (free)
   The built-in weather app is nice, but I like looking at the radar maps and this app has them! (you have to pinch-out and center the world-map on your location; not sure why this isn’t automatic, but maybe in a future release it will be)

I haven’t added an ssh client yet. There are now at least three apps available purporting to be good ssh clients, but each one seems to have its drawbacks of one kind or another. Since I haven’t had the need to connect to a command line lately, I’m waiting for these apps to go through a round of updates to see how (or if) they mature before making a purchase there.