iPhone, after the honeymoon

By Josh Highland in hardware, iPhone, Josh's Rambling

iphonesmall.jpg
I’ve owned the famed apple iPhone for about 3 weeks now. In that time I have grown to both love and hate aspects of the iPhone.

I understand that this is a first generation phone with the 1.0 software running on it. Despite knowing this, I dove right in and bought it.

I’ve had enough time with the phone to fully explore it.

below are the biggest problems with the iPone that I have

  • ring tone is too quiet even when on full volume
  • vibrate mode is too discrete, i want to to shake longer
  • text message notifications are to quite
  • no notification of missed text messages without turning the phone on
  • text messages can only be sent to one person at a time
  • horizontal keyboard mode is only avaliable in safari

I guess that isn’t a very large list of things that I want changed in the iPhone. Actually those are all software problems that could be fixed through a software updates. Apple hasn’t released any updates to the iPhone as of yet, so we will see if the problems I am seeing, are ones that Apples feels like they should fix.

iSold out and got a iPhone

By Josh Highland in iPhone, Josh's Rambling

iphonesmall.jpg
For over a year and a half, I have used a windows mobile 5 based phone, the T-Mobile MDA (which is actually a re branded HTC Wizard). The MDA was such a great phone that I created a website for modifying and customizing it, MDATweak.com

I liked the fact that I could add 3rd part applications to it, like pocket putty (an ssh client), and the web browser was the best mobile browser on the market. I also liked the fact that I could sync my contacts and calender from outlook to the phone,

When the iPhone was announced, I was super excited about it. I was in a contract with T-Mobile, and was happy with with my MDA. I didn’t want to wait in the lines, and more importantly I didn’t want to pay the price tag for the iPhone.

Last week I was talking with my friends Bill Garoutte in my office, going over my list of reasons why I was not going to get an iPhone. As I was talking to him about how I liked my MDA phone, I managed to knock it off my desk. I have dropped my phone tons of times in the past. Its always been ok. This time was not one of those times… I was charging my phone through the USB connection on the bottom of the phone. The phone must fallen perfectly because the USB cable popped out. I picked the phone up and plugged the USB cord back in. The USB jack on the phone pushed up and into the phone.

The USB jack broke off the board inside the phone and was free floating inside the device! The phone still worked but without the USB jack to charge the phone, in a few days, my MDA would become a giant paper weight.

I called T-mobile, and they told me it would be almost $200 to replace my aging MDA phone. It was $300 to move up to the newer version of the MDA, the T-mobile Wing. Looking at the options, I was going to have to shell out some cash to get another phone, and I only had a day or 2 to figure it out before my phone was going to die. I talked to T-mobile about my situation, and the lady I dealt with was not nice to me at all, and wasn’t willing to work with me on figuring out a solution to get an upgraded phone without renewing my contract with T-mobile. I was so frustrated by the experience I decided to bite the bullet and move over to AT&T and get an iPhone.

I placed an order for two iPhones (the wife wanted on also) on July 3rd, and I received them in Saturday July 7th. So here I am with two new iPhones. I will post later with what I think about them once we have really started using them.