Saturday, June 30, 2007

iPhone Diary 6/30

Pathetic nerd day. Spent day obsessively loading songs and videos onto new toy. How obsessive? Took time to make sure all album titles were correct on ripped albums, and tried to get all album art ported over. (Didn't work on all albums, for some reason, even albums that are definitely there on iTunes. Issue goes on The List.)

How obsessive is Doug? Spent time changing "Weather" display. Spent time modifying world clock to list favorite cities. That's obsessive geekdom, ladies and gents. When wife gets home, she will make fun of me. If not, another 100 relationship points.

Downloaded a bunch of TV episodes from iTunes; watched an episode of "Monk" and an episode of "Kim Possible." Yes, I'm pathetic. Battery life quite impressive. Next up: I can finally watch Heroes.

Sent text message to sister the Apple fanatic to brag. She didn't answer. What's the point in bragging if you can't create envy?

Spent time Web surfing. Had to tweak home network issues a little bit; always forget my password is Hex. Download speed impressive. Web surfing is very nice; experience is much superior than that on my Archos 604 wifi; sorry, Archos. Two reasons: Safari on the iPhone is better than on the Archos, and the iPhone screen is simply vastly superior. Also, the zoom in/out function rocks.

Spent time setting up email, which was a pain only because it meant I had to set up email on yet another of my laptops (I have three). Oy. But when it was done, it works fine on the iPhone. I can see why the BlackBerry addicts get, um, addicted. Doubt I will, though; most of that account's email is junk.

Bought a slip-case for the gadget. Pretty bogus that Apple doesn't include one. C'mon, Steve; 600 clams and not even a cheesy leatherette job? Lame.

Finding the two-thumb typing method useless; turns out I'm (wait for it) all thumbs. On other hand, single-finger method works fine, and 'way faster than old cell phone key-pad hunt-and-peck method. I'm fine with it.

Current wants: eReader, games. I still can't believe there are no games, not even Solitaire, for cryin' out loud.

Currently researching DVD ripping-and-conversion tools for m4v format; all my knowledge in AVI/DivX area. Oh well, back to drawing board! Keeps me out of trouble.

Fun new toy. Fun fun fun.

Note on price: read lots of complaints about the price. Reviewers are boneheads. PDAs cost between $200-$1000 (the HTC Universal retailed for $1200). The iPhone is selling for half what the HTC Universal retailed for, it's 'way better, weighs half as much, and does a lot more. People keep forgetting it's a PDA and a phone.

3 comments:

Paul Levinson said...

Good that people are having fun with it - that's the point. The iPhone has been a long time in coming - it was predicted in 1979

Douglas Moran said...

I guess it depends on how you define "predict." If one wants to nitpick, we could debate that Arthur C. Clarke predicted it (somewhat) in 1968 with the "Newspad" in "2001: A Space Odyssey," eh? (I think the Sony Reader looks a lot like Clarke's Newspad; too bad it doesn't work like it.)

Still, I'll give you props.

Of course, we had to wait for the infrastructure to be created. And it helped that memory and CPU technology were both developing apace at the same time. As Heinlein used to write, you railroad when it's time to railroad.

Paul Levinson said...

Absolutely. And actually, mobile media that do some of the things the iPhone does have been part of our popular culture for almost a century ...

But I was the first, as far as I know, to put it into a boring doctoral dissertation -:) - with a fully developed theory of the evolution of media to support it...
(I did quote Clarke in it, though...)