iPhone

iPhone activation problems exaggerated

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Some mainstream news sources are going as far as calling the iPhone 3G a bad apple because of yesterday’s activation problems. Last year’s activation problems were much worse – many people didn’t have their iPhone activated for 24 hours or later. Yesterday, the servers seem to be back up before noon EDT. I doubt if many people had to wait more than an hour for activation. Once the stores realized the server was down, most of them sent people home to activate their iPhones instead of attempting it in store.

3G vs. Old iPhone

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3G vs. Old iPhone, originally uploaded by mike3k.

The iPhone 3G is actually slightly thicker than the old iPhone, but the rounded shape makes it seem more sleek.

iPhone 3G

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I got my 16G iPhone 3G today at the Cypress Creek Station AT&T Store. I got there a little after 8AM and the line already reached the end of the block. I got into the store around 10:30, when they were already out of 16G black, so I got a white iPhone. By that time, they had already given up attempting in store activations since the server was down.

When I got home, I connected it to iTunes and after about an hour it was activated. My old iPhone became deactivated about 15 minutes before the new one was activated, though.

The 3G iPhone seems a bit slimmer & more sleek looking than the old one. The metallic controls look very nice against the white plastic. Both the headphone & docking cables fit much more tightly in their connectors than they did on my old iPhone. The new headphone jack flush with the surface is the biggest improvement of the new case style.

I find the GPS location is quite a bit more accurate than the old GSM & WiFi only location. It was now able to pinpoint my location to the exact block. My old iPhone could only narrow it down to about a 5 mile radius.

Since I’m using WiFi, I couldn’t really determine how much faster the 3G data transfer is.

You can see my full set of unboxing pictures here.

iPhone 3G Side View

iPhone app mini-reviews

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I already installed the 2.0 firmware on my old iPhone and downloaded a few of the free applications from Apple’s new App Store.

Some of the applications like Exposure, SmugShot, NetNewsWire, Twitterrific, and Remote seemed very polished, while others like ShoZu still seem pretty rough.

Twitterrific works almost exactly like the desktop version. NetNewsWire is a pretty basic RSS news reader that syncs perfectly with the desktop version or NewsGator Online.

Exposure is a great way to browse Flickr. You can view your own pictures or those of your contacts. One of the best features is Near Me, which uses the iPhone’s location capability to find pictures near your current location. SmugShot is a very simple application that lets you take a picture with the iPhone’s camera and immediately upload it to SmugMug. I’d really love to see something similar for Flickr.

Apple’s free Remote application lets you control iTunes or an Apple TV from your iPhone. Its display on the iPhone looks exactly like the built-in iPod player, even displaying the artwork and current location in the song just as if it was playing on the iPod itself.

Unfortunately, ShoZu is pretty troublesome. It took several times before it would accept my Flickr settings and log in successfully. The application will only let you set up a WordPress.com blog, not a self-hosted WordPress blog like this one. I was able to set up this blog as MetaWeblog from their website, but it won’t recognize it in the iPhone app.

Qikking

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I’m trying out the unofficial iPhone version of Qik, which requires a jailbroken iPhone and uses the standard installer. A new version was just released today, which works pretty nicely. I recorded this video and streamed it live from my iPhone.

My iPhone prediction

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There are lots of predictions about what Apple will announce monday, many of them sparked by mysterious boxes being delivered to dealers around the world.

I suspect there will be some kind of docking station with keyboard & display for the new iPhones. Since Apple is now referring to the operating system as ‘OS X Leopard’ instead of ‘Mac OS X Leopard’, there will most likely be some non-Mac device that will run it (actually it already runs on several non-Mac devices: the Apple TV, iPhone, and iPod Touch).

The iPhone already has a lot of the Mac’s capabilities, so it isn’t much of a stretch for them to have a docking device with a keyboard & display to make it a full-fledged computer. Another alternative would be something similar to target mode or portable home directories, where a Mac can use the iPhone as their home directory when it’s docked, so you can easily take your setup anywhere and use it on any Mac.