4 posts tagged “iphone”

Steve Jobs announced in a letter to the Apple community on the apple.com website that the iPhone SDK will be released in February of 2008. This SDK will allow developers to make safe and official 3rd party applications that will run on either the iPhone or iTouch. The iPhone not having an official SDK had been one of the harshest criticisms of Apple since the release of the iPhone.

Well, now that I have an iPhone I've been receiving a ton of questions about what I think of the phone. After playing with it for four days, I feel pretty confident I can answer most of the inquiries that have been posed to me.

For those who don't want the novel length explanations, I'm really digging it. The EDGE network  issue isn't one for me because my service area doesn't have 3G access anyway. Plus the wireless more than makes up for it. I'm in a Google town, so there are wireless access points all over the place to cater to their employees.

I've received questions concerning Safari and why there have been so many sites optimized for the iPhone in particular. The question goes, "Does this mean that the Safari browser included doesn't follow current Web Standards?" The iPhone optimized sites are sites where they are taking advantage of your ability to touch the screen, so they are generally optimized for the 320 x 356 screen. This often means larger buttons and links, because you can actually click them, as opposed to tabbing over to one on a non-touch screen phone. They also tend to include all of the bells and whistles of todays modern internet, like pretty AJAX goodness, and because some the sites don't meet normal web standards themselves the iPhone became one more incentive for them to get off their asses and bring their site up to current standards.

In my experience I have not experienced any website incompatibility issues. There is the Flash issue, but I understand why they are going with H.264 Quicktime over the currently more prevalent Flash. It is a superior compression technology that takes up less space with less loss of quality, which of course will mean a better media experience and faster download for us EDGEsters.  Also, now that Adobe has announced that they will include H.264 compatibility with their Flash it should render the whole situation moot in a short while.

The keyboard has worked nicely for me. I can even see myself doing some two thumb typing in the near future. I don't GPS because I am quite capable of knowing where I am on a map, so Google Maps works fine.

The iPod rocks. I am a tad annoyed with having to get the headphone adapter. I expect that eventually third parties will start making plenty of quality headphones with adapters for iPhone included as part their package. I've never been a big fan of earbuds going back to the Walkman day. I must confess though, that phone operation button on the earbuds, is pretty darn cool.

The SMS is great. I love how they included the iChat comic word bubble and colors that they chose for monitoring conversations. I like that you can quickly scroll up the screen through an ongoing conversation. My Gmail works nicely with the phone. I look forward to using their Calendar app in the future with Google Calendar. I also suspect they ran out of time for Notes. It works fine, but I can see where they might want to polish it with added features.  I also like that email deletions on my iPhone are not destructive to the same messages in my Gmail server account. So if there is a problem, I can always go back to my Gmail server archive.

It has also been a great conversation piece. I received a text message while at the bank and I got quite a few inquiries and more than a couple "may I see it for a second" types of communication once they saw that it was an iPhone.

I can also freely agree that it will not be THE phone for everyone. Then again, no phone on the market is. It really comes down to how the phone vibes with your lifestyle.  I find that it suits mine perfectly. I love that with your two year commitment, they've pledged that you will be receiving constant improvements in features and bug fixes, which is not something they always do so frequently at the other mobile OS companies like Microsoft and Palm.

I am amazed by the waste of trees and amused by Justine's hilarious vid. The Apple iPhone jingle was a masterstroke.

I confess that I was beginning to feel pretty worn thin by the end of 2006. It was a year that was a mixed bag for us. Raven went through a job change that required a bit of an adaptation for both us and we are still recovering from challenges in our past. Even so, the future ahead looks brighter. She now works for DaKine, which is easily one of the Earth's leading active wear companies. She is responsible for the World T-Shirt wholesaler and vendor relationships for the company.

Our wedding looms in May, and we see light at the end of the tunnel regarding a few financial stresses that have been plaguing us for years. Still no home purchase in sight, but we are continuing to grind away at it.

Over the holiday I got her a Black 80 GB Apple iPod as well as a Griffin Roadtrip  iPod to FM transmitter. In both cases the products seemed to improve over the past year. Particularly the Roadtrip. The FM transmitter seems to be a bit stronger, and they've done a pretty good job of addressing the need for a plastic housing to cradle the iPod on the sides. It is a tad more snug than I would like with the 80 GB model, but I guess we all can use a bit of extra work on those forearms, right?

Its a better situation than mine which crackles with static occasionally, and you had to be careful while driving, or it was one sharp turn and your iPod would go zipping off of the cradle and end up on the floor beneath the passenger seat.

In related news, Raven is now looking for some wonderful podcasts to fill that aforementioned iPod. Particularly she has been looking for some solid educational podcasts that cover Early and Medieval languages such as Latin, Old English, Middle English, Welsh and Gaelic. Pretty much anything that will contribute to her ongoing educational pursuit for a Bachelor's degree in History with a focus on Medieval History. Any solid historical podcasts in those veins would also be a boon. So, if any of you has any recommendations, let me know.

I keep trying to recommend some of my favorite podcasts but she keeps returning with a comment like "But I want to learn something!" lol. Now why would she want to go and do something like that?  :P

We finally brought her father into the DVD world. Nearly ten years after DVDs became ubiquitous, he finally owns a player and his first title: Pirates of the Carribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. We had considered getting him an HD-DVD player, but with the standards battles still going on, and with the likelihood that he doesn't own a suitable Television that can take advantage of such an improvement in resolution we thought it would be best to get him something that gives him plenty of options and likely won't be going away for easily the next decade or more. Besides, I think it would have just blown his mind if we tried to explain the possibilities that are roaming around out there with regards to this new technology and the DRM implications.

I await with baited breath the Apple announcements next week. Even though I will be broke, I look forward to seeing if they indeed can make the iPhone the great cell phone the world has needed for sometime now, and if they can get these OS problems with the Apple TV worked out before MacWorld. There have been the usual rumors out there but my favorite hopeful version is the Gregory DeSantos video spec labeled iTalk

EDIT:  iPhone looks scrumptious! Can't wait to get my mitts on one!

Recently I've been purchasing more and more episodes of NBC's hit drama Heroes from iTunes for my iPod.

I love the show. I've heard complaints that the characters are not original enough and that they are based on archetypal comic heroes that have been established in higher profile titles (such as X-Men), but I'm convinced that is why the show works. For once they are treating the superhero genre with the kind of honesty and grit that it deserves. No more of this hokey stuff that is only for the lowest common denominator nor are they pandering to children. The writing has been solid, and the acting is fantastic. My favorite characters are definitely Hiro (love the Neal Stephenson SNOW CRASH reference here by the way (sword and all)), Claire (nice Rogue reference), Peter (the other half of the Rogue reference. It seems the writers will be destined to romance these two together at some point), and Nathan (again, the X-men (Angel and Archangel) reference).

Producer Tim Kring of Crossing Jordan and Misfits of Science (a wonderful guilty pleasure from the 80s) fame, has done a wonderful job of assembling a solid writing team, production team and cast that has me excited again about the possibilities of Television and its convergence with  our interactive age of the Internet. One unique thing about the show that is great is the further exploration of the Heroes world with their online graphic novel at the NBC official Heroes website, which of course I'm sure everyone already knows about but I thought bear mentioning one more time. lol
How many of you are also awaiting the airing of the new episodes on January 22nd?