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New iPhone for Group29
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My wife saw the new commercial for the iPod touch, "I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know that It’s here".
She actually thought it was for the iPhone. The iPod touch and iPhone are similar, although the iPhone has a bigger speaker and the cellular telephone.
She suggested I get one for my birthday. I was not sure what to make of that, since she is anti cell phone (she thinks they cause cancer). Maybe she wants me dead sooner!
Suffice it to say, I got one. Check out the iPhone friendly group29.com link at Group29.com/iphone
Reasons not to buy the iPhone
I could think of a number of reasons to not buy one.
1. I am not really an Apple/Steve Jobs fan. I started programming on the Radio Shack TRS-80, the direct competitor to the Apple ][. The Macintosh computers never dropped their prices to be affordable. My roommate got a $3000 computer in 1989. It had an 80-megabyte hard drive I told him he would never fill. (I have eaten those words many times.) Comparable PCs have been one-tenth the cost, now more like half to a third. Apple still only has a marginal share of PC sales, mostly to graphic designers and schools.
2. I have a tough time carrying my cell phone. The belt holsters really have not stayed on well. I lost one Moto Razr in the water.
3. I do not use my cell phone that much. My office was a former laboratory where bomb guidance system were designed. The walls are very thick and designed to resist RFI. My home is down in a valley with limited cell phone service. "More bars in more places" does not include my house. I do not use it much while driving. It has been mostly an emergency device.
4. I do not listen to music much. Getting an iPod has never occurred to me. Who would want a disk drive rotating around their neck? My music library is not much to speak of anyway.
5. I do not text message. My boss’ daughter ran up a $300 text-messaging bill. This is what kids do. It is like passing notes in class.
6. The iPhone is much more expensive than a regular cell phone. It is double the initial cost of the Moto Razr. The plan also is a big jump. I had a one hundred minute-per-month plan with T-mobile for $22. This was not one of their regularly advertised plans. They inherited it from VoiceStream, who inherited it from Aerial. It had been this rate since 1999. The iPhone has a minimum 450 minutes per month, plus data charges. This brings it to $60 per month + fees. Add that to the fact that my wife and I are penny-pinchers. The monthly cost seems exorbitant.
7. The iPhone fanbois are saying to wait for the "soon" to be released 3G network iPhone which is supposed to be much faster than the AT&T Edge network.
Reasons to buy the iPhone
Now that I have one, I find I can describe it in one sentence, "This is the coolest evar!"
Here are the counter arguments
1. To their credit, Apple has pulled from the doldrums of 1-2%, to get more than 6% of PC sales, with bigger inroads on laptops. Also in terms of operating systems, the MACOS on the iPhone is crushing the Windows Mobile operating system, which has no real answer to the iPhone until 7.0 in the summer of 2008. Mac has a killer app in Garage Band, which is unbeatable. The whole iLife suite is quite cool. Microsoft, with Vista really has nothing to compete on that front. Prices are still very high though.
2. The iPhone can be put in your pocket with keys and coins. That is what the Apple employees are doing. There are a number of videos on YouTube of users showing how pins, razor blades, and keys will not scratch the touch surface of the iPod touch and iPhone.
3. I am using my cell phone much more. I do not have to rely on my wife to be my secretary for home phone calls. I actually get AT&T service in parts of my house and at work!
4. If I were going to suggest a free application for ripping CDs and cataloging your music, iTunes is now at the top of my list. Now that I have it, I am using it to listen to music. I love the album flip view. That was one of the "I gotta have this thing" moments, when I saw that.
5. Nobody else I know text messages, but the fact is that you can do POP and SMTP mail on the iPhone. So why bother with SMS? I can read my home email on the iPhone and also send. When I actually download my email on Outlook 2007, I get copies of the sent mail too.
6. Between the unlimited data and 450 minutes, sixty dollars a month is a good deal. I get rollover and 5000 night and weekend minutes, which is when I call most anyway!
7. The Edge network is not good for web surfing. But I can send and receive mail. In addition, most places I spend time have free Wi-Fi, which the iPhone automatically finds!
I highly recommend "iPhone, the missing manual, by David Pogue"
I found out that if you create "apple-touch-icon.png" in the root directory of the web site, the iPhone and iPod touch allow a user to save a WebClip bookmark to the site on their Home Screen.
To specify a bookmark icon for all pages of a web site, place a PNG image named "apple-touch-icon.png" at the root directory of your web server. It is similar to the "favicon.ico" for site icons. The bookmark icon dimensions should be 57x57 pixels. If the icon is not 57x57, it will be scaled and cropped to fit.
The iPhone browser, Safari, automatically changes the icon to the standard "glassy" overlay so it looks like a built-in iPhone or iPod application.
RF Interference
Yes, there is RF interference into my HP PC when the iPhone is nearby. It is annoying. It also happens on PolyCom conference room speaker phones.
See this article for more information.
FAQ the 411 on radio frequency interference
Your brand new Apple iPhone is sitting next to the PC on your desk at work as you're typing away, listening to some music from your computer's speakers, when all of a sudden you hear it. It might start out as a "hiss" or a "dit-dit-dit-dah-dit-dit-dit-dah" like someone sending you a message using Morse code.
I will see if airplane mode will elminate the beeping.
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Posted on Wednesday, May 07, 2008 @ 09:45:30 UTC by BB
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