iPhone, The First Weekend

I usually detest travelling because it means that I have to lug around a shit-ton of electronic equipment in order to stay connected. Worse yet I am paranoid about moving my equipment around for fear of losing information on the device, so if you saw me in the airport I am one of those guys cluthing the laptop bag as if it were my life... which isn't far from the fact since I work at home as an indie developer and don't necessarily have much for fancy backup systems, just a portable HDD and some DVD-Rs. As such I have been eyeing up PDA devices for the past few years, trying to find that perfect one that meets my needs.



Now I would like to say that I chose to get an iPhone because it's the best thing on the market. But the sad, honest truth of it all is that I really did not consider getting one until I saw that I could get the Torque Game Engine's running on the iPhone SDK. This really excited me because we use Torque a lot at work for the stuff we do, so not only as there a possibility that we could maybe put some of our stuff on the iPhone but now I could convince myself that buying the phone and writing it off was a good idea. All that I had to do was convince my wife, who reminded me that I was entitled to "treat myself" to new things once in a while... which translated from woman-speak meant "sure you can get one, just get one for me as well".

For the most part the phone is pretty sleek and easy to use. Though as a iPod virgin, the lack of any sort of instructions on how the dammed thing operates annoys me (bad Apple, for $350 could you try not to be a bunch of cheap fucks and put in a tiny 50 page booklet on the basics of the phone?), so I am still learning things about this phone today and will probably continue to do so for the next few week.

So here are some of my quick thoughts on the iPhone after using it for a weekend.
- On Syncing the phone to the PC: Using iTunes the device was able to quickly pull over all my bookmarks and contacts... which I then had to go and edit down (since most of my bookmarks and contacts are there for long term storage and not day to day usage) and then disable the syncing of bookmarks and contacts so I don't nuke anything on either device.
- iTunes: I hate it. Once again the lack of instructions here is rediculous (I spent a good hour or two doing the old "hunt and peck" approach of figuring out what the software does) and now I have an invasive Apple brand application trying to take priority of loading various files on my PC.
- The web feature is pretty cool and I like the fact that if there is wifi in the area the device will try to connect to it first. It's also completely WYSIWYG with only a few issues such as trying to type in a forum post when the screen isn't zoomed into the field in a PHP3BB board.
- The email functionality is pretty good too, though setting it all up to work, due to SMTP and POP configurations by the ISPs I use and having to remember my email passwords wasn't much fun but I cannot fault the device for this. Now that it is working its great.
- The app store for the phone is pretty lame. There is no real opportunity to look at demos or screenshots, so IMHO its pretty hit or miss what you are going to get. Though I will admit I am thinking of trying my hand at programming again to maybe create a little app of my own.

That's all for now... more later.