iPhone 3G

When the original iPhone came out in 2007, I really wanted one but I decided to wait for a while because I had my Treo 650 and had a cell service contract with AT&T as well.

I am glad I waited because I got the iPhone 3G last year and fell in love with it. It really is a revolutionary phone. Even Michelle loves it and found the touchscreen interface very intuitive. She loves to watch YouTube videos, take pictures (she has even figured out how to take screenshots), play games (Touch Hockey is her favorite), draw (Doodle Kids is the app she uses), and look at Google Maps.

There are a couple of things I do miss:

• Lack of copy and paste is the most annoying and I hope Apple adds it as soon as possible.
• Push notification support for applications and Gmail.

I have setup the iPhone to use my wireless network at home and also the AT&T wifi network at Starbucks and McDonald’s, etc. However, 3G data speeds are also very good.

In accessories, I bought a Jawbone 2 bluetooth headset which reduces noise quite a lot better than any headset I have seen.

Since I use the iPhone a lot, I have to charge it every night regularly. The iPhone battery cannot be changed by the consumer, so once the battery’s gone through enough cycles, I’ll have to get Apple to install a new battery.

The applications I use the most are the following:

• Toodledo for task list
• The Weather Channel for weather forecasts and conditions
• TwitterFon for Twitter
• NetNewsWire as a feed reader for blogs etc.
• Facebook
• Loopt for tracking current location
• Palringo for instant messaging
• fring for Skype and other voice chats
• Google Mobile for searches etc.
• Geocaching
• Evernote for quick photo or text notes
• Jolt for quick audio notes
• “Mint.com” for bank accounts/finances
• New York Times
• BBCReader for BBC News
• Bloomberg for financial news
• Touchterm for SSH
• Stanza for e-books
• Urbanspoon for restaurants
• OpenTable for restaurant reservations
• Trailguru for trail tracks
• WordPress for updating my wordpress-based blog
• Easy Wi-Fi for logging into AT&T Wifi hotspots
• Pandora radio for streaming music
• AirMe for uploading photos to Flickr
• SimCity

I recently switched my ZackVision email accounts from being hosted by my webhost to Gmail using Google Apps. It should not change anything for those sending me emails, but I like the Gmail interface and their spam filter is also much better than the one I was using at my webhost. One problem with the email switch was transferring the tens of thousands of emails I had in my different mailboxes. Google has an Email Uploader for the purpose but it was not transferring a significant number of my emails. So I just had to set up IMAP accounts in Mozilla Thunderbird for my old and new (gmail) accounts and move the emails folder by folder. This took some time.

In addition to email, Google Apps also provides me with my own calendar and documents. So I uploaded all my Outlook contacts to Gmail and decided to switch completely away from Outlook. Instead of syncing my contacts and calendar between Outlook and iPhone via iTunes, now I am using “Google Mobile Sync”http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html to sync over the air between my iPhone and my Google calendars and contacts at my own domain. So the only real thing I need the iTunes sync for is podcast subscriptions.

And now I am salivating over the Kindle 2.