Living with the iPhone

Strangely, I found myself with 30 minutes of free time yesterday. And, instead of doing something productive, I found myself drawn to watch the latest 30-minute iPhone 3G video from Apple.

Sure, it's that same creepy guy from last year, and this time, he looks even more CGI-generated than last. I think he gained some weight too. But, the new features made up for the the excessive use of "most advanced," "incredible" and other doped-up adjectives. Those are 30 minutes down the tubes watching this man, but, the 3G iPhone does look pretty enticing. No idiotic recessed earphone jack (a 'redesign,' really?), mass-email edits, Exchange services, slick Stek Trektricorder-like GPS tracking, finally allowing legitimate third-party innovation via applications... the list does go on. The bells and whistles showcased here did partially counter the weariness I've heard some of my friends fret about the ritualized procedures (and fee increase) that AT&T seems to have imposed on the 3G iPhone launch.

Being an attorney with an iPhone, I've wondered about the privacy of my SMS-text messages and whether they can be withheld from prying eyes. I don't mean that dinner date across from you, but in a larger sense. Think about what we've all begun to say via text messages: Carrie Underwood got dumped this way and Detroit's mayor was brought down by his text messages, for example. Like it or not, texting has become a communication medium that is here to stay, meaning that the contents of those messages are also susceptible to legal discovery, i.e., you have may have to fork it over in a lawsuit. The iPhone itself is purported of being capable of storing about 75,000 SMS-text messages. That is almost too much data in your hands! You could probably write a small novel with that amount of text messages. If you're like most people, you gripe about life and work inevitably. But, what if your employer pays for your SMS plan, can they have a peek? Especially if you go over a plan's limit? What if you're sending (gasp) personal SMS-messages on work phones?

Well, according to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the answer is "no." An employer needs a sender's or receiver's consent before examining those messages. In a decision issued Wednesday, ( Quon v. Arch Wireless) the court (the highest federal court in the West short of the U.S. ... Read more

With iPhone 2.0 coming soon, a question I've heard many a current iPhone owner wanting to get the next iPhone ask: what do I do with my old one? This emerging question highlights the early-adopter's plight against the law of diminishing returns. It's doubtful that a current iPhone will fetch more than $100 on eBay. But you never know. This presupposes that people will dump their old iPhones for a new one, but the incentives are there this time around especially with the lowered price, and given our disposable cell phone culture, it's more than likely that people will replace. (This leads to other questions: if you plan to get a new iPhone anyway, why would you buy Apple Care when a new iPhone comes out each year? And, now, with an even lower price, why bother?)

For those who haven't replaced with iPhones and bought them near to day 1 last year when the 1.0 iPhone came out, the clock is ticking to replace them. I've seen these original 1.0 iPhones with batteries that are deteriorating and many 1.0 iPhone screens and cases that are scratched, rendering them even less valuable once iPhone 2.0 comes out.

In my case, I've been a bit luckier as this is my third iPhone which means it's still relatively 'new' (if not refurbished). There hasn't been noticeable battery deterioration (yet) nor is the iPhone scratched especially after I encased ... Read more

A newly negotiated deal with Apple could hurt exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier AT&T in the short term, but the cell phone carrier sees a big upside for the future.

Following the much-anticipated launch of the iPhone 3G at an Apple event in San Francisco on Monday, AT&T announced that it had struck a new deal with Apple. The new arrangement between AT&T and Apple is similar to other contracts AT&T has negotiated with other smartphone manufacturers such as Research In Motion and Samsung.

(Credit: Apple)

Since the first iPhone was launched last summer, AT&T and Apple have shared ongoing revenue from iPhone users. But now AT&T will pay the upfront cost for the iPhone 3G and subsidize the total cost of the phone by making customers agree to a two-year service contract.

The arrangement will benefit consumers by allowing the new iPhone to be sold at a much lower price point. The 8GB version will cost only $199 and the 16GB version will sell for $299 with AT&T's subsidy. This puts the iPhone on par with other smartphones such as RIM's BlackBerry and Samsung's BlackJack.

But the new deal comes at a price. AT&T executives said on a conference call with analysts and investors on Monday that the arrangement will put pressure on the company's profit margins and dilute earnings for the next year and a half. That said, the company believes that the new price point ... Read more

This year many riders in the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the LA Gay and Lesbian Center's annual 7-day AIDS LifeCycle bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles were toting iPhones - tucked away in their spandex or in their Bento boxes on their bikes.

The iPhone was the mose commonly spotted PDA, but man riders had Blackberry devices too. In any case, having a PDA was a great way to keep up with news and to send out updates about our trek's progress. Each day the Ride featured 2500+ riders cycling more than 70-100-plus mile routes. And, at the end of the day, a massive tent city would be set up in such exotic locales as Lompoc, California, which were no more than large grassy fields or state parks. Power sources were very, very scarce if even available. So, in addition to complaints about sore backs, sit ones and tight quad muscles, many iPhone-laden riders noted the battery life was pretty dismal. When there was an errant plug-in found at the park it was immediately swamped with chargers and extension cords to get some precious electricity.

Not being able to plug-in, many ALC riders tried using solar chargers, others like me, only turned it on sporadically during the day, but even after 7 days of doing that my "low battery" warning light popped up by Day 5 of the Ride. For those using solar chargers mounted on helmets, backpacks or tents, a full charge wasn't ... Read more

The new iPhone is looming, right? Current iPhone models are not being restocked or are 'sold out', buzz is being generated. It's a different kind of buzz than last time around though. There aren't 'leaked' pictures, there aren't many purported leaks, or any increased amount of feverish patent-trolling to see what's coming. It seems that there won't be a ground-breaking paradigm shifting this time around, right?

On the larger vein of waiting, though, I'm a pretty impatient type. A bit ADHD too. But you know the type of person I'm talking about: people who are ready, willing and able to wait for something for a finite amount of time. Not talking about waiting for iPhone 2.0 but more about waiting in a line, for a table, for a movie to start, at the DMV, etc. Moving to California from the Midwest a few years ago taught me how Californians are supposedly so laid-back. In realty, we all have just gotten used to dealing with the large amounts of people who live here and that things take longer here than they do in other parts of the country. Here, you have to learn to wait in line for everything, parking, coffee, food, etc., it's part of the deal.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to alleviate waiting, cell phone calls, reading a magazine/newspaper, staring off into space. So instead of wasting time in the waiting line (ala Zero7), having the ... Read more

Let's face it, the iPhone can do a whole bunch of things, some necessary (like talking, texting and emailing) and others not-so-necessary (like the rolling-a-make-believe-ball-into-a-peg-fame) pretty well. But, you would hope that one of the more basic features like the weather function would work better than it does. Sure, the icons are pretty and easy to understand. One of my favorites is the ambiguous sun-with-raindrops icon, so you know that it's supposed to rain and be sunny, right.... The forecasts are not detailed, and have questionable accuracy at best. I've been noticing this trend for months now, but this should't be the case as weather forecasting and even simple reporting is going to get more relevant as weather (i.e., global warming) becomes a greater and more pernicious factor in our lives (think about it: tornadoes in the midwest that have record wind speeds, snow in the Dakotas in late April, hurricanes that wipe out countries).

As such, because the interface is simple and only provides basic forecasts and conditions, you would hope that the iPhone weather feature would be at least accurate. Think again. I've seen it almost everywhere I travel. Today, for example, for San Francisco it says it's cloudy, when it's sunny. It said it was 61 degrees when it was 51 degrees (earlier it said it was sunny when it was cloudy). In Australia, I remember the forecast being sun and rain on alternating days. In reality, it was ... Read more

Sure, it's not new that people get interrupted at dinner by a cell phone call. In the past, it must have been a pager, or maybe in olden days, a courier pigeon. But with the increasing number of people getting iPhones (I have to admit that a scion of my friends are over it and are eagerly awaiting the next iPhone) what's happening is now I know what types of messages are interrupting that long-planned catch-up dinner with that over-scheduled friend sitting across the table from me. Whereas before you knew there was a message, now (thanks to the limited number to iPhone tones available) you can have a pretty good idea that Johnnie Q. Public is being texted, has a new e-mail, maybe missing an iCal appointment, or has new voicemail. Even if your iPhone is on silent you can hear the vibration, persistent buzzing (a call), short buzz (everything else).

Of course, this brings up a new set of disclosures, expectations, and etiquette that I'm sure Emily Post would reject out of hand: don't answer; switch off your phone, stupid. OK, maybe not the "stupid" part, but I'm sure she'd lean toward giving your dinner date your full attention. But we all can't be Emily Posts, nor should we. But what are the guidelines? Do you tell the person or persons you're eating with who texted/called/e-mailed you? I kind of want to know who interrupted my dinner. Who ... Read more

There comes a point where every early adopter realizes they are no longer really adopting anything unique any more. This happens when a product becomes saturated, more available and more universal. For me, as I've seen over the past few days, that point has come to pass - at least in San Francisco.

Walking around, eating out, and driving around San Francisco, all I see are iPhones. But it's not only the young yupppie/guppie types any more. Rather, there are kids, young professionals, middle-aged folks (not so many older folks though), men, women, white, Black, Latino, Asian, you name it and they are touting an iPhone. Have prices fallen drastically? No. Has that SDK come out yet? Not in an appreciable way yet. But nonetheless, visual evidence indicates that Apple and AT&T are on their way to selling millions of units this year, even if it's not 10 million.

This would explain, perhaps, why it was so easy for me to get another replacement iPhone when I thought I'd have to buy a new one. Unlike my last iPhone which had a portion of the touch-screen die (cell death is what the Apple rep temred it), this time I dropped my iPhone during a 20-mile training ride for the AIDS LifeCycle. It was my fault, plain and simple. The iPhone still 'worked' in a sense as it powered up and displayed its main menu. After all, it's tough enough to have been rolled ... Read more

Recent iPhone ads have touted the utility of having the iPhone on a trip. Vacationing with the iPhone is a great convenience, but also makes it harder to vacation.

Using the quasi-GPS and Google Maps, being able to make dinner reservations, forsaking tour guidebooks and printed itineraries it great. On a recent long weekend to Hawaii, my friends and I discovered and confirmed the utility of the iPhone features on the road. So much so, we didn't even bring our laptops, which is a big deal for some of us. Really, it is. The only physical complaint I had about the iPhone was getting sunscreen and sand on it. The only user-interface issue: dragging and dropping the "pin" in Google Maps as it sometimes got tripped up and I wished for some "reset" function to clear out all the locales we looked up.

In a larger sense though, at one point, I kind of wanted to throw my iPhone into a pineapple patch or a volcano (there were road closures do to hot lava flows). But while the iPhone is touted to merge phone, camera, iPod and PDA. Doing so, however, makes it hard to truly disconnect and unplug - spam emails follow you, work emails come too. Sure, this is true with any phone or mobile device. But doing so is both liberating and daunting as it takes me a particular amount of will power to switch off my phone and to keep it off for an extended ... Read more