WezM.net

A friend asked the following today, the reply was big enough I decided to post it:

So Wes, you’ve had your iPhone for a week now - what are your initial comments?

Pros / Cons?

Has it changed your life? Has the battery life been crappy for you? Talk time OK?

Its definitely the best phone I’ve had. Part of that is due to the tight integration with Mac OS X, which obviously very few companies were going to pull off. As a device its brilliant to use and full of functionality. I’m loving the apps and decent browser. The WiFi is really nice at home. The iPod part obviously works as well and better than any prior iPod.

The on screen keyboard is pretty much as described. You have to give it time to get the hang of it and you have to trust it. If you’re typing a word that would be in the English dictionary you’re best to keep on typing even if the word is way off. By the time you get to pressing space its usually selected the right word, which is selected automatically upon space. Two irritations with typing though. Its less likely to get shorter word right, particularly when there’s multiple valid options. There’s no way that I’m aware of to get a list of possibilities and choose the one you want. Of course being a small word means its not hard to fix and if you type it correctly in the first place then it isn’t a problem at all. The other minor annoyance is when you get to the last word in a sentence that is mis-typed with a correct suggestion it appears the only way to accept it is to press space (and then delete the space) or grab a full stop.
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I read through the 150 odd pages of the iPhone user guide looking for tips and shortcuts and for information on usage that I haven’t discovered yet. The following is a collection of the things I found useful or interesting, some may be well known already but they’re mainly here for my reference. However they may be useful to others as well; Particularly those who’ve just picked up an iPhone for the first time following the worldwide release of the iPhone 3G.

The quotes are mostly copied verbatim from the iPhone User Guide (PDF), Copyright Apple Inc. As noted at the end of this post the iPhone User Guide is also available for viewing directly on the iPhone at http://help.apple.com/iphone.

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I just sent off the following to Vodafone customer enquiries. I’m not overly hopeful of a favourable response but thought it was necessary.

Hi,
No doubt I’m one of thousands sending an email like this but still feel it necessary. I am eagerly awaiting the launch of the iPhone in Australia. I am intending to buy one on the day of release. When it was initially announced that Vodafone and Optus would be carrying the iPhone I had it in my mind that I would take the opportunity to swap to Vodafone from Optus. I have been a constant Optus customer since getting my first mobile phone in 1999.The complete lack of communication from Vodafone has put me off though.

In order to make an informed decision on launch day it would have been nice to have plan details available at the very least a week before. With three days remaining its now getting beyond a joke. I understand that there may be other factors at play here. However given you have an audience that have voluntarily signed up for updates it would have been pro-active and open to communicate with these people and let them know what was holding up progress or at least when to expect more information (with more certainty than “very soon”).

At this point are you able to provide any more detail than that which is publicly available already?

Unfortunately unless the plans eventually announced are particularly compelling I expect I will remain an Optus customer.

Regards,
Wesley Moore

Here’s tip for something I worked out today. WordPress blogs generally have an RSS feed available for the comments on a post. This is handy for when you want to see other comments posted without having to remember to check back. The problem is many WP themes don’t provide a link to the feed. The solution is to add /feed to the URL of the post, so for this post the comment feed is at:
http://www.wezm.net/2008/07/02/comment-feeds-in-wordpress/feed.