WezM.netThe weblog of Wesley Moore

Some­thing that seems to be a regres­sion on the iPhone rel­a­tive to all pre­vi­ous iPods is that song titles get trun­cated. Even in the orig­i­nal iPod the Now Play­ing screen would scroll the cur­rent song title so that you could read it all when it didn’t fit on screen. Later model iPods also scrolled text that was wider than the screen when brows­ing menus. It seems the iPhone 3G does nei­ther of these.
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The first email I sent from my iPhone was:

Hello from my new 16Gb white iPhone. I was 5th in line.

Unbe­knownst to me at that time, my phone had help­fully attached the default sig­na­ture of, “Sent from my iPhone”, at the end of the email. Later that day, in a reply to what may have been my third ever email from the phone a friend said:

> Sent from my iPhone

thats going to get annoy­ing soon.. heheh

Not one to wish to annoy people and seeing where he was coming from I removed the signature.

A couple of weeks later as I was typing out a reply to a dif­fer­ent friend on my trip to work on the tram, the desire for the sig­na­ture returned. The reason being includ­ing the sig­na­ture tells the recip­i­ent that the mes­sage came from a small hand­held device, whilst I was on the go. This may help explain why the reply is terse and why there may be typos or par­tic­u­larly in the iPhones case, whole word sub­sti­tu­tions. The phone is gen­er­ally pretty good at auto-​correction but if you’re typing away furi­ously its easy for mis­takes to go unno­ticed. So, with a gen­uine desire to have a sig­na­ture that wasn’t about big-​noting the fact I owned an iPhone, I explained the sit­u­a­tion to my friends and asked what exactly was it that they dis­liked about it and how could it be made better and/or less intru­sive.
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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/​i​phone.

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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