iPhone Case
Since I got my iPhone I’ve been trying to find a suitable case for it. As I mentioned on Stephen’s blog back in July I was looking for a pouch style case. I wanted something a thin as possible but not something that was permanently on the phone. I don’t see the point of buying some thing with excellent design then wrapping it in some ugly case. I’ve been dropping into phone shops now and then to see what cases they’ve got but hadn’t found anything compelling until this week. I saw that TeleChoice seemed to have what I was looking for, it also happened to be a Mossimo case. There is one problem that I didn’t notice in the shop though.
iPhone Gripe: Trucated Song Titles
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.
Pondering “Sent from my iPhone”
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 iPhonethats 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.
iPhone 3G One Week In
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.