I used to have a Blackberry and found it extremely useful. Last year and the early part of this year I made do with a normal phone as I wasn't ever too far from an internet connection. Amongst other things my circumstances have changed recently. Discovering that Verizon was ripping me blind and that the iPhone plan gave me more for less, I bit.

Image from Information Architects

Probably a bad time to purchase as the iphone 2.0 is due out soon, but whatever; either way I have found it useful already.

Like most of these things they are not necessarily for everyone, but I needed seamless email integration anywhere. The interface for the iphone which let me connect up to gmail through the main email interface is excellent. The most useful part of the phone for me.

I put all my music on it, but the iPod (or nanoPod, I have both of several generations) is a better form factor for music playing. Enough that I will still use my nanoPod at work to listen to music rather than the phone. So the iphone has limited utility there.

The browser component is far, far, superior to the same functionality on the blackberry and will come in handy when I am travelling; Which is when I need that type of thing most.

The contacts list is also written for the modern technorati and integrates with web functions. Rather than a phone list - like it is on most phones, it allows you to express a contacts web persona or personality with multiple emails etc. Hitting the contact's page means multiple forms of communication are a click away; txt, voice or email. It is well done.

The voice mail is very useful as well. It is like playing a wav file. I would let multiple voice mails build up on prior phones as it was a pain to log in, go through them one by one, hit 7, hit whatever, go through the voice activated interface; ugh. The computer screen paradigm works very well with voicemail.

One of the downsides of the iphone is that it doesn't hold charge well. It sucks the juice quickly, more quickly than other PDAs I have had in the past.

All in all it is an excellent piece of functional equipment that I have found useful immediately.

Included in the blurb for the google reader making its way to the iphone is:

... iPhone and iPod Touch owners know how powerful having a full-featured browser is.

The iphone's Safari browser is not to be under-estimated. Many, many years ago the company I was with was looking for some mobile solution to update tickets from the field. We tried laptops, but back then they were too expensive for everyone to have one. We tried a proprietary application running on an iPaq; but there was too much data. We tried the ATT browser on the blackberries too; but it was WML and really stunk up the joint.

In the end the version of the Blackberry with the RIM browser came out and a special version of the website was made for it. The curious thing was very few people used the special mobile website, they used the normal website and put up with the display inefficiencies.

A few of the techs eschewed the Blackberry altogether for browsing, using it only for email and phone calls. Instead they used laptops and a fully featured browser to go through the website they worked with.

The great thing about Safari on the iphone is that it makes no compromises for being a mobile application. You can view the web page is if it were on a laptop or desktop browser. It has magnifying functions which have a great algorithm for identifying blocks of text. You can also rotate the browser sideways and the view of the page will change to longways and vice versa.

However; it is a fully featured browser. That is the key IMO. It is why I like the iphone's safari browser and where the WML/WAP garbage and RIM have screwed up in the past.

I bought my iPhone only recently, I was a slow adopter and despite the rumors of the next-gen iPhone I didn't think the hardware changes would be significant enough. I was right, what it is now is enough for me.

I was wrong about the price drop though, I did not see that coming. I payed $500 USD for mine and the next generation ones start at $200 USD. Quite a significant change in price and one which will probably put Apple into direct competition with RIM's Blackberry range. However, the devil is in the details, and the US telecoms are almost 'Telstra rapine' in their appetities. As Johnathon LaClour writes:

Over the course of the two year contract, an iPhone 3G will cost you a full $360 more than a first-generation iPhone would. This means that with the same ATT service plans, the $199 8GB iPhone 3G will actually end up costing you $559, where an 8 GB iPhone 1.0 will cost you only $399, representing a savings of $160! The iPhone 3G isn't cheaper at all, it is in fact far more expensive.

I feel the same. I am content with my current purchase and can do without the extra charges. Ironically I bought the iPhone for the hardware. I will pay good dollars for it, but I consider the cellphone and data service a commodity, which should be cheap considering the number of service providers. ATT obviously disagrees with me though and sees their service as a luxury that people will pay through the nose for. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the market.

The counter point is that I may just be a grumpy old arsehole who thinks the commodity component of a service should be deflating, not inflating, and that digital movement of information, such as data and text messaging should be decreasing in price, not increasing. The cell providers in the US have been going the other way. There was recently an article which compared the cost per byte to recover the data from a hard drive in a crashed Space Shuttle, and it was cheaper than text messaging.

Whatever the market will bear. It is a shame that NASA doesn't offer text messaging services though.

Mercedes has announced it has integrated the iPhone into its range of cars and SUVs. Which is interesting as the Blackbery still outsells the iPhone though Apple is going after the Blackberry market by lowering the price of the starting iPhone to $200.

I am really disappointed with the integration of modern tech tools into my car. While my car has a heads up display, a navigation screen and a DVD that flips up and out when I press a button; it does not integrate with the iPod, let alone the iPhone. Since I have bought the iPhone it has replaced my nanoPod, though I still have a large iPod which holds my entire music collection and is hooked into a Bose player in the house.

I pretty much consider the need to hook a car up to an iPod, Zune, Blackberry, whatever as essential these days. People use and rely on these devices constantly; whether it is power, music, txt or voice communication. The old car stereo is an anachronism, unfortunately, the car industry runs at a snails pace due to the long lead times on platforms.

I don't know why car manufacturers try to integrate so much into their cars. It effectively dates them as the tech changes so rapidly that an 80s car looks archaic internally. Portable technology has taken off in recent years as batteries have improved and storage for both RAM and mini-harddrives have shrunk in costs.

The navigation DVD screen my car has, while large, it inferior to the small portable ones you can get from Best Buy for a couple of hundred dollars. It may be that car manufacturers need to look at how the IBM clones came about and give third party manufacturers and integrators something like the PCI slot, or the USB conenctor to hook a car's devices into rather than the super-integrated, and out-dated, offerings of current manufacturers.

Neil McAllister argues that Software Developer Kits [SDK] are not the be all and end all of smart devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and Android. The Microsoft side of this style of argument is the boorish, "Developers, developers, developers" and that you do not have a viable platform unless developers have bought into your SDK. But as McAllister notes both the iPhone and Android come with WebKit - an HTML rendering engine based upon Konquerer's kHTML engine. The universal device in the smart phones is the web browser.

That means Web applications designed for one will render almost identically on the other, provided their developers adhere to published standards.

Those same applications will also render on WebKit-based desktop browsers, such as Safari and Google Chrome, and on any other browsers that implement the standards correctly.

Based on that, all this talk of SDKs seems almost foolish.

The iPhone applications store opened to massive fanfare but I have only downloaded one application. That is the remote so I can operate my iTunes library remotely through my phone. I use the browser on the iPhone every day and I am extremely thankful that it renders web pages without any loss of the original formatting.

Many, many years ago I did a smart device project to collect facility data. We tried an iPag which at the time was Compaq's smart device. It came with a windows operating system of some kind, I cannot recall which. It didn't work and wasnt popular. We then tried phones and the horrendous WAP toolkits. Then we tried blackberries.

The main benefit of the Blackberry was the RIM browser (as opposed to the WAP AT&T; browser which was crap). It would render a page honestly even though it was on a small screen. I made up a version of the website so that it could be used on the Blackberry but most technicians used the main website which was intended for desktops and laptop style resolutions anyway.

The browser that could render the web on a mobile device became the solution. In my opinion McAllister is right. The web is going to continue being the web and SDK's are anachronisms to get people to that level of universal browsing.

My current iPhone plan includes 450 minutes during the week, 5,000 during the weekend plus all manner of permutations of rollover minutes, crazy minutes, mobile to mobile minutes, etc. I also pay for unlimited data and 1500 text messages.

I used:

• 100 minutes (67 in prime time)
• 148.97 Mb
• 123 txts

My iPhone is mainly for email and browsing the web. My conversations are short when I do call, and I only do the occasional txt when I can't get someone by email. I guess I wanted a portable computer that has some phone functionality, rather than a phone with some internet capability.

The upshot is that AT&T;'s iPhone bills don't support my usage. I am over paying for voice and texts (the latter my fault though, I did used to text a lot but that has since changed).

I use my iPhone as my main music center. I have a full sized iPod that has all my music on it, but since discovering Pandora, I don't listen to bought music anymore, instead I have a Pandora station that is a mix of most of my favourite bands. Consequently when I am at home I stick my iPhone into the Bose player which has the double advantage of recharging my phone at the same time (it also blasts out incoming calls at the same volume as the music, which is odd, amusing, but ok).

What the clock radio and music players companies such as Bose have worked out is that they don't need a user interface to play music, the iPod/iPhone/iTouch/etc has that nailed down to wonderful simplicity. Their role is to provide a good, simple and easy to use mechanism to have the iPod play music through speakers.

So given that, why do car manufacturers get it so wrong? For instance Chevrolet and Infiniti. They don't need to make an iPod interface, the iPod provides that in one simple click wheel. They are reinventing the wheel by making a user interface to use the iPod. They really only need to do what Bose does and provide a jack on the top of the dashboard to stick your iPhone into. It is that simple IMNSHO.

My car should have something in the middle console that looks like the Bose system I have on my bedside table.