I have an iPhone

My Sony-Ericsson k850 had given me a taste for mobile Internet yet I yearned for more. I was somewhat tempted by an asus eee901 but decided a smart phone would be much more portable. After some research on the capabilities of the iPhone I had to have one.

I can summarize it easily: I love it. Calling it a phone detracts from just how flexible it is. I'm not normally a design freak but I like it's slabbiness, one button on the front, another on the top, a volume control and a small switch to turn the ringer (easy to work in my pocket). Speaking of pockets, it is sleek and quite flat and is very comfortable there. Slips out a bit too easily when I sit down. The case has very few markings, just a shiny mirrored apple and my Elizabeth, not yet two could name the brand. It feels very solid.

I'll go through the things I have been doing with it:

phone: well der. Good call quality and (for me) better reception than my old network when sitting at my desk at work. My phone is pay-as-you-go so the calls are 25p a minute: unless I use the truphone voip app I downloaded and pay 3p a minute. I could have settled for an ipod touch which does most things an iPhone can but I hated the thought of carrying more than one gadget.

text messaging: the touch keyboard is better than a normal mobile, not sure about a blackbery though. Texts are displayed in 'threaded' conversations (to/from same caller on one page) which is cool and the whole thread can be deleted in one go. No way of forwarding a message though. No support for SMS messaging at all (except via applications, not real SMS).

email: nice email client, supports gmail out the box. It is supposed to support push email with yahoo but apparently this has always been temperamental.

wifi: I use this all the time, my phone is always doing something or other Internet related. Connects quickly and solidly too. I downloaded am application to list available networks and signal strengths and it makes a great wifi reception diagnostic tool at work.

3g: internet is slow over 3g and coverage in my area is patchy. Enabling 3g drains the battery noticably faster. With 3g off and wifi on I need to charge every day but I play with the phone all evening.

spirit level: the iPhone has an accelerometer which is used to detect portrait/landscape orientation in the web browser but is sensitive enough to make a spirit level. Many of the games available use this in surprisingly inventive ways.

web browser: I thought the tv adverts on tv looked faked but it really is that easy to surf, much better than my old phone. Safari does crash now and then which makes me swear. iPhone web apps are essentially web pages tuned for the iPhone. I use one to post to Twitter.

note taker: I have an application called reqall where I can speak notes and the recordings are converted to text on a website I get free texts to remind me what I've invariably forgotten. I'm composing this blog entry on the notetaking app but the iPhone totally lacks cut and paste so I can only put it on the blog by emailing it to my desktop. Composing this in safari would have been too painful, the note utility is full screen and I can save drafts regularly. It is RSI-city, my knuckles are burning.

radio: the last.fm application streams the back catalogs of every artist I can think of in random order for free and I'm still not sure what the catch is. It's great for acts I didn't fancy investing in a cd for.

ibluesky: a mind-map brainstorming app.

mobile memory: the 'air share' app allows me to copy files to and from the iPhone over wifi using bog standard Internet explorer. The app included a file viewer.

tv: plays BBC iplayer and YouTube Just fine. The screen is very nice, good contrast and resolution, small but perfectly formed. I had a seminal moment watching Stephen fry in America when he pulled out his iPhone to show a picture. His iPhone was perfectly framed within mine.

iPod: nuff said? Can buy music wirelessly with built on iTunes app but it doesn't handle podcasts or videos without iTunes on a pc/mac.

camera: the camera is very basic after a Sony-Ericsson and has no settings to tween at all. There is no flash and indoors it is pretty much useless. It can't record video at all, not even poorly like other phones.

app store: the only way to install apps is through the app store. There are many good things there either free or as low as 59p. Very hard to say no to punting 59p for a silly toy to amuse the kids for five minutes (koi pond, face melter, chalky).

remote control: 'mymote' can control my mythtv from anywhere I am in the house. If it could schedule recordings it would be perfect. There is a free apple app to control iTunes on a mac/of.

ssh terminal: touchterm is a nice little ssh terminal capable of light transcontinental server maintenance. I tried a vnc app but couldn't figure out how the mouse was supposed to work. Command lines are infinitely more powerful for server stuff than guis anyway.

gps: location to within about 50 yards, maybe less. Built in google maps complete with satellite photo's. Can tag photos with location, should I ever want any weirdos stalking my daughters.

I've done all this and I've only had it three weeks. As I said earlier, I love it. It does more than this: I'm not one of those people that thinks wandering around wearing a Bluetooth headset is cool.

Downsides:

battery life isn't great, a charge a day but I use it a lot and it can charge from USB on an ubuntu hardy box without installing silly modem drivers (ahem Sony).
it is commoditized, restricted and closed. I'm not free to write apps for it unless I buy a mac (tempting). Google android sounds very nice open, non-proprietary and in a year or two I may well have an android phone. It might be as good as what I have NOW.
apps crash too much, especially safari web browser. The phone has never locked up, you just get taken back to the desktop, no errors or apologies.
limited multi-tasking: listening to last.fm, if I switch to something else the music stops. It does the old palm thing of not giving much control over processes. Windows mobile is similar but there are innumerable task manager apps. Apple lock down what is available on the app store so there is nothing like that. Apart from air-sharing the apps have limited support for concepts like files, probably worse than palm in that respect. Palm had a database rather than a file system, this thing has a bsd core and files shouldn't be an alien concept.
the touch screen is much nicer than a stylus but spelling corrections are frequent and tactile feedback would be nice. It can do a key click but that is a bit loud. I think all the good keyboard data entry ideas have been patented.

Mythical Convergence Box++

My Mythical Convergence Box was working ok as a mythtv backend but as a server it was frustratingly slow: slow to boot firefox, task switch, run wow, whatever. I was itching to upgrade it.

I decided the cheapest solution was a good old processor/motherboard/memory upgrade so now the box has a Dual Core 64 bit AMD processor, a AMD690GM motherboard and 2g of 800Mhz ram. I also splurged on a 750G SATA hard disk since they were on special offer. I installed the native Ubuntu 64 bit version for a free 64 bit state of the art operating system. Why pay more?

This fixed the performance problems

Myth and everything all worked fine, 64 bits did not cause any compatability problems. The 750G disk will hold about 375 hours of TV recordings, should I have 15 solid days (and nights) spare to watch tv.

The motherboard I bought had an AMD/ATI chipset so my biggest problems were getting WoW to run without crashing, ATI's linux drivers not being the best. I used the ones installed by ubuntu, I tried installing newer ones at one point but they made no difference. I tweeked more things than I can remember googling for but the most important thing is to add

SET gxAPI "opengl"

to WTF/Config.wtf as otherwise it tries to runs in direct 3d mode and immediately dies with a fatal exception. The frame rate was then crap and I had to turn all the settings down but it does run wow acceptably: while setting it up I became preoccupied with gathering turtle meat.

The graphics are still odd, there is something wrong with the colour balance that makes everything looks cartoonish and when watching recordings the top line on the display flickers. It's awfully tempting to get an nvidia card..

On my desktop Wow still runs just fine, even with mythtv showing Alien vs Predator on the second monitor. Add a nice mug of coffee and life is sweet.

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I have an iPhone

Mythical Convergence Box++