Saturday, June 30, 2007

Tips, tricks, photos and bugs


Now that more than 24 hours has passed, a sense of overwhelming awesomeness has settled on me and my iPhone. This is one cool device. I can't really say enough good things about it. I completed the AT&T online account registration on EDGE while riding in a car at 65 mph on I90. It didn't take too long either, the speed was reasonable. While you can always have more speed, it certainly is faster than the no-web surfing my Moto PEBL had.



Some tips - the keyboard doesn't register a press until you lift your finger. If you hit the wrong key and notice quickly, instead of lifting and hitting backspace, just slide your finger around until you are on the right key, then lift. Mistake corrected!

I also had a problem where it became difficult to unlock my phone. I'd slide my finger and nothing would happen and it would take me a few attempts. Well the solution is to turn off the phone to restart. To do this, hold the top button for about 5 seconds until a new screen pops up. Now, the hard part, you have to slide the red thingy across - given the difficulty of sliding things already established this might take a bit! Once you get it, turn it on and problem solved.

Safari doesn't seem to allow you to use textbox input yet. This is unfortunate because it means you can't blog directly from within Safari. Obviously you can use mail-to-blog interfaces, but I'm not sure if blogger has one. This is a clear bug that I hope will be fixed soon. I might submit a bug report to Apple to encourage them.

The last problem is you can't attach photos to a mail already in progress. There is no good reason for this, just a UI omission. You can email photos to a new mail, but not really the same thing. The file form upload element is also disabled, but they should enable it and allow you to upload photos on the iPhone. Another bug report!


Enough complaints, they really are minor compared to the awesomeness that is the iPhone. Here are some of my joys:

Mapping directions on I90 going 75 mph. The speed at which the data was spooled amazed me! The directions are great and the UI of Google Maps rule.

Getting a text message while doing something else: A pop up with the message summary asks if you want to read it or ignore. If you ignore the SMS app on the home screen will still have a little red number on the upper right corner letting you know how many unread messages you have. If the phone is locked it will display the message summary.

If the phone is charging and it's locked, when you hit a button you see:
_MG_0459

The "slide to unlock" text has this rolling highlight in the direction of the drag to unlock. Combined with the little arrow there are three indications of what to do. Little details like that I just love!



There is much much more of course. Rounding off this post is a picture from the iPhone:

IMG_0012

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