Personal

Bought Incase slider case

I've been looking for a case for the iPhone for a while. I had a DLO rubber one before but it's too thick and 'sticky' and is hard to put and take it out of my pants pocket. The Incase is a slippier design and doesnt add much thickness. It does cover the bottom so you can't use the 3G universal adapter when docking. I ended up removing the adapter from my clock/radio that I use and it fits fine once you do that and this will work for me I think.

It is expensive at 35 bucks and it has no screen protector. I'm reusing a static cling type one I had on the phone anyway but this would add another 15 bucks if you didn't already have one. The case fits very snugly. The bottom can slide off to allow it to be docked normally but it's super tight. This makes it hard to take off and this is why I decided in the end to just take the universal adapter out of my clock radio rather than sliding the bottom off and on.

Overall, this feels like it should be 20 bucks with a screen protector but I couldn't find something like that at the store.

Bought a JBL Onstage 200iD ipod/iphone speaker

My wife wanted a speaker for her iphone for the kitchen so I happily obliged :) I was looking at the Bose Soundstation but it's way overpriced for the sound. Batteries were not important to me so I ended up buying the JBL Onstage 200 which is iphone compatible and blows the Bose away sound wise. Sound wise, it's ok, only so much you can do with a couple of 2 inch speakers but it's plenty fine. I have my Shure head phones or the stereo system for critical listening.

Setup was easy. Pop in the iPhone dock adapter and then the phone fits it very snugly. It comes with adapters for all the various iPods including the older iPhone.

The iPhone integration is limited. I can't use it as a speaker phone so thats annoying but then it's 130 bucks. Still, I'd have paid 200 for something that also did speaker phone. The options at the local best buy above the 130 buck range were not attractive. All were lacking features to justify the price given the sound quality wasn't there.

Anyway, happy with the JPL. Sounds good.

Tip of the year: Don't lose your iPhone!

I thought I'd lost my iPhone today. ATT didn't want anything to do with it. A replacement one is north of 500 dollars. EBay prices are still sky high. ATT is unable to locate the last tower that talked with the iPhone, this is would incredibly useful and you just know that they should be able to do this but are basically refusing to make the ability available probably on privacy concerns. There is also no way to black list the phone. You can receive a stolen way and it appears that you'll be able to get a contract on it despite the fact it's stolen and has a IMEI number.

Anyway, I'm just happy I found it in the evening under my bed would you believe. I looked in to insurance today but ATT don't sell their 5 buck a month insurance for the iPhone. I'll double check tomorrow however at the store. 5 bucks is cheap to what losing one of these will cost you.

iPhone 3G with Motorola T305 car bluetooth adapter

I got frustrated using my Jawbone V2 because I can't keep the nipple against my cheek bone without holding it and if I have to hold it then whats the point. Most of the time I wanted the earpiece when driving. I decided to buy a car bluetooth adapter.
I bought the Motorola T305 for 79 dollars at Best Buy. The T505 was there also for 130 but the only difference seemed to be playing stereo music over bluetooth which you can't do on an iPhone anyway so the T305 it was. Installing was easy and pairing was very easy. Hold down the button on the T305 and then it shows up on the iPhone and thats it.
Call quality wise, I can hear people just fine. My wife complained I sounded far away but thats been the case on every bluetooth headset I've owned. Other people haven't said anything during calls so I think it's ok. It has noise reduction and that seems effective taking calls driving my GMC 2500 pickup which isn't quiet.
Battery life looks really good at 14 days standby and 14 hours of calls. It turns off after 30 minutes of losing a bluetooth connection so the battery should last a long time. It pairs automatically with the iPhone if on when you get in the car which is cool.
Overall, happy with it.

MobileMe doesnt sync contacts to iPhone 3G

My iPhone 3G isn't mirroring the contacts on my Macs or on the mobile me web site. There are just entries missing. I worked around this, this morning by turning off contacts sync in the iPhone settings which deletes all 'synced' entries (in my case, all entries). Then I reenabled it again and bingo, all the contacts show up after a moment on a 3G network. Annoying but at least, they are all there now.

iPhone3G with 2.0.1 slow and hanging

I'm really hoping Apples next firmware update fixes this thing. The pauses especially in contacts are now really annoying. I was trying to add a photo using the camera to a contact today and it hung just after taking the picture requiring a full reset to resolve it, this really helps sell the iPhone when your friends, and potential Apple customers, see it hanging and need a reset to keep going.

Using the iPhone 3G on vacation, call plans

I'm currently taking a vacation in Ireland. My US based ATT iPhone 3G is working fine here, no reception issues. I visited the ATT store to find out about international rates before leaving. I'd read some nightmare stories of 5000 dollar phone bills etc on the web and didn't want that to happen to me. The staff at the store was ok but not stellar. The 5.99 a month world traveller plan lets you take the phone abroad and 'only' pay 99c a minute for incoming calls. Outbound calls to the US are 99c a minute also and calls to Ireland would be 99c + 9c which is bizarre given it's a local call.

Data-wise, I gave up as they don't offer a viable option right now in my opinion. ATT wanted 25USD for 20MB I think and 50 for 40MB. If you go over then it's a per KILO BYTE charge which is just nuts. I didn't chose either plan as both seemed inadequate for traveling given the chances of a 1000 dollar overage charge. I asked the ATT rep if there was a way to disable data when roaming then given the ridiculous charges but all he suggested was don't use the browser or email and turn off push. There is a No data while roaming setting on the iPhone which he wasn't aware of and it's OFF by default. It's in the network settings.

There is another plan for making international calls from the USA and this looks a deal compared with tMobile. My tMobile account charged me 99c a minute for international calls but the ATT World traveller plan charges 9c a minute (plus the monthly 5 buck fee) but this seems ok to me. What does annoy me is that all these per month charges are PER line which is annoying but that said, 9c a minute for Mexico and Ireland has me almost at the point of dropping my fixed line in the house. This is 50 bucks a month for me right now and if I can survive with just the mobile then why not.

iPhone still slow after 2.0.1

I upgraded to 2.0.1 of iPhone OS but the phone still pauses in contacts and other screens even after hard starts so I don't think it's a memory leak issue. I can't explain the pauses given the applications cannot use things like garbage collection etc. Weird. Hopefully, it'll get sorted out in V2.1

First using iPhone typepad app

Just downloaded the typepad iPhone blogging application and am hence trying it out. I'm finding I can type pretty fast with one finger and quite accurately using the corrective typing that the iPhone does. Not bad, I can't see myself doing war and peace on this but short entries would be do fine.

Current iPhone order time is 12 days

I ordered a black 8Gb iPhone for my wife at the local AT&T store on July 16th and it's arriving today by the looks of things so we'll pick it up this evening. They estimated 10-17 business days so thats better than expected.