iPhone 3G

When Apple released the original iPhone last June, I was disappointed to hear that we wouldn't be getting one in Canada. Since then, rumours had it that we'd get it at Christmas time, then spring time, but all turned out to be false. Some of the more hardcore Canadian geeks, like my friend Mel, went over to Buffalo to buy the iPhone, and then have the phone unlocked, therefrom losing the warranty. Being a conservative kind of person, I wasn't about to do that.

Now I'm rather glad at the delay because the new iPhone 3G is better and cheaper. Friday, July 11 was the release date. Some geeks camped outside Rogers and Fido stores at 2 a.m. the night before. Well, I wasn't about to do that, either. So I waited out the weekend, and ordered my 16GB White iPhone on Monday, the 14th. The Fido salesperson said that, due to high demand, the iPhone wouldn't be delivered "until August 1" -- a two-and-half-week wait. Oh well.

So imagine my surprise when a UPS guy knocked on the door yesterday (Friday, the 19th), with my shiny new iPhone. It took only four days. I'm wondering whether all this "out of stock", "high demand" talk is just hype.

I carefully unpacked My Precious and spent the next few hours setting it up. It was straightforward. I took out the SIM card from my cellphone, and inserted it into the iPhone. Syncing is done through iTunes, which is fine. I had to first export my addresses and date book from the Palm OS Desktop, and then import them into the corresponding Mac OS X programs, which are Contacts and iCal. There was a small glitch when iCal entries were synced to the iPhone Calendar due to the fact that the factory default timezone is set to US West. Once I changed my timezone to East, everything was good. Getting Wi-Fi to work was a breeze. One other crucial program I needed was SplashID, which I purchased from Apple Apps Store, installed on the iPhone and on the iMac, and synced without any problems.

Today when we were out, I tried out the iPhone Maps program which uses GPS, Wi-Fi Hotspots and cell towers to locate the current position. It worked very well. The initial triangulation process is much faster than my Garmin GPS, and the graphics much better too.

So far, the iPhone has lived up to my high expectations. I do, however, have a few small complaints.

One is that the soft-keyboard is rather small for typing with thumbs. Maybe I'll get more used to it down the road.

A more serious problem has to do with the Notes program on the iPhone -- it does not offer the sync functionality. What is the point of a PIM program that doesn't sync? Also, a todo program is missing on the iPhone. These tools are not mere bells and whistles. They are the heart and soul of a PDA. I noticed in the Apple Apps Store a slew of Todo- and Notes- clones are out there. I suppose I can always write my own.

Finally, a major grievance: where is the string search tool, like the one offered by every Palm Pilot, which allows one to search for a calendar entry or a contact by supplying a string? Without this functionality, the Calendar program is next to useless, and the Contact program a pain to use.