David R Storms.com

Like many millions of people I downloaded on June 17th the highly anticipated 3.0 software update from Apple for the iPhone. Since I’m not even a year into my contract with Rogers, this review will be based on my 3G. I think this will make a more accurate review of the software itself without confusing 3.0 features that work only with the 3GS.

For the most part I will revisit the highlighted items from my post back in March on the iPhone OS 3.0 Update.

Installing

Installation was a breeze. I have to admit that I was caught up in the excitment for this one and got up bright and early and started scanning for updates in iTunes but none were to be had. At work through TweetDeck I setup a search feed to watch Twitter for #iPhone3.0 and saw a lot of people waiting. I checked again at lunch time and nothing (I’m in EST by the way). Around mid afternoon, say around 3-4 pm I saw notes all over the place of people downloading. There was also reports of time outs, iTunes activation problems, delays, peoples phones not coming back, etc. Needless to say I was a bit aprehensive. But I know I would try anyway.

I was home around 5 ish that night and wondered if the servers would still be bogged. I plugged in my iPhone, gave it one last glace at 2.x, then proceeded with the upgrade. The download of a couple hundred megabytes took about 17 minutes or so. The backup of the phone took place, then the firm ware was installed. This was probably about 10 minutes. During installation my phone went black and I saw the normal silver Apple logo with a progress bar underneath. I thought I would see that progress bar each time the phone started as a new feedback feature, but alas not the case.

Before it was done iTunes alerted me that there was a software update from my carrier (Rogers) and if I wanted to download this. I can only assume that it had something to do with the MMS and tethering capabilities. I agreed and it downloaded and installed in no time.

That was it. My iPhone came back all loaded. I normally reseve the home page for the factory apps, and in 2.x I had 1 spare space where I put Tweetie. After 3.0 the Voice Memos app was added which pushed Tweetie to the next page. However what it did was put it on a blank page just to the right of the home screen all by itself. I was startled at first but fine with it. I believe you can go up to 10 pages now and I find that I now want to still reserve factory apps for the home screen, then frequently used ones on a more or less empty page.

Later on I’ll talk about Spotlight which kind of antiquates this.

App Store & iTunes (from iPhone)

I find these 2 apps now slower for me. Maybe I’m crazy but I get the loading screen a bit longer than I normally do. Even slower when not on Wi-fi.

First time I started the App Store I had 2 apps that had updates now that I was on 3.0. However each of them failed repeatedly. They would sit on the waiting stage for a while and then I would try again and from the App Store and I would get 2 failures. Finally I was in either the App Store or iTunes and I got prompted to accept the license agreement.

Finally on the App Store, when you look at the details of an app, you no longer have to click through the images, they all load on the detail page and you just swipe left and right to look at them. This is great for me beause I like to see all the screens but I don’t want to have to click one, then go back, click one then go back.

I did that and lo and behold I could update those apps. Only hiccup I’ve had there.

While I haven’t done it, I think it’s neat you can get TV shows and movies from iTunes right on the phone. I beleive you will need Wi-fi to download them because my 1 GB cap just won’t handle it!

Touted Features

Apple says over 100 new features, and I found this site that lists them all. Here is my personal experience with each of them.

Cut, Copy & Paste

Another feature that I think it’s great that it is there and extremely useful, but I just don’t do that much copy pasting on the phone to begin with. When I do use it though, it works as expected. And the shake to undo and redo blows a lot of people away and was a very nice touch on Apple’s part.  I’m used to double tapping to zoom things and often the bubble pops up with text selected but its easily dimissed.

It’s just the way it is, but without a mouse it is a bit slower to narrow down to select the text you want, and I do find that the feature is smart about finding a word, then paragraph and then page.

The fact that the feature works across all apps is expected and works great. Copying images (up to 5 I believe) from the Photos app to an email works well (although you can send via email right from the Photos app), but grabbing an image from a web page and mailing it off is great too.

I don’t use this a lot, but I sure am glad it’s there!

Landscape Keyboard

I sort of got used to typing in portrait mode so it is a conscious reminder to flip to this form. Primarily I would use it in Email and Messages. I don’t take notes very often but I’m sure I would use this there as well.

Text Messaging & MMS

As mentioned above, the landscape keyboard is now in text messages which marginally helps me type. I do find it can take up a lot of room and leave me little area to see what is there:

One of the first things I did was try to send pictures over MMS. This worked like a charm. The small camera next to the text line makes it easy to snap a new shot or choose an existing one. I was told by my friend that pictures with text came out weird on his phone, but I love how they appear in speach bubbles on my end.

Last week though I tried to send him some shots of our basement project and all of them failed. Failed messages have a little red exclamation point beside them that you can click and retry. I did this many times but they still failed and I just gave up.

As I found out tonight (June 24) my friend also sent me pics last Friday (June 19th) and Sunday (June 21) and I didn’t get them until tonight. I then replied back with a picture and it worked. Best guess is that Rogers was overwhelmed or had to work on something last minute to make MMS work better. No idea. Haven’t seen any word on this.

You can now selectively forward and delete individual messages which I like rather than clearing the whole conversation.

Sadly I can’t take video because I don’t have the 3GS so I don’t think I can MMS any either.

A great change to the Messages app is now that when you send you are not locked out of the app while it sends but your message bubble pops up and at the top the app you have the “sending” note with the progress bar. That made a lot of sense to me.

I don’t find the app opens any faster but in fact seems slower to me.

Spotlight

This is a great idea addition to the phone. However I keep forgetting that it is there and often find myself locating apps and contacts the old fashioned pre-3.0 days.

I know its there I just need to remember to use it. The number 1 reason I would use this is quick access to my contacts. I don’t have pages and pages of apps and I organize them a bit so it’s not such a big deal to flip through the pages. I think it’s great that it will look into my email and calendar events, not to mention the iPod library.

Other

I have noticed modest speed boosts in web site rendering but I don’t tax things that greatly. I do know that JavaScript heavy sites like the Google services work quickly. I use the mobile version of Google Reader and its fantastic.

Another feature I use often is the landscape support in Email. Not so much for flipping through the list of messages, but opening emails I find it very useful. I still get the delay while the app tries to adjust the font size so it is readible, but that is mitigated a bit by the landscape support. I find that I type faster in SMS using portrait mode but from time to time I will use the messages app in landscape mode too.

If you want, here is  forum documenting user found features you may not even know about yet!

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=715629

This is the first post in this series of articles I’m writing detailing the products, services, web sites, technology, etc that I use in my day-to-day life. Hopefully some of this is useful to you when making decisions or maybe you are looking for something and I can help out by describing what I do.

For example, I LOVE THE iPHONE! Apple got it so right when they built this product. Being that I live in Canada, it wasn’t until July 2008 that I even had the option to get one (well, for me anyway). I dumped my carrier in the late fall of 2008 to pick one up. I have since been integrating this device into my life, and it has definately made an impact. I highly recommend this device for anyone that thinks they want a smart phone. Don’t know? Then read on and maybe I can sway you to the dark side!

Applications

Ok, let’s get this part out of the way first. When you talk about the iPhone the first thing most geeks think of is the apps you get from the Apple AppStore. Here are the apps that I use most frequently. I have tried many, but I only want to talk about the ones I like and use most often.

Right away I’ll tell you I have not purchased any apps yet. I will buy an app when I think I need it and the price is right (which for the most part everything is reasonable). I will do a part 2 if I find more apps that I use and maybe there will even be paid versions. Let’s face it, the free ones are where a lot of people go.

In order of most frequently used: (note that icons will launch iTunes and the AppStore)

	Free RSS This app is a great way to organize your news feeds. It simple and it works very well. I have an Engadget feed, the default Apple Hot News feed, CNN entertainment and technology feeds, the tech feed at Digg and Paul Thurrott’s Supersite site feed. I find the Engadget feed the best as it renders photos for each post, plus a built in browser means you don’t have to leave the app to view the web content.
	Twitterriffic & Twittelator Who isn’t using Twitter these days? I even broke down myself. I like reading people I follow on Twitterriffic. However, Twittelator has a cool feature to allow you to geo tag your Tweet, plus take a picture using the iPhone’s camera and include both with your post.
	Google Mobile App The king of search is on the iPhone. What I like is the voice search, which I find very accurate. I can speak “pizza pizza” into the phone and get the number, map and address to the local pizza shop. Very handy.
	WeatherEye Better than the provided weather app by far. It has up to date forecasts during the day and a 3 day and 5 day forecast. Add supported but not that intrusive.
	AroundMe Works using the built in GPS of the phone to use a category, like say Apple Stores and it will tell you the closest with address, phone number and a link to the maps to get directions. Has a very good library of places and works well even in my little part of the world.

Productivity

Web 2.0 was definetely thought of when this phone was built. I leverage a few online services for work and I like having access to them no matter where I am. So here is what I use.

Gmail – email from Google is super easy to setup. When you add a mail account it is one of the options. I highly recommend you use Gmail through the IMAP protocol (you can “Google” that if you don’t know what it is). With IMAP, your email always stays in the cloud (Google servers). This let’s me check my mail using a couple methods:

1. You can use Safari on the iPhone to access the mobile version of Gmail
2. You can use your email client on the iPhone to read, move, delete and respond to all mail
3. You can use your browser on any web enabled machine
4. You can use mail clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, etc to do everything with email

So no matter where I respond to emails or read emails, I edit only the copies on the server so I see the exact same results no matter how I get at my email.

Calendar and Contacts – Since I use Gmail for email, it only makes sense to use Google Calendar for my scheduling needs. The iPhone already has a calendar program and a contacts list. I wanted the same behaviour where I can keep all my data with Google’s services and have them able to be manipulated on the cloud or the phone. I discovered a service that let me take advantage of the 3G’s Exchange capabilities.

Here is how you get started. Visit https://www.nuevasync.com/ and create a fee beta account. They have a mobile phone friendly version of their site (which is the only version).  They have good instructions, but once logged in it’s very simple to activate email, contacts and calendar through their portal which uses the Google API. You have to agree to allow in Google Nuevasync to access your data feeds (nothing manual, you are just promted).

After that, you can simple go into the settings of your iPhone and enable the various Exchange like features so that you have push and pull calendar and contacts. I choose to remain with IMAP for email. It works great, I add a contact in Gmail or a event in the calendar either in my browser or on the iPhone and it appears in both places, and very fast too.

Accessories

There are tons of things you can get for your phone. I settled on some of the essentials. I still to this day use the standard headphones. They are excellent because of the small mic/button tab that works great for music and phone.

The stock head phones that come with the iPhone work great and sound very good. I do have trouble with them staying in my ears, and I am looking at other phones. But, the little mic attached on the cord I can’t do without. You can go forward or back on your iPod, or answer phone calls. The mic works great and I haven’t had anyone say they couldn’t hear me well. I actually prefer using the headset while talking on the phone.

Dock: I purchased the standard dock for the phone that used to come with it. I like having it sit up on the desk rather than have the perfect finish get scratched!

Case: I went with the Marware C.E.O. Sleeve because I liked the belt clip, plus the ease at which I can get the phone free. You have to take the phone out of the sleeve to charge, but that is what I have the dock for. No problem with the head phones and you can easily reach the buttons. You have to remove the phone to use the camera. The inside is a material that wipes the phone on the way in and out, ensuring less smudges. You can find the link here.

Face: I purchased the Power Support Anti-Glare Film set because I wanted to protect the glass surface of the phone. It works great and does indeed cut down on the glare. You lose a bit of clarity but not enough to worry about. I even find I like the touch interface better than using the glass directly. A bit tricky to stick in the right place, but not that hard. Here is the link here.

Thanks for reading my post. Of course there is more things I use with the iPhone, this is just for starters! Leave a comment and let me know what you think.