What do I think of the iPhone now?

Jeff Carlson's column in Saturday's Seattle Times Personal Technology page is on his iPhone, a year hence. His opinion largely matches mine, which is that the iPhone is the best small portable tech device I've ever had.

Jeff is the classic early adopter, and he bought the phone at full fare when it came out. I'm a big believer in staying away from the cutting edge, as I've mostly been burned when I've not obeyed my own sensibility (witness the Drobo debacle). I also couldn't stand the hype surrounding this device when it came out, which kept the recalcitrant anti-cool part of me from wanting one.

But you know what I still keep saying? The hovercraft and those futuristic gizmos from the Jetson's cartoons, about how the future was going to be, about now? The iPhone is the first arrival from that world. It pains me to no end to mimic the Macinista's, but it's really that cool.

Jeff's first rave about the phone is the same as mine—ubiquitous Internet access. That I don't have to fire up the laptop to check my email on the road is a huge boon. I do some web surfing on the thing, but I haven't delved into the world of mobile-friendly websites, and Jeff's column gave me some great ideas to pursue.

I have no idea what he's talking about though with Twitter, a concept whose functionality utterly eludes me. Why would I want to know what coffee someone in my “social network” just ordered? I really don't get this one—can someone explain it to me? Or am I really just that old now?

I've also never considered the possibility of watching a movie on an iPhone. Isn't that what theatres are for? I'm also one of those dinosaurs who has never made an iTunes purchase either, and I get supremely annoyed when I plug in my iPod or iPhone into the wrong computer, and my entire music library is deleted from the device (I've since learned to check the “manual sync” box on everything I can find that has one).

Other annoyances. Battery life is abysmal, though I'm coming from an old, monochrome phone which seemed to hold a charge for months, apparently. With the iPhone it's pretty much a daily routine to plug it in, particularly if I'm on the road and using the web features a lot. I dearly wish there were a way to organize my email into folders with a POP account, but even more, I wish there were a way to delete the 80 messages a day all at one go. Right now it's a one-at-a-time chore. If my iPhone sits anywhere near my computer, the speakers pick up an interference hum. Yet if I'm charging my iPhone from the computer, it's sitting right by it.

I think there is a chip in the thing that detects the age of the person using the phone, and makes using the keyboard progressively harder the older you are. I've had this phone for months now, and I can barely complete a simple Google query without two or more misspellings from hitting adjacent keys. As you can guess, my email replies from it are extremely curt.

I've had two occasions now where my address book/contact list has completely vanished. Whether it's an iPhone thing or a Macbook problem I don't know, but I've detected the problem both times when my contacts had vanished on the phone. I have a .Mac account, but I don't know how to control the sync directionality (and a Mac doesn't ask you, it just assumes it's smarter than you are) and I've been afraid of spreading an empty address book throughout my whole data set. I now carry a backup on a flash drive when I travel.

What has been a nice surprise is that my cell phone bill didn't go up. It's actually lower than on my old Verizon account.

Comments

[Jeff Carlson]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for linking to my column!

I was a long-time Twitter holdout until a colleague convinced me to give it a whirl. Here's the short-form answer to the question, "Why Twitter?" Imagine you're at a dinner table with a lot of people you admire and want to know what they're talking about. And you don't have to contribute anything if you don't want to. It's like a minimally-intrusive finger on the zeitgeist (at least, a corner of the zeitgeist you want to touch; in my case, most of the people I follow on Twitter are in the Mac/Writing/Editing field).

I agree with the limitations you mention, too, though I don't travel enough such that battery life is an issue. And I'm not good at typing on it either.

But once you get past the fact that you're not in a movie theater, watching a movie is just fine. The convenience outweighs the location and shared experience (and no, portable video like this isn't going to kill theaters).

Jeff

[Doug Plummer]

I always look forward to your take when I read your columns (in analog, on paper, the way God meant for a newspaper to be read) in the Times. Thanks for commenting.

[Erik]

There's a reason everyone I work with has a .sig along the lines of "typos provided by my iPhone".

[Karen Anderson]

Doug,
There's another day or two left on the half-price Take Control ebooks sale. Buy Joe Kissell's Take Control of .Mac and your sync mysteries will be over and you'll get more use out of the .Mac account (which can be mysterious).

Kissell is simply the best how-to tech writer around. For $5, how can you go wrong?
Karen

[Mordy]

Jeff- Like Doug, the concept of Twitter completely eludes me. I am ashamed to admit, your explanation does also! Really, i want to know and play on twitter too! Maybe the long-form answer would help? Or, i am just too old to ever get it.
Thanks Guys

[Jeff Carlson]

Mordy - Although Twitter is designed to be basically a one-way correspondence (you're essentially answering the question, "What are you doing right now?"), I've found it to be remarkably social. And that's purely due to the other people on Twitter that I follow. You can go to my Twitter page (http://www.twitter.com/jeffcarlson/) and see who I follow, click on their icons, and then follow them too. What you'll find is that I follow a lot of people in my industry... writers and editors in the Mac field, plus various other people I find interesting or know personally.

During the course of a day, these people comment on all manner of things. They/we don't always adhere to answering the question of what one is doing... mostly it's loose thoughts, questions posed to others, and even the occasional "Time for more coffee" type post. I use a Mac program called Twitterific that provides a better interface than just going to my Twitter Web page (there are a lot of Twitter clients).

What that gives me is a sense of what people are talking about. What's important to them. That can range from impressions of the latest Iron Man movie to reactions to news to on-the-floor reports from trade shows and the like. Because messages are limited to 140 characters, it's not a huge time investment, and because they're just short bursts I don't feel as if I need to methodically read everything to get caught up, as I would with email discussions. People "talk" to each other directly by starting their posts with @name (so, a tweet - yes, posts are called tweets - replying to something I posted would read "@jeffcarlson You're a bonehead!"), but the discussion is visible to others.

It's like being at a cocktail party where you can actually hear all the interesting discussions.

Twitter can be practical, too. People frequently post things like, "I've landed in Burbank" for family members to see that their flight is in without requiring a phone call. (There are twitter clients for Internet-enabled cel phones.) And Twitter can often be a source of fast research: higher-profile folks such as Leo Laporte (who has the second-highest number of followers on Twitter, behind Barack Obama) will often post a question to solicit immediate feedback of his audience's opinions. And, finally, Twitter is a great short-publishing vehicle: whenever we post a new article at TidBITS (www.tidbits.com), people who follow @TidBITS see a tweet containing the article title and a link.

I hope this helps. Believe me, I'm as surprised as anyone to be defending Twitter, which I at first thought was completely inane.

Jeff