So I have a new iPhone 3GS. It’s my first “mobile device” from Apple.
People find it odd that I’ve been an Apple fanboy since my first Apple //e as a child, owning many Macs over the years, and being a Mac software developer (amateur and professional) for nearly 20 years… that with all that Apple-ness in my life, I’ve never owned an iPod or an iPhone.
iPod was simple. I had no desire for music in my ears. I love music, but I also love my hearing. I’ve already done enough damage to my hearing from loud music (either the Walkman in my ears as a kid, or attending loud concerts), motorcycles, guns… all sorts of things that until I had done enough damage to my hearing I didn’t start doing things to avoid damage to my hearing. I just don’t care to do such damage any more. Furthermore, when you have earplugs in you end up tuning out the world around you. I prefer not to do that. I enjoy just listening to the world around me, most of the time. Of course, there’s things like situational awareness too. All sorts of good reasons for hearing things other than piping music into my head. Still, from time to time I thought an iPod would have been useful but never enough to justify buying one.
iPhone was also simple. At first it was cool, but not practical enough. I didn’t have much need for the mobile phone, and the original iPhone’s really lacked in features and support. But now with iPhone OS 3, and the iPhone 3GS, things are finally coming along. I actually think I want the phone more for data than telephone. I’ve had more than enough times where I’ve been somewhere and went, “Gosh, if I had an iPhone…”. One recent incident was buying my Savage 11 hunting rifle. If I could have looked up the specific model information on the Internet from right there in the store, that would have made things very simple. Instead, I had to go home, look it up, then go back. Furthermore, I’ve always felt on long trips to new places that such a device would be useful. Sure there’s the TomTom, but that’s a one-trick pony. Heck, in going to the Hunter Education course, I realized that the directions I had vs. the Google Maps vs. the street signs vs. my own knowledge of the area… everything was actually slightly off and didn’t mesh with each other. I was pretty sure I was supposed to turn at one intersection but opted to go forward a bit just to see if maybe it was ahead. After going a bit it dawned on me that I now had an iPhone. I pulled over, pulled up Maps, noted my location via GPS and realized that yes, that intersection was the correct one to turn at. Just the sort of thing as to why I was happy for an iPhone.
I can’t wait for the next big family road trip. 🙂
So Far
So far, so good. I’ve gotten her all hooked up, updated, synced. I’ve gone through various address books and gotten things updated and in order. I can’t get my work’s POP email to work for some reason, tho SMTP is working. Probably just a configuration thing, despite it matching the config on my laptop. *shrug* I’ll deal with it in the morning. Plus I’ve been on the App Store and have a bunch of free apps and silly things. Bought a couple little games too.
I’m getting better at typing on it. I’m sure in short order I’ll be rather fluid with it and things will flow just fine.
I admit that I think ringtones are stupid. I just want a basic “ring”. I see far too often when someone gets something they think is a cute ringtone, then their phone goes off around “other folks” and the embarrassed look the person gets on their face as everyone hears their ringtone. It’s hard to find something that’s just plain and simple and won’t sound stupid being played over and over for the world around to to hear while you fumble for your phone. 🙂
The only other bump in this? The physicalness and limits of iTunes.
I wanted to use my personal MacBook Pro as the sync point for the iPhone. Makes good sense. However, I do not have my iTunes music library on this machine; music runs out of another box. I’m trying to find out a way to deal with this… so I can have some music with me. I tried hooking up the iPhone to the other box to manually sync just music, but when I tried that I got told “we’re going to erase everything because this iTunes library isn’t the same iTunes library”. Ugh. I really don’t want to deal with this. It’s just a limitation of iTunes, in that there’s no good way to share music. It’s so one-person/one-computer oriented. I’m not sure how much of that is bug, feature, imposed by Apple, imposed by the media groups. I don’t know, but it really hampers the user experience. I’ll be Googling around to see what I can do on this.
Oh, battery life is interesting. Just having the device sleeping on my nightstand lost about 10% charge… just sitting doing nothing (if you will). That’s nuts. Don’t forget your charger.
To bring a gun thing into this, one of the first gun-related apps I downloaded was SureFire’s ShotTimer. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but I can’t wait to. 🙂
Stuff From Hsoi 
I had the exact same issue as yours in regard to using a laptop to sync. The only workaround I was able to find was to turn a Mac Mini into my media server for the house and make the MBP the manager of the library (using an always connected network share). The MBP would share the library to the rest of the network. On the rare chance I was on the Mac Mini and I wanted to play a song, I’d just fire up iTunes, Bonjour would find the shared library on the MBP and I’d browse the library that way. It is kind of overkill on the network communication, but at least I didn’t have to worry about syncing issues except when I am outside my home network… and even in that scenario you just get a nasty iTunes message during a sync that it can’t find any of your songs in your library. If you find out a better way to share libraries let me know.
Power drain is definitely sucky… There is a great lecture on power management in the Stanford CS193P online class. Most of what he said is pretty common sense for someone in computers, but I liked how he summarized the rules. He said that the two big drains of the iPhone battery are the radios (Cell, 3G, Wi-fi, Bluetooth, GPS) and the screen. It is kind of a pain in the butt, but when I am at home and not traveling I disable all radios except the Cell and dim the screen brightness way down from the default. That gives me about 4-5 days between recharge even with moderate phone usage. I’ll flip on Wi-fi if I don’t want to walk to my laptop, but usually I just stick with Edge. Good luck finding the balance.
The way I have my setup is that there’s a server machine in the house that holds the physical iTunes library. Then there’s another machine in my office that has my speakers physically connected, and I use iTunes on that machine to control things. I mount the server volume on the machine, then iTunes’ preferences are set to think the library folder on the mouted volume is its iTunes folder. And that works…. lets me natively control iTunes to do what I want to do without using screen sharing or whatever just to say “pause” a song. And if other machines in the house want music, the iTunes Sharing is on and everyone just streams it that way. My home network is as closed as I can make it.
But I think I managed to get something going. I set up the MacBook to sync all the “information” stuff and be my primary point of syncing. It just doesn’t do any “media” syncing for music, videos, etc. And it’s set to sync upon plugging in.
Then I set the iTunes on my other machine (not the server) to NOT auto-sync when plugged in… there’s a setting in the iTunes.app preferences for that. Then I plugged in. I have everything set to manually sync… I unchecked anything that I didn’t want to sync and ONLY checked to sync music and made a particular “Hsoi’s iPhone Playlist” playlist for just what I wanted to bring over. Then while on the “Music” tab of the sync pages, I just clicked sync there and it seems to just sync my music. BUT for some reason any purchased content gets synced too, so it does sync up my applications, but nothing got lost.
I had found this:
http://www.andrewgrant.org/2008/03/30/how-to-sync-an-iphone-with-two-or-more-computers.html
And tried the mentioned technique, but it didn’t seem to work… so I reverted my files all back to the original 16-digit numbers.
So far, so good… things seem to be working to just do some manual things on the other machine.
Fingers crossed it continues to work. 🙂
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