The Cult of Jobs

We now have enough Apple gear at our house to be classified as an official House of Jobs Worship. On Sunday mornings, every lap is often bejeweled with a shiny brushed aluminum laptop, and the air is crisp with etheral wifi signals speeding to the airport altar. If there was any doubt of our cult status, the new iphones solidly put us over the edge.

It’s been a few days so far with the device, so I guess it’s time for a review…

The internets are everywhere It’s really nice having the Internets in your pocket — especially these days with so much of my brain offloaded to someplace online. The iphone basically makes for a third access device after my home and work laptops. This also means I’ve had to reinvent my password strategy to something using purely mnemonic-based techniques rather than encrypted storage or password hashing systems.

The mobile version of Safari is amazing: multiple browser windows and a great interface. Wish it had flash support, but that’s probably on it’s way. Safari has crashed a couple times, but it thankfully does it gracefully: it doesn’t crash the whole iphone, it loads back up in a jiff, and remembers your last location(s).

EDGE is better than I expected. From all the hooting and hollering I expected to hate it, but it’s perfectly usable for most surfing. You can also have mutliple browser windows open which allows you to read one and download another.

I find my search habits are different on it then when I’m sitting with a laptop. The size of the screen, the slower data while away from wifi, and the lack of an adblocker, makes overly busy sites even more busy looking. As a result, I find myself avoiding busy sites and enjoying clean sites more. Some of the mobile versions of sites are nice, namely Digg and Google Reader and Calendar (the latter two automatically adjust for mobile). Some of the new iphone targeted sites like leaflets are great too.

I still have yet to set up my email on it so I can’t really comment much on that. I don’t want my iphone flooded with email, so I’m planning on using my gmail addy as the main reservoir and then set up blacklist and/or whitelist filters to forward on the important messages to another account. For the other account, I might end up using yahoo mail since they do push email or I might just set up an IMAP account off our hosting service.

Best ipod ever Two words: Coverflow or maybe that’s one word? What’s with this whole germanic-style internet spelling thing anyway?

“Hey wanna see a picture of my cat!” So Nifer and I got a Crazy Cat Lady action figure as a gift, which is funny since the first thing I though of putting on my iphone is a picture of our cats.

In conversations with new people, I often end up mentioning my fine hairless feline friends with nary a photo in reach. But now, if I was so inclined, I can carry hundreds of cat photos. I’m not that crazy though, so instead I just loaded it with a bunch (a bunch is less than a ton), and added pics of all my friends and a historical catalog of all the art projects, costumes, and events I’ve been part of. Basically, more fodder for future conversations.

Misc quick hits
The interface is as amazing as everyone says it is. It’s almost like playing with something that came from the future. The smart virtual keyboard with predictive text works nicely, though they need to redesign the horizontal one so it’s a bit shorter. After you get used to it, you can type at a decent rate — not sidekick speeds, but I’m not a chat-addict anyway. Speaking of which, Hey Jobs when are we getting our built-in IM app? There are webapp versions out there, but they’re slow.

As for the other widgets/apps, the integration with google maps is fabulous. YouTube is ok, but kinda pointless as a stand alone app, since I typically only go to the site from website links. The weather widget is nice, the stock one is worthless for me, and the notes app needs more work. NEED COPY/PASTE!!! The camera is basic and functional — I hope they add video through a firmware upgrade or something.

Oh and yeah it works great as a phone too. Visual voicemail is great. The reception is better than my last two phones and the headphone/headset that it comes with is nice. The voices are tinny, but it’s obviously not the speaker quality, so it’s probably a result of the cellular digital clipping process.