Assuming I’m not on crack, how cool is that?

Weirdly enough, I see names on older calls, so maybe it’s been there for a while and I just never noticed?

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to love about the iPhone, especially with some of the applications that are making appearances now, but Apple really needs to get some of the basics implemented.

Whenever I complain I always have someone popup to say that it isn’t needed because information just flows between apps. To some extent this is true, it’s one click to call a phone number from an email (assuming it’s formatted correctly, no way to add that missing zero or area code though), Google Maps adds contacts to the address book automatically, etc.

What I can’t figure out is how exactly to flow three 16 digit numbers from an email to a courier’s tracking page to find out when my Christmas gift will be here.

Apple fanbois, enlighten me!

I am currently running an entire virtual instance of Windows Vista (you know, that OS you keep poking holes at in your commercials) and in that instance I am running three different webbrowsers and a mail *server*.

Guess what is using more memory, iTunes or Vista? Now keep in mind one is an operating system and the other is an overgrown music player which Apple has bundled (hmm, wasn’t Apple among those crying about Microsoft’s bundling a couple years ago) with some of their hardware.

Please learn to write more compact code, and for the sake of all that is holy, learn how to use multiple threads so the entire iTunes GUI can be snappy and responsive while it takes iTunes 99% of a 2.4GHz core for over 30 seconds just to connect to an iPhone, will ya?

Under 100MB. That’s embarrassing.

Why? Well, I spend most of my time with access to wifi, and use it religiously. Still, I’d have expected 500MB or so, I’m constantly reading email and Google Reader while I’m out.

Still, I suppose this isn’t a bad thing.

I installed it last night, and to my surprise, a few apps that were crashing before seem to be a little more stable, although it might be just dumb luck as the crashes aren’t 100% consistent. Oh, and another nice treat, the install is fairly quick and installs in place (like 2.0.1) without wiping the iPhone in the process, so you don’t need to reload all your apps/music/etc.

While playing around, I discovered something else that rather annoys me. I don’t connect to iTunes very often, I despite iTunes, but I’m stuck with it for loading music on my iPhone, OS updates, and whatnot, so I do fire up iTunes every once in a while.

For some reason the AppStore feature on the iPhone only notifies you about some updated applications. I had a notification for one application earlier today, and updated it, but it wasn’t until I went to load the new OS that I noticed that there were 10 more iPhone applications with waiting updates, none of which the iPhone AppStore application mentioned. Some of these updates were over two weeks old.

Weird.

Apple, you have a beautiful piece of hardware, please get a QA team for the software side, or open up your beta program (and yes, I’ll sign an NDA)

I previously mentioned the WordPress app for iPhone, allowing easy posting to my blog from my iPhone. Welp, now I’ve done the other side as well, I have installed an iPhone compatible theme, so if you have an iPhone/iPod Touch, hit my blog and let me know what you think?

I also upgraded to WordPress 2.6.1, as always, please report bugs.

So far, the experience had been mixed. I’m already familiar with the iPod Touch, so the OS as a whole isn’t new to me, but having the phone and camera is nice. The App Store is a mixed bag, with applications ranging from cute to pathetic.

One thing I didn’t expect is that as far as I can tell, none of the annoying interface bugs from the first version of the OS were fixed.

Safari still crashes several times daily, the music/iPod mode crashes easily too, as do many of the third party apps. Worse, there is complaint after complaint from app developers about Apple’s often excessive delays approving new app store app versions.

On the plus side, despite the instability, there are some neat applications. For example, WordPress had released an app to make it east to blog from the iPhone. Neat.

All in all, it makes a nice phone, but the iPhone is still a bit mediocre as a PDA.

But, it is fun!

I thought Apple was gonna change the face of wireless here? Remember when Steve Jobs was a genius for insisting on no subsidies and revenue sharing?

Fast forward to the present: Our little iPhone has grown up to become just another cell phone. And not a real functional one at that. The 3G model is a giant yawn, GPS (most modern smartphones have some form of GPS), a faster data connection, and not really much else new.

Oh, and pricing? Well, as it turns out, this baby is even more expensive then the last one, despite the marketing spew.

iPhone 8GB $399.00
iPhone 3G 8GB $199.00

However, the AT&T iPhone data plan went up $10/month, and lost the previously included SMS, so you’re looking at a minimum of $240/year more, which quickly eats up that $200 price drop.

So for those of you feeling bad about your first generation iPhone, feel better.

Power was restored late this morning, all of my Windows servers and desktops are fine, as is my BSD router. Unfortunately my Linux based PBX decided it doesn’t get enough love, the filesystem is rather corrupt looking.

As a result, all of my phones are currently offline. I expect to have some functionality up later this evening, but in the mean time, I’ll apologize in advance to anyone who can’t reach me.

To add to the fun, I did a firmware upgrade to my cellphone a few days ago, it’s still having some technical difficulties, so I may not be reachable by cell either, although that one will be fixed shortly.