iPhone rocks, but looking forward to new revisions

So I got my iPhone activated two days ago. It is excellent as everyone says. Its also not prohibitively large compared to my old Nokia 6230.

One very interesting thing I find is that because it is so good, you expect it to be perfect. You expect so much more out of it than you did for previous phones, not so much because of the hype but because it is much more like a personal computer than a phone.

As a result there are lots of things you can do now that you couldn’t do before easily, but a lot of desktop-OS glue is missing. For example:

• Mail does not show/allow flagging even for IMAP mails that already have it.
• Mail does not have a search facility
• Mail does not have a junk filter (understandable… but problematic means you need it on your server now)
• Mail does not work in landscape mode.
• Mail always top-posts
• No copy and paste – e.g. can’t get links from Safari into an e-mail you are sending
• No multiselection in any of the apps, i.e. tracks or emails or bookmarks. Easily done as the paradigm for this is set with the "Edit" button in Mail – an alternate list view that does not show items when clicked but allows actions to be performed on them
• No apparent way to delete photos from the "Film roll"
• No ringtones available in UK iTunes Music Store (?!)

Other pet peeves so far is the inability to put DivX videos into it even though Quicktime+iTunes play them on the desktop, and the complete lack of SMS distribution lists, Bluetooth OBEX for exchanging vCards and no Bluetooth GSM Modem.

Don’t get me wrong, the phone is a quantum leap and I love it. It’s just interesting that they put it out with so many standard phone features missing. Hooray for updates is all I can say… let’s hope there are some good ones in the pipeline.

OS X Leopard firewall / Skype crashes

Argh. Why? Apple seem to have really trashed the OS X firewall. It’s application based now with no option to restrict ports – i.e. all or nothing for each application.

Therefore when you install it (a) ditches all your firewall rules, (b) leaves the firewall off by default (for some users like me anyway) and (c) Skype crashes when you turn the firewall on, no matter what you do.

Madness. I understand where they’re trying to go with usability of firewalls but  to remove functionality such as specific port blocking is stupid.

Here’s the skype thread on this

iPhone UK … not what I wanted it to be

Can’t help but be a bit depressed by the UK iPhone announcement.

I was prepared to move provider for iPhone, but the pricing is madness. In the USA the same phone sells for $399 which is currently £200. So selling it in the UK at £269 inc VAT makes sense? Jobs says "It’s mostly VAT" – yes but not all. The price is 35% higher, not 17.5% – so only 50% of the increase is VAT boyo. However we’re not going to quibble over £30 or so.

What is more off-putting is the tariffs. £35/mo is not, on the surface of it too bad given what you get in the deal. However I’m a low-user of minutes and I’m rarely near The Cloud. I would likely not even use the data much when out and about, but the phone would still be useful to me in that situation at times.

The final straw however is that the iPhone will not act as a modem over Bluetooth. This means when you are on a train somewhere working on your laptop you cannot access the internet. I can do this right now with my crappy old Nokia 6230, and often do. It beggars belief that the iPhone doesn’t do this and I can only hope this is merely a software issue and a future update will add it.

I’ve seen people saying that this is deliberate because they don’t want you squandering your unlimited bandwidth using a laptop to do normal stuff or doing P2P sharing over it instead of using broadband.

A completely ridiculous argument because a) the use is "unlimited" i.e. there is a daily limit equivalent to roughly "1400 web pages" and this will apply whatever device you use, and b) O2 UK are rolling out their fixed rate data plan to all tariffs soon, and this will inevitably include phones that do allow laptops to connect via Bluetooth to the phone to access the network.

I’m hoping Apple don’t shoot themselves in the foot here by pushing the iPhone just as a "breakthrough internet device" in its own right, and ignoring the fact that quite a lot of iPhone users will also have a MacBook with them! Duh.

Apple iPhone and iPod Touch will change web design forever

The announcement of Apple’s new iPod Touch changes everything.

The iPhone came out, "wow! full Safari?!" we all said. The device was priced high but we knew this would garner us some new Safari web hits on sites we develop, and that we would "need to start" looking at developing sites that work well on the reduced screen size.

Apple should be selling millions of iPhones per year soon, but they already sell millions more iPods. And now the iPod touch brings Safari and wifi to the palms of pretty much anyone who would buy a hi-spec iPod previously (caveat: capacity is currently a fraction of the now-called iPod classic).

This means several things.

First, we’re going to have to support smaller displays with our sites. iPhone and iPod Touch together will make a significant market share in the months and years to come.

Second, Safari’s market share in terms of site hits is very likely to rocket – provided people provide content that people want when they are out and about. Suddenly Safari may impinge on Firefox and IE’s share very rapidly. It all depends on the browser experience on such a small device, but by all accounts it is great.

You may say it’s only in the high-cost iPod Touch. But we know, apart from the Shuffle, Apple roll all the features of the top-end down to the low-end models over time. Who will really be that surprised if they find a way to do an iPod Nano fullscreen with single or multi-touch.

"Oh… and one more thing." How long before there’s a new iPod headphone kit with built-in mic, and Skype for Mac adapted to and running on the iPod Touch? Ooops, wi-fi phone by stealth. Who needs iPhone?