Unlikely Words » iPhonica

The Next iPhone

aaron cohen — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:39:08 +0000

As soon as the iPhone came out I wondered, "What will be in the next one that will make all the people that have one now upgrade." There were a few ideas, better camera, better GPS, etc. Obviously adding a video camera to the 3GS was a huge step. It wasn't enough for me to switch, but it was enough a product change that I considered it. Here are some thoughts about what people want in the iPhone 4.0. So far, it focuses almost entirely on the OS. I'm curious, though, are there any hardware changes that would be especially exciting for you? (OK, OK, besides battery life.)

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Apple Gives You a New iPhone if Your Old One Breaks

aaron cohen — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:11:07 +0000

I don't know what's more remarkable, how often I've heard of the 3G iPhones crapping out because of hardware issues or how easy it is to get a new phone from the Genius Bar at the Apple Store when it does. Seriously, this seems like the hidden story of the 3G phone. My guess is Apple knew very quickly that the 3Gs weren't ready for primetime and went against about 25 years of corporate policy to make it easy to replace a malfunctioning product. I just got a new one today and I'm psyched!

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Best iPhone App?

aaron cohen — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:36:29 +0000

I love the iPhone. I use mine incessantly. Mostly I use Mail, Safari, Google Apps, and Facebook. Maybe I'm just jaded, but most of the applications on the App store are garbage and don't do anything terribly exciting. The other morning I downloaded the AccuWeather GPS-enabled iPhone app, though, and wow. This is the weather App for which you've been waiting. It uses GPS to give you the temperature at your current location, plus a "feels like" temperature. Plus there's a radar section , finally. And to top it off a risk bar set up. It's not perfect, but it's the most perfect free weather App I've found. Also, it's one of the more useful applications. Anybody have thoughts on other useful applications? Leave them in the comments. (By the way, the working definition for useful is something like "Not a light saber, zippo, or glass of beer."

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Since writing this post a couple weeks ago, I've noticed a few quirks in the app that I would change if I was building the BEST iPhone app. If you're looking at the 5-day forecast and you switch to a day a couple days away, it goes back to today when you toggle between night and day. Also, you can't view today's forecast more than a few hours into the future? It would be good if you could hit 'next' and move forward. Fact remains, it's still more useful than all the others and I want to know what you're using.

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Update: Thanks to digiphile in the comments for pointing out my error in leaving out Pandora. I was remiss. I don't use it much, but that's a great app. Also, since iTunes started streaming podcasts, I appreciate it even more.

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The iPhone Experience, or iPhonica!!!

aaron cohen — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 03:22:34 +0000

We got iPhones last weekend and I thought I would note down some of my initial thoughts and questions. Some have been answered, and some I'll just put out there for the internets to answer if they can. After a week, I'm pretty pleased. Except for a few features, it hasn't completely blown my mind, but my expectations were higher than anything I've ever had expectations for.
Without further adieu, and in no particular order, my questions, observations, and experiences, with answers when found, are below the fold:

*Does the iPhone play AVIs? No.

*Wrong iTunes account set up on iPhone? When I got the iPhone, Oliva Schow's iTunes account was assigned to it. I'm not sure if this was because of the computer used to set up the phone, or if the phone had already been out on the street. Anyone else experience this?

*Porting the number? Someday I will write up the story of the 3 weeks I was without a phone when Sprint tried to port my number over from ATT 4 years ago. This time, I got a text message an hour after leaving the store saying that there was an issue porting my number. Needless to say, I was nervous. Apparently, however, the password had been entered incorrectly and the operator was able to get it going for me. The fact that they have an entire call center devoted to call porting was a refreshing change from 4 years ago, but it still took 16 hours or so for the port to complete.

*Contact birthdays in iCal? I like to enter the birthdays of my contacts into the address book, but there didn't used to be an easy way to do it. Now it seems like there is, but I don't use iCal anymore. Can you do this with Google Calendar, or automagically on the iPhone.

*No video purchase off of the iTunes store? Nope.

*Battery came somewhat charged? The battery came about 75% charged, which meant I could play with it in the car on the way home. I liked that.

*No plastic caps on the USB cable. I'd heard Apple had try to environmentalize their packaging and one way they did it was by not including the caps for the USB cord that I always ended up losing anyway. Noted.

*Problems!!! 3 days after bringing the baby home, there was a total failure. I couldn't get the iPhone out of phone mode (an ironic problem to have), so I tried to reset it. It wouldn't get past the white apple screen, so I tried to restore it. I thought that did it, but there a VM indicator that wouldn't go away. I've had phones that perpetually showed a voice or text message indicator that was off, and these are not phones you want to use. Also, the date and time was seriously off. I could understand if the time zone was off, and one of my favorite sayings is, "It's X 'o clock somewhere," but let's be honest, there's no way it was 5:27 AM on May 9th, last Wednesday night at 8:43 PM. I reset again and again it wouldn't get past the white apple screen. I restored again, got it working, and made an appointment the next morning at the Apple Store. I sat with Jake at the Boylston St store at 8:50 AM and was steeling myself for battle. Jake was unfazed by the seeming software issues, so I twice went back to a minor issue with a button being too raised until he graciously gave me a new baby. So far, I haven't had any issues with this one.

*Double tap space bar for period. When sending a text message from my old phone, you literally needed 4 key strokes to get a question mark, so needing one key stroke to get to the punctuation on the iPhone wasn't an issue for me. But imagine my delight when I discovered, by accident, that you could double tap the space bar to get a period. Genius. And if you want the pure genius rating, Apple, add in some other key combinations to get the comma, question mark, and exclamation mark.

*Mail app does not go horizontal. It's so much easier to type in the horizontal mode, I wish the mail app would allow this.

*Pandora app is killer!

*Google Reader app really needs to allow for reading oldest first. Who reads their RSS newest first?

*Picture viewing is awesomely amazing! Just recently discovered this, looking at pictures on the iPhone is an incredible experience. The colors are brilliant, the details sharp... I can't say enough. I want to take more pictures just to look at them on the iPhone. Why would you ever print a photo again. Wow.

*Haven't used the iPod function too much, but what I've used has been fine.

Do you have one yet? What's your favorite app? What's the smartest way you use your iPhone? What do you wish it could do? What's your favorite feature?
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Edited to add:

*Yahoo StatTracker doesn't work on the iPhone. Booooo!
*Keep your finger pressed on "123." button and drag over the punctuation or number you want and go right back to the letters. Yay!

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Dr. Horrible

aaron cohen — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:12:40 +0000

I heard Neil Patrick Harris on Fresh Air talking about his new web musical, Dr. Horrible and thought it sounded pretty funny. I wasn't going to say anything about it, just make it the first thing I add to my iPhone in a month or so (when I celebrate iPhonica), but now everyone's talking about it and I don't want to be left out anymore. If you've seen it, let me know what you think in the comments.

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