I’ve now had an iPhone 3G S for a little over a day and thought I’d share my first impressions.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the battery was pretty much fully charged out of the box and also how easy the keyboard is to type on even in portrait mode. Of course, practically, you are limited to single finger typing as you’re generally going to be holding the phone in your other hand. More on this later.
Once I went through the registration process and set up my 60 day MobileMe trial, I headed over to the App Store and started downloading. There were a few things I already knew I wanted - to complement applications already installed on my Mac Boo Pro - notably 1Password and Things. I also got the iTunes and Keynote remotes, iSSH and a free VNC client. As a Tetris addict, I also shelled out for the official version of that at £2.99.
At that point, having spent £16.05 on software, I decided to stop spending money and started looking for free apps that I would find useful.
I now have 63 icons on my home screens - so I’ve added 46 items, four of which are websites. There are a few that duplicate functionality - for example, I’m going to try out a few GPS tracking apps to find out which I prefer. There are still a few holes in my tool set though.
Medication tracking
I currently use On Time Rx on my Palm Zire 72 to keep track of all my medication and there’s a lot of it to keep track of. It’s a well-thought-out programme, which does nearly everything I need from it. Obviously, I won’t want to carry both my Palm and my iPhone around with me all the time, so I need to find a suitable replacement app on the iPhone.
One of the main reasons I didn’t want to get the previous incarnations of the iPhone was because of their inability to schedule notifications when the app concerned wasn’t running.
With Push Notifications, that problem has been solved, but it’s too early to expect a niche app to take advantage of them. Even so, there are already a few medication tracking apps out there, albeit without Push Notifications. I’m currently using a free app called iPills, which seems to be the best of a bad bunch. It tries to be clever with a graphical pillbox, with trays to show which tablets you’ve taken and which you’re yet to take. Unfortunately, it falls short in a number of respects. I take tablets at five different times during the day - 9am, 11am, 3pm, 8pm and 11pm. However, iPills only provides four trays - “Any Time”, Morning, Afternoon and Evening so it’s less than ideal. With seven different tablet types in the Morning and Evening trays, it’s quite fiddly to select the right tablet to mark as having been taken. iPills provides no system to provide alarms to remind you to take medication. They suggest you create iCal events to do that instead.
As well as reminding me when to take my tablets, On Time Rx also provides detailed logging and stock control. iPills does logging of a sort, but doesn’t record the time at which you took the tablets, which makes it worthless. There is no stock control system, so you have no idea how many days’ worth of tablets you have left. I get my tablets prescribed at approximately three-monthly intervals so frequently have several hundred tablets of a given type in stock.
I may well end up writing my own iPhone app to do medication tracking properly.
iPhone shortcomings
While iPhone OS 3.0 clearly brings a great number of improvements and some new features and the 3G S is certainly very nice hardware, there are still a number of areas where Apple could do better.
The biggest of the shortcomings from my point of view is the lack of support for Bluetooth keyboards. Both my Palm Zire 72 and Nokia 770 support Bluetooth keyboards (although admittedly the Palm has been rather temperamental at times) and this makes them vastly more useful. On a number of occasions, I have used my 770 to take notes at meetings. Fundamentally, however clever you get with onscreen or pull-out keyboards on mobile devices - and the keyboard on the iPhone is nice - they’re always going to be too small to type on properly. My folding Bluetooth keyboard (a Dell badged Think Outside Keyboard) provides almost full-sized keys and is easy to type on. I’m probably slightly slower typing on it than I would be on a normal keyboard, but there’s not a lot in it. Being able to use it with my iPhone would effectively turn it into the smallest NetBook going!
As @mezzoblue pointed out on Twitter this evening, the current iPhone is roughly the same spec as a laptop was in 2000 - 256MB RAM, 30GB hard drive and a 600MHz processor. Add a keyboard to it and it becomes as useful as that laptop. It’s hard to see why Apple would want to deny people this.
Having followed Apple's advice repeatedly to clean the ball on my Mighty Mouse, today, it came to the point where this would no longer work.
Following the rather more drastic advice of mightymouserepair.com, I soon got the mouse apart and found the cause of the problem:
There's no way that rubbing with a damp cloth would ever have got all of this out.
Fortunately, I was able to prise the plastic ring off the base of the mouse with my Swiss Army Knife with no cosmetic damage to the mouse and then glue it back in place with silicone glue, as recommended by the website. However, Apple really should have designed the device so that it could be taken apart and cleaned by the user more easily.
Flashback to 3rd September:
09:24 Dez: Morning
09:24 Dez: This is ungood
09:24 Dez: I turned my monitor on this morning to find that my mac had crashed
09:24 Dez: I turned it off, turned it on again and after about 5 minutes of it sitting on the grey screen with the whirly whirling, I turned it off
09:25 Dez: Left if a few minutes and turned it on again
09:25 Dez: I come back to find that I've been given a root prompt
09:26 frosty: dez: ooh :/
09:29 Dez: fro> know what the appropriate fsck equivalent is?
09:29 frosty: dez: nope, sorry
09:30 rollercow: dez: fsck oddly enough
09:30 Dez: rc:
09:30 Dez: ** /dev/rdisk0s3
09:30 Dez: BAD SUPER BLOCK: MAGIC NUMBER WRONG
09:31 Dez: LOOK FOR ALTERNATE SUPERBLOCKS? [yn]
09:31 FireFury: dez: sounds like your hard disk may have exploded
09:31 rollercow: dez: thats generaly not good
I tried several more times to boot and fsck, all to no avail and so bit the bullet and ordered a new hard drive - opting for a 160GB model rather than simply getting an identical 80GB replacement.
I then set about opening my Mac Mini's case in order to allow me to replace the drive when it arrived and discovered that the RAM in it was identical in specification to that in my PC. It had been suggested by sits that it might be the RAM and not the hard drive that had failed, so I swapped the RAM over and lo and behold, the machine booted as normal with no problems at all.
So I didn't need a new hard drive after all. Still, the extra space would be very helpful - every time I want to do anything video related, I have to make space on the drive by moving things onto other machines.
I had a look at finding some replacement RAM, found a suitably-priced 1GB stick and ordered it.
I decided to take photos of the process of installing the new hardware as on my first attempt at opening the case, following rather unclear instructions I found online, I mistakenly attempted (and succeeded :-/ ) in removing the shiny plastic top of my mac mini, rather than the chassis.