Living with the iPhone 4 Day 68

When the first sliding windows touchscreen phones arrived I have to say I was almost giddy. I had been carrying a Motorola Razor (that I still keep as my back up phone) and a huge laptop. The new windows phone was going to solve my problems. I traded my sleek little Razor for a phone that by comparison was a small laptop.

The first windows phone I picked up was from HTC and as a phone it worked pretty well. The internet features and speed left a lot to be desired. It turned out for the next year I was carrying a bigger phone and the laptop. When my first HTC windows phone quit working due to “water damage”, I waited and got the “tilt”. I have beard from many people that the “tilt” was a significant improvement over the original Windows slider phones.


The Tilt did look cooler, and the tilt feature was an eye catcher. Sadly that phone quit working due to “water damage” also. Since I lived in Houston at the time this is expected. The humidity in Houston will turn the little “water dots” the phone companies put into the phones purple every time indicating the phone got wet. Never mind getting caught in a good rain storm without an umbrella in Houston.

All I really wanted was a phone that had basic email, a descent browser and blue tooth for using a wireless headset, or so I thought.

Eventually I gave up on windows phones and went to the most popular smart phone, the BlackBerry. We started off getting one BlackBerry for an employee and decided to see how it worked. He gave it a quick thumbs up, so we did a sweeping shift and moved everyone to the BlackBerry. We discovered all kinds of quirks, but overall the phones were good phones and the email was easy to use and reliable. The browser was about the same quality and speed as the windows phones. There weren't any significant feature gains, just user friendliness and reliability.

Over time however the BlackBerry phones started to show some wear, locking up, dropping and eventually missing calls. The little cursor balls were requiring regular cleaning or replacement. When I decided it was time to bring in the first iPhone, there were chuckles all around. The little bit of irony here is my first job outside of throwing pizzas or catching burgers off the grill was helping MBA students learn to use Mac's. The students that worked for IBM would make me swear under oath never to tell anyone they were using a Mac.

Eventually I landed a job as a support and networking contractor for Apple. I have always liked Macs and the computer that got me through college was a Mac Plus that I sent out to upgrade in order to keep it running until I graduated. The software we used to run our business wasn't available on the Mac so my company has been all PC's. A little over a year ago my brother came on board as a partner in our KuhlApps area building simple fun iPhone apps and yet we didn't have an iPhone. We used an iPod touch for testing the apps.

So here we were flipping coins to see who would be the guinea pig with the new iPhone. My wife won. Our chief of marketing got the new iPhone 3GS. It didn't take long before the raving became annoying enough that we started looking at iPhones for everyone, but through the rumor mill I had June 15th pegged as the date for the iPhone 4 release. We waited.

June 15th it happened and with all the glitches, we got lucky and made the pre-order list. All of the things we talk about in our marketing seminars happened, Apples online order entry system was overwhelmed and failed. AT&T's in store systems crashed from the load and yet somehow we made the list.

Now that I have had my iPhone for a couple of months, I have adapted to the quirks of living with an iPhone. It is still the best mobile "i" unit out there, and still a terrible phone. Among the quirks which are rumored to be a Droid problem are the pocket dialing and face touching. When talking on the phone one hand is always required or your face will randomly, mute, dial someone else or my favorite switch to speaker right as my mother is asking some embarrassing question about toe nails or something.

I guess there is one more funny thing. I couldn't find a “voice dial” or “voice control” icon anywhere on the phone. It turns out though that a press and hold on my favorite Plantronics headset will activate voice control. Apparently I pocket dialed my friend Elliot Mazer several times while he was in important meetings the other day. Sorry again Elliot. For whatever reason this glitch didn't happen with my BlackBerry and the Plantronics Pro.

I did add some security software to my iPhone just because people send me vCards with information that probably shouldn't be there. Social Security Numbers, home alarm codes and such. Even with the extra encryption the phone is still fast enough to keep me from popping a vein and the email and browser are leap frog improvements over everything else I have seen. I still haven't figured out invites, and ToDo is ok even though using the USB or direct bluetooth instead of the PAN would make it way easier.

Now if I could just get Java to work for my Cytrix client. Oh wait, we have an app for that.