I’m happy to admit that I’m in the tank for the iPhone.  Its not a perfect device, but it is a magnificently close enough to perfect that I don’t really care.  

In no specific order, however, are the three most delicious things I’ve experienced (perhaps you have your own).

1. live video streaming: To this, of course, I am referring to Qik.  Perhaps there are other applications that do this for the iPhone, and perhaps, you can use this on other devices.  But being able to shoot video on the fly — and stream it to a webserver — is almost magical.   Much like with the camera on the iPhone, once you get into the habit of using it, you find yourself shooting almost anything.  And with a young child, this is, actually a very good thing.  My family has a long history of capturing things on film / video (perhaps it is bred into our Asian DNA), and I never regret the stuff I do capture of my son, with my parents, with my wife, or even with his friends doing every day things.  With video, I’m capturing small details and nuances as he’s growing up, and it is so easy.  You whip out the iPhone. You press a button.  And away you go.

*caveat: you have to jailbreak your phone to use Qik —  I don’t know how long its coming to the apps store soon. 

2. The earbuds:  I didn’t realize this at the time, but the earbuds that come with the iPhone not only function as a receiving device for your phone (duh), or, are clickable so that you can stop music at any time(double duh), but are ALSO clickable so that you can *advance* a song, or *go back* a song.  By double-clicking the little doo-hicky, you can advance, and by triple-clicking, you go back.  What’s amazing, is that by incorporating these actions into this small device that’s on the line to your ears, it makes the actual device small.  Its not this giant thumb-sized thing you have to look at with three separate buttons.  Its this sleek little thing that you can just click without looking at it.  When you’re walking around on the subway, holding a huge bag of medical stuff in a heavy jacket, its nice to just click the damn thing rather than fumbling around for a control. 

3. a tethering device:  easily the most sublime thing about my experience that I know is not quite unique to the iPhone — and yet, in Canada, there are only a few devices that work with the 3G network.  Anyway, a few weeks ago, I did jailbreak my iPhone with the aim to use a service called PDA Net, which is a piece of software available for the Treo as well, although for the iPhone its free.  I got it working with minimum fuss, so let me reassure my American / AT&T using friends: if / when your data plan supports using your iPhone as a tethering device so that you can use it as a wireless modem for your laptop to surf the web … it is almost magical.  The downside is that it drains the iPhone’s battery, which is to be expected.  But as my laptop has a negigible battery I’m usually next to a power socket anyway.   Bottom line: setting it up AND using it is a breeze.  You literally just press a button and you’re off to the races.  I get about 3Mbps down and 300kbps up, which is imminently usable for light browsing, video watching, and blogging.  I’m so happy Rogers (the local wireless company that I have the iPhone with) allows tethering as part of their data plan.  Quite frankly I was having a hard time using 6 gigs anyway, and it allows — as you can imagine — to surf anywhere you get a 3G connection, freeing you from Wi-Fi nodess.

BONUS: Yes, Box.net got some coverage about cloud access via the iPhone, but what’s also cool is using dropbox via your iPhone.  Its now open to the public, and they’ve done a great job creating an optimized iPhone interface via the web.  You can browse all your files, and in a pinch, download them for viewing, watching, or listening.  Smooth.

Now, two of the three things require you to jailbreak your iPhone.  Boo.  Happily this is a pretty painless procedure.  Also, they’re not specifically unique to the iPhone as well.  Fine.  But on the iPhone I am happy to report that they’re easy to set up, and otherwise transformative in the way that you use this device, and the way you interact with new media … and well, life.

Yesterday, for example, I found myself on my couch surfing on my iPhone (via Safari) while watching TV, while my computer was sitting about 5 feet away from me.  I could have gotten up to use my computer, but the problem is that its facing away from the TV.

Yes, aside from the thought “jeebus, WHEN did you get so colossal lazy?”, the other thought that also popped into my mind was that the browser in the iPhone was perfectly acceptable for recreational surfing.  And it allowed me to surf while doing all kinds of things, including watching TV, without hauling out my laptop *and* a TV tray *and* its electric plug.

(having a baby meant getting rid of that TV tray, as its an object with a high center of gravity, and a high risk of damaging small fleshy things, which would put me at a higher risk of getting personally damaged by my wife)

So, its no surprise when I heard that the iPhone, as a means browse the internet, has actually *doubled* its share of the browsing pie. This isn’t merely mobile browsing, but *all* browsing.  Now, the actual numbers are a lot more humble than what I thought, at about 0.3%, but given the kind of positive experiences I’ve been having I’m not at all surprised.

I do wonder if and when Apple grants people the ability to use the iPhone as a tethering device for laptops, how it might change the uptake for the iPhone as a browsing experience.  Not that its currently being allowed in the States, but apparently, in just another month its coming to Canada. Tell you what: when it does come, I’ll try it and let you know. ;)

Even though I’m a couple months late to the party, here are my thoughts

1. its a magnificent piece of technology. The iPhone has its faults (see below), but its a great piece of hardware.  Silky smooth crystal touch screen.  A nice solid un-plasticky kind of weight.  A user-interface that is slick, easy to read, and otherwise gorgeous.  It has something almost super-naturally tactile about it (given the whole touch-screen thing, that’s the point, I suppose) that makes you want to touch it and hold it all the time.

2. typing is atrocious. In spite of how awesome the UI is, the fact that it is almost 100% touch screen necessitates that the keyboard is also part of the touch screen.  This means, unlike most data phones, there are no keys to provide touch-feed back when you’re typing.  As someone who’s migrated from a Blackberry, this makes typing an atrociously frustrating chore, and although, I admit, I’ve only had it for a couple days, there is just no way I’ll be composing lengthy emails, or blogging for that matter, via iPhone.  Perhaps my fingers are fat and pudgy, but even so, I find myself making far too many unintended keystrokes, even after about 10-15 hours of usage, and I just don’t see it improving.

3. iPhone “apps” are awesome. The iPhone apps store is one slick piece of work.  You browse apps.  You find apps.  You download them directly to your iPhone.  And you have a new app.  I am not planning to jailbreak the phone, and yet, there’s still a ton of stuff available.  Some of it is crap.  Some of it is surprisingly good.  Like, for example, “Epocrates”, which is a program that is popular amongst medical students and physicians, originally developed for the Palm Pilot.  There’s a free iPhone version which is just as good as I remember it (allows you to search a comprehensive drug database, cross reference for adverse events), but given the iPhone’s excellent graphics, also has a “pill display” portion, where you can actually see what pills look like.  This is an application that could have easily sold for bongo bucks — but its free.

4. 3G isn’t as fast as I thought it’d be. Caveat — I live in Toronto, and the 3G coverage is pretty excellent.  I understand that in the states, or, other areas in Canada, the coverage can be quite spotty.  Having said that, sure, the 3G network is meant to be between three and five times as fast as the EDGE network.  But, it doesn’t really feel that fast.  Why is that? Personally, I think its because unlike with the Blackberry I was previously using, which was an EDGE network phone, I was probably browsing mobile-optimized web pages.  With the iPhone 3G, I am browsing web pages — which, perhaps, are three times as heavy, in terms of data size.  Its able to stream video, however, which *is* something to see.

5. battery life sort of sucks. Coupled with the fact that there is no easy way (read: impossible) to change batteries, and the fact that most people will want to use the iPhone as a cool doo-hicky — and not merely a phone — you’ll perhaps find that the length of time your batter lasts is between 3 – 5 hours.  Now, actually, compared to laptop batteries, this isn’t that bad (in my experience), but the problem, as I stated, is that you can’t change the batteries, and furthermore, for most people, they’ll also need the iPhone for one other thing: to make calls.  Yesterday, I nearly ran out of batteries before the end of the day, and it wouldn’t have mattered so much except that I had to make a few unexpected emergency calls.  I was sweating bullets, silently praying that I wouldn’t run out of juice while I was making those calls.

6. The camera is crippled. Displaying photos is nice.  Taking photos, however, sucks.  There’s no zoom.  There’s no flash.  And it suffers mightily from a longish exposure time, requiring your hands to be pretty still to avoid a blur on the photo.  Especially at night.  Having no zoom also sucks, and I didn’t realize how sucky this was until I actually needed it (case in point: I wanted to take a photo of an insect the other day — don’t ask — and I had to get so close to it that I was within eating distance)

While there are a ton of things that could be better (I don’t even want to think about how fragile it is), there’s one unmistakeable thing about the iPhone.  It is an amazingly unique piece of hardware that does some things so well that it makes you forget (most times) about the others.

Most of it being negative, thanks to Rogers’ bald-faced, shamelessly blatant attempt at profiteering, that is, as one glance at their voice and data plans suggest.

I have nothing further to add, actually, other than to say that at times like this, I begin to wish and hope with all my might that companies that happily provide so little and ask for so much, get their delicious comeuppance.

Not just the usual “demand is soft, interest is down, Rogers stock takes a brief dip and everyone moves on”.

No, I mean some sort of catastrophic, humiliating, trip on that step you didn’t see in front of a world-wide audiene, public pie-in-your face, step in a cow-pattie at your wedding kind of comeuppance.

I mean, I don’t think it will actually happen come July 11th, but hey — a man can only hope.

{although some more recent news suggests that perhaps Apple might snub Rogers after all}

Therefore, it was with schadenfreude-like glee that I read about Leopard’s earlier mishaps (although I understand much of it has been patched), and now, Robert Scoble’s own royal frustrations (see Rob Hyndman’s problems with peripherals).

While there are a lot of things that macs in all their incarnations do very well, one thing I cannot abide by is the snobbishness that many Mac-owners take about their platform and hardware of choice.  There’s no question that PC owners do the same, but I think the real issue is that Apple corporate echoes the same kind of childish tropes through its own marketing voice (‘it just works’), advertising, and error messages that are coded right into OSX.

On the other hand, I don’t think you will ever hear anyone who is attached to Microsoft ever make smug suggestions that their products are without error …which I take “it just works” to mean.

I had commented on this discrepancy in a prior post, but its worth mentioning in brief: In the United States, Apple’s iPhone (via AT&T) data package *starts* with unlimited data.  Such a thing doesn’t really exist in Canada, but if it did, would, I’m sure, require you to hand over your first born child, in addition to the mortgage of your house.  In the meantime, we get the privilege of getting 20 megabytes per month for the same price, which really is a pissant sum of data.  If you start out at a lower data package (for the Blackberry, for example), you’ll pay through the nose as you’ll almost certainly go over 1 megabyte simply by checking email and the odd blog page {I speak through experience}.

It turns out that Apple is going to enforce some reasonable standard as it applies to data transfer packages, as it has done in the US, and in the soon-to-be-forthcoming UK and Germany.  And to this I say “bravo”, and “hooray”.

The oligopoly that exists in Canada as it refers to most things, but not limited to mobile carriers, means that the free market determines squat, and everyone gets the benefit of paying higher “we-swear-we’re-not-colluding” prices.

The snarky translation to this is that no one is ever going to make Rogers (or Fido, or Bell, or what have you) charge *less* because there is no real business reason to do so — until now.

So while I’ve been critical of Apple in the past, I am all for a company that improves the lot of consumers everywhere — at least all individuals who have a mobile phone that is.  Because make no mistake: if Rogers is forced to offer a more generous data package, it will necessarily have to start lowering / improving all of its mobile packages across the board, and all of the other mobile carriers will undoubtedly follow suit.

I mean, that would make sense, anyway — but, I’m sure the cynic in all of us (who are familiar with such shennanigans) aren’t quite holding their breath just yet.