(no subject)

[strredwolf]

Taking the 8 to Towson Town Center (closest Apple store) was a bust, as it landed me without a phone and an hour late getting back to work.  I'm staying late tonight.

Which is a good thing, actually, because there's some issues that have to be delt with beforehand:

First, AT&T's backlogged heavily on activation requests, usually from people wanting to move to AT&T from other providers.  They didn't expect this much demand.  (Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, now estimates that half a million iPhones sold.)

Secondly, the iPhone locks itself to your PC or Mac like a cable modem locks itself to your firewall/NAT router.  Oh boy, that's a deal breaker right there, given my current setup.

I want an iPhone, but I'll have to get a Mac first.  I can't do that until Anthrocon is over, and I will also need a LCD display for it too -- the monitor I have on the old rig is fuzzing out, so much that I perfer to VNC to the Linux rig's LCD.

Comments

[bibliophage.livejournal.com]

What it means is that an iPhone is exactly like an iPod.

It identifies itself with a unique code to a single machine. If you attempt to use it with another machine, you would have to make it that it would no longer work with the first machine.

There were hints of this in the past, but I hadn't seen specifics.

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

Worse. iPhone won't even show on a second PC/Mac. iPods will bring up a complaint saying "Hey, you're synced with another PC. Want to wipe it and hook it with this one?"

[kazriko.livejournal.com]

Sucks.

I wiped out my (hand-me-down) ipod's firmware and put rockbox on it because I didn't like the way it structured the folders and its lack of OGG support.

I'm not terribly fascinated with the iPhone. It has some new quirks that are handy, but are gimmicky, have been used elsewhere, or are obvious. (The voicemail as email attachments? I've been using that on my Packet8 phone for a couple of years. Zooming, panning, etc by using two fingers? The 4-touch screen does that. Tilt sensors to alter the orientation of the screen? There's been monitors that do that, as does my digital camera.) They've just taken lots of under-utilized ideas that already exist and tossed em all in one big pot. There's going to be things that don't quite work right and won't be perfect until the second version.

I'd love to have an OpenMoko phone, though. I'd take open hardware over a few fancy tricks.