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[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

[raemonde.livejournal.com]

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.

] Can you clarify what this means, or point me to where you learned this please?

-Rob

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

Okay, This Week in Tech ep 103 (http://www.twit.tv/103), Leo Laporte and company say that if you activate your iPhone on a PC/Mac, the iPhone will remember what system you did it on and refuse to dock on another system -- it just won't show in iTunes.

[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?"

[raemonde.livejournal.com]

] Thank you. Personally, I don't see how that's a problem... unless my machine suffers an unrecoverable crash. There are other ways of transferring data.

-Rob

[bibliophage.livejournal.com]

It's a problem if you're like me, with two desktops and two laptops.

[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.

[raemonde.livejournal.com]

] I do have two desktops and two laptops, as it happens. However, my iTunes library, calendar, contacts, email etc... everything I would sync - are on a single desktop. Any data I would need from any of the other sources can be synched to that desktop before being synched to an iPhone - and probably should be anyway, since it's my main computer.

] So I still don't see a problem... though that's just my setup. I agree that it would be easier if it were more open, but I also don't see the need.

-Rob