awkward.org T & M – Thoughts & Musings

The iPhone like most phones with a built in contacts list will translate the caller ID supplied phone number to a name and perhaps a ‘location’ (home, mobile etc.) using the contacts list. A cute feature of the iPhone is that if you have the same number multiple times with similar entries in the contacts list it combines the data in a sensible way.

For example I have an entry for Michele (Home) with our home phone number and for myself with the same Home tag. When someone from home calls me it says ‘Michele or Andrew Kimpton – Home’ onscreen rather than just picking the first match. It also recognizes the same surname on both entries and so removes that from the first name.

Cute.

Posted under iPhone

I’m not quite sure what happened but this afternoon my iPhone no longer seemed to have an ‘Accounts’ page in Mail to let me select between my .Mac account and my IMAP account for awkward.org. I tried disable and re-enabling the accounts which didn’t seem to fix it. In the end I deleted my IMAP account and re-entered it, and things seemed to pick up again – very odd.

Posted under iPhone

One of my (and I think everyone elses) primary concerns was the on screen keyboard. I have to say tfat (that) even after only a few hours my co verbs (concerns) have pretty much vanished. I was never a major speed demon on the Treo keyboard but I’m already typing just as dash (fast) on the iPhone keyboard as quickly as I type on the Treo. The key I think is to just place your faith in the auto-correction feature of the soft keyboard. The Treo also makes an attempt at correcting things as you type but the algorithm is nowhere near as smart as Apples.

One thing that is supposed to be used in Apples algorithm is a reduction in the error rate by eliminating errors such as thw instead of the however I’ve had a few times where it doesn’t seem to have been tripped. I think part of the trick is again to just go with the flow because part of the input to the prediction algorithm is the speed of entry so if you pause in the middle of a word it can confuse the algorithm.

(EDIT – the words in parenthesis in the first paragraph were added after a proof read on my PC. I couldn’t proofread on the iPhone and correct these undetected mistakes from the iPhone since I couldn’t get it to scroll the text entry box in the WordPress write a post page).

Posted under iPhone

This was going to be aboutthe iPhone keyboard but instead I’ll make a smaller observation that wordpress’ post page is a little wonky in the iPhone. It works but switching between title and post body was a little tricky for some reason. This post is however being written from my iPhoneI expect there might Still be some tweaking either to the javascript implementation in the iPhone or perhaps to the visual editting code in wordpress.

Aha – whats broken is rhe visual editor. This isn’t so surprising since in fact i can’t actually get that to work in the release builds of Mac OS X. The code editor works just fine however.

Posted under iPhone

6:35 pm (EDT) – Place it on the dock, launch iTunes, choose the replace a phone on my account with this iPhone. Wait while AT&T verifies the information I gave (phone number, billing zip and last 4 digits of SSN)

6:36 pm (EDT) – Surprise #1 : Wireless service for your iPhone is not eligible for any service discount available through your employers agreement with AT&T. You can activate your iPhone on your current IRU account, but any available service discount will be removed. I actually don’t think this is a big deal – the primary discount we get is that the data package for my Treo is only 39.99 a month, according to AT&T’s iPhone FAQ the iPhone data package is 20 dollars extra a month – in other words another 20 dollar saving. I’m very pleasantly surprised that they worked this out ! I had expected this to be a major sticking point.

6:37 pm (EDT) – Click through the ‘discount notice’, choose the standard SMS options, and give my Apple ID, agree to the license agreements and ‘activate’ – now I have the ‘processing activation’ dialog. This is where it could really not work !

6:42 pm (EDT) – Congratulations AT&T is activating your iPhone. Let’s hope they’ve really sorted out all the problems ! It’s pretty much down to them now !

6:44 pm (EDT) – Wow ! They really have sorted everything out ! My iPhone is activated  !

Posted under iPhone

As always Apple outdoes itself with the ‘out of the box’ experience – lift the lid and the phone is right there suspended in a clear plastic shell. Even the inside of the top of the box is padded with foam in order to keep the phone held down and scratch free during shipping.

Of course the real out of the box experience will be with the activation process. There’s been a lot of comments this weekend about how the phone activation process has been broken for many customers. I admit I have some trepidation on trying this. To start with the account for our family phones is in Michele’s name and not mine (though my name is on the number I’m planning to try and move from my Treo 650 to the iPhone). Secondly our phones all have a 415 area code which is a long way from the 01890 zip code on our billing address – which is apparently another source of potential problems. Lastly our account is ‘linked’ to a Foundation Account Number through the good graces of a friend at AT&T/Cingular. It’s not a business account per se – but does qualify for some modest discounts, yet again another source of potential hassles.

AT&T says they’ve resolved them all… we’ll see as I’m just about to upgrade iTunes on my notebook and ‘set things going’…

Posted under iPhone