my phone

since i've had my iphone for a few weeks now, i thought it was about time to give a better rundown of my thoughts on the thing.

overall, i LOVE it. no regrets whatsoever over dropping $300 on a phone. the high calling plans didn't really affect me much since i had an expensive calling plan before for all the minutes i was using while still in sd.

i gave a quick review of some of my favorite apps in this post, but in all honesty, i don't really use many regularly. here goes anyway for the ones i do use.

pandora: EASILY my favorite app. i love this thing. having an seemingly infinite amount of music at my fingertips is great. since 3g coverage is pretty good in nyc, i can walk around listening to pandora with few skips and lags. i really wish they would allow the app to persist in the background because while it runs, unfortunately, i cannot do anything else on the phone. oh well. i've already discovered a few new interesting artists through pandora, including the sound providers. dj profile, dj'ed at bar dynamite and part of the upstarts, used to be a part of the group. they got a sound similar to crown city rockers. good stuff. i find myself switching out my music less often than i did with my old ipod touch, and i think if i had known about pandora before i bought my 16Gb iphone, i would have thought long and hard about saving $100 and going with the 8Gb one.

facebook: the facebook app is pretty good. the first update now allows you to upload mobile photos directly, and i find myself snapping pictures of random things more often and immediately uploading them..

city transit: as i still get my bearings for this city, this app has come in handy. i can easily access the subway lines and figure out which station is closest to me.

twinkle: my twitter client of choice on the iphone for the simple reason is that it use the location tags. you can see who else is sending tweets with a set radius (5/10/25/50/100 miles).

remote: this application works exactly as i would like. i had been wanting this on my ipod touch for awhile now. it's easy to use and very intuitive. when combined with my airport express, the wireless audio setup i have going in my apartment is pretty cool (despite my crappy speakers). this would have been great for college parties. however, after seeing the remote app, i wish they would change to design of the native ipod interface to be more like how the remote app looks. maybe that's in the works.

those are basically the only apps i use regularly. everyonce in awhile i'll play a game on the subway, like bomberman, holdem, or jirbo break, but for the most part, i played them a few times to begin with while they were still novel.

the gps is a bit disappointing. it'll usually find my position within a block or two, but it has a tendency of moving around, even when i'm sitting still. to make thingss worse, the tall buildings of nyc often block the signal, and i can't even get a lock at all sometimes. the iphone definitely will not replace a good gps device ... yet at least. there are rumors that firmare update 2.1 will enhance the gps functionality, maybe even including turn by turn directions.

the best part of the iphone though is constantly having the internet and google maps at my fingertips. it helped me point some couple in the right direction on their quest for white castle (i'm not making that up either). while espn and facebook have good iphone sites, google wins in this department. google reader on the iphone is really good. for awhile, i was searching/hoping for a good app to use to track my investments. i wanted something a little more robust than just price or percentage changes, which the native stock app has. i finally figured out that google docs has a well designed iphone site. when you throw that in along with the googlefinance functions, i had what i needed.

i have no complaints about service or call quality yet (other than not being able to call canada). the battery is not that great, but since i keep it plugged in at work, i haven't had a problem yet. we'll see what happens when i'm running around for a day or two.