Yes, I stood in line. My old phone was crunched - not dead, but it would have cost more to buy a replacement screen than to simply upgrade/replace it.

Bugs/issues

• Battery life is definitely much worse. Received wisdom is that this is due to the 3G radio… Turning off 3G to save battery life really isn’t practical without something like a single button toggle app — any takers?
• The new device won’t take a charge from the little Belkin Griffin adapter that I have in the car. Apparently this is a known issue. Luckily, this adapter is in two parts, the plug that goes into the 12V “lighter” socket, and a USB-iPhone cable that plugs into that.  It turns out that while the Griffin “USB” cable doesn’t work with the new phone, if I replace that cable with the USB cable from the iPhone power adapter, it works fine.
• Apps take a long time to load in general. A friend of mine who works for Apple says that the SMS and Contacts apps in particular can slow down when you have a lot of SMS messages (or Contacts). If you have a Mac, you can backup and clean out old SMS threads with SyPhone, but I’m not aware of an equivalent for Windows.
• Contact list right-hand alphabet index scrollbar takes 5-10 seconds to start responding after contact app is loaded. I can understand that it takes a while to pull 1000-2000 contacts into memory, but still, ugh! Apple can do better.
• Contact search input field should float as you scroll so it’s always visible.
• There should be a preference to always allow Camera and Maps to use GPS location services, instead of prompting me all the time.

Good stuff

• Appigo’s Todo app with built-in support for over-the-air sync with RTM. It’s not “push”/real-time sync, but the app is very well done, and the sync works well.
• Pandora - free! rocking!
• Tuner - streaming internet radio stations! Check out WSUM, WFMU, KALX, Little Radio…
• Pandora & Tuner streaming over 3G, jacked into the car stereo!
• Movies.app
• Remote

Missing stuff

• KeePass/KeePassX password manager. I switched from SplashID to KeePass a while back because KeePass has a much better UI, and also because SplashID has Windows & Linux versions that use the same database… I don’t really need the Linux feature, so I could switch back to SplashID, which does have an iPhone version ($9.99 in the App Store). I took another quick look at SplashID though, and the UI kindof bites, and I bet KeePass will come out on the iPhone before too long.
• Notepad sync - so lame that this still doesn’t exist
• Google Calendar sync. I was using NemusSync on my 2G phone, but an equivalent doesn’t yet exist for the 3G. A native Google sync app would be better.
• Google Contacts sync. Something like Funambol might eventually work, but a native Google sync app would be better.
• 1Shoot - best little one-function app ever!
• uPoze - automatic Flickr uploading - I want this back!
• jailbreak, of course - not quite out yet, but almost…

I’ll update this post as I learn more

A while back (before I smashed up my iPhone), I had the idea that I wanted to change the stock “Answer/Decline” and “End Call” messages on my phone to something more creative. While there may be utils out there that enable this, but I figured, hey, it’s UNIX, those strings must be in files, and I can edit files.

iPhone ‘nix doesn’t have find built-in, but it does have grep -r, which allowed me to find out the two files I was looking for:

• Most of the strings for the phone application are in /System/Library/Frameworks/TelephonyUI.framework/English.lproj/General.strings
• In-call text strings are in /private/var/Applications/MobilePhone.app/English.lproj/InCall.strings

iPhone strings files are stored on the device in a binary format known as “plist“. (Luckily the binary format retains enough text to allow you to grep for what you’re looking for). You can’t edit the plist format directly; there are two ways to deal with that.

1. Copy the strings file to your PC and then use this online tool to convert the binary plist to ASCII text. Edit the resulting text file, and then copy the text file back onto the iPhone in the same place as the original binary file of the same name — the iPhone will read the text version of the file just fine.
2. Install EricaUtilities (download the zip file to your PC, unzip, and then copy the contents of the bin directory to /usr/local/bin or your iPhone), and and then use plutil to edit the strings files on the iPhone itself. Note that the command line arguments in plutil seem to be sort of reversed; to set a key I had to do plutil -s KEY -v VALUE instead of -s VALUE -v KEY, but whatever. There is also an older EricaUtility called plist2txt that simply converts the binary plist file to text, right on the iPhone. You can then edit the resulting text file right there, with, say, vi. There’s an even older version of this utility as well, but you’ll need perl to run it.

In any case, once you’ve edited the strings file(s), restart the phone, and you should see the new strings.

One final neat little trick is that if a friend of yours has a jailbroken iPhone with the default root password, and you’re both on the same WiFi network, and you know his IP address, you can ssh to his phone and change his strings to whatever you like, all while you sit there at Cafe Ritual, sipping your coffee. You can even restart his phone remotely - just use the unix restart command.

I love a subtle reference. This month’s Monocle has an article about the unlikely (or, to be more precise, unforeseen) affinity of the Swiss for Subaru automobiles… A bit of obscure reportage, to be sure, but it’s the following paragraph that really stands out for me:

…They [Subaru buyers] love the elastic power of the engine, yet thanks to a dual-range gearbox and four-wheel drive, it could also tow an Alp (the fact that the Forester has repeatedly been voted Towcar of the Year by various caravanning types has, miraculously, done nothing to dent its credibility among people who choose life).

To fully understand this, you first have to know what caravanning is, which requires a familiarity with British culture that, for the American reader, could really only be attained by watching Top Gear, the fantastic car-fan show whose editors make no bones about their disdain for what is a uniquely British and uniquely pathetic sort of populist summer recreation — attaching a fiberglass camper (”caravan”) to the rear end of your family (”saloon”) car and towing it along congested secondary (”B”) roads to what is basically a parking lot covered in sod. Where you sit, for a week, and then return home via the same route. Amazing. Point being that, given the fact that the only way that many readers would even know what caravanning is at all would be by way of Top Gear, the mention is itself a reference to the show. Thus a very subtle sort of cultural cross-reference.

Secondly, and all the more subtle, is “…among people who choose life.” This is not, of course, a reference to the misguided propaganda of American political rightists, but a clear citiation of the opening lines of Trainspotting, where life is the first of a range of choices that you might have available, if you don’t choose heroin that is.

All the recent talk of an Obama-Clinton ticket would be more distressing if I thought it was more than a desperate PR move by Hillary’s campaign. Obama has to be smart enough to know that would be a lose-win non-partnership, and the worst possible tactical move for his own candidacy. Her recent remark about Bobby Kennedy takes her down yet another notch. Like the Economist, Kos and many others, I say it’s well past time for her to hang up her hat and spend some quality time with ol’ Bill.