Marianne Schultz

I've now had my 3G iPhone for a few days and I'm really liking it. It
is not a drastic leap forward from the first generation iPhone (more
details to come in my comparison review in a few days), but it's pretty
damn nice. The App Store is awesome, and I've already downloaded a
bunch of apps (free and paid – I'm burning through an iTunes gift card I
got in preparation for the App Store's release). The one thing I am
worried about, though, is stability. (For the record, I don't believe
this is limited to the 3G iPhone since the first generation iPhone can
also get the 2.0 firmware with the ability to use 3rd party applications
from the App Store.) So far, I'm not horribly impressed – the Tetris,
eReader, and New York Times apps have all caused my iPhone to completely
reboot. If this keeps up, it will be reminiscent of my Treo days, and I
definitely don't want to return to that. I sincerely hope that these
are just 1.0 app bugs that will be worked out very soon, because
reliability is pretty much my number one requirement in my cell
phone/communication lifeline.

What I really wanted to blog about today were the ebook reader apps that
are now available for the iPhone. As you already know (from a few
negative blog posts in the recent past), I have an Amazon Kindle and I
made the final decision to sell it as soon as I saw that an eReader app
was available for the iPhone. In fact, my Kindle will be off to its new
owner in a couple of days. eReader (www.ereader.com), part of
Fictionwise, publishes ebooks and I'm a long-time customer with nearly
100 books purchased from them in the past 8 years. With their free app
for the iPhone, I can access and download for reading all of the books
I've purchased from them. Buying new ebooks through the app is not
currently possible, but I am content to go to their site and purchase a
book via Safari, and then download it to my iPhone through the eReader
app.

Another ebook application is Stanza, which allows you to browse and load
free ebooks under public domain. Most of the literary classics are
available, and if I were still in school, this is the way I would find
and read my summer reading assignments. At this point in my life, I
know I'll use it to read some of those classic I've missed.

I'm still playing with my 3G iPhone and setting it up to suit my
preferences. I'm absolutely thrilled to have 16GB (well, 14.6GB of
actual free space for my use) to accommodate more music, movies, and all
of the apps I've downloaded and will download in the future. At the
moment, with 7 videos (2 of which are full movies, the others are
podcasts or TV shows), 805 songs, 629 photos, and the 26 apps I've
downloaded already, I still have 6.7GB of free space. Scwheet!