Marianne Schultz

the musings of a geeky girl

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I am a geek. But I’m not upgrading to the iPhone 3.0 beta yet.

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Bear with me on this one. I am a geek, and as a geek, it is my sworn duty to own the first versions of all gadgets that entice me with their sleek shininess. This satisfies the greedy tech monster – a smaller yet more furry and orange version of the Cookie Monster, if you will – inside me and allows me to show off to all my friends who accordingly “ooh” and “aah” over my cool new toys. Before you go off and say how I end up just being a beta tester for manufacturers who put out new products without adequate QA to ensure they work the way they should for the majority of users, this term does not apply to me. I am a geek, dammit. This is what I do. And I love it.
With that said, it is incredibly hard for me to say that I don’t think I’m going to upgrade to the iPhone 3.0 firmware beta. I’ve been hemming and hawing about this one, much like Patrick over at JAIB, but I’ve been reading through some of the bug lists users have posted on forums and I just don’t think I could live for 4 more months with some of those issues, assuming the final version of 3.0 is released in July with no updates until then. Let me explain…
I love my iPhone. My iPhone is in my hand even when I walk around the house. I check my email regularly, catch up on Twitter, browse the internet, check movie listings, read ebooks and my RSS feeds, and so much more multiple times a day, which I can do anywhere and anytime thanks to my iPhone. I’m not a big YouTube fan, but I do use it to find web videos that accompany current events and tech news and reviews. My battery lasts me all day on 2.2.1, even if I don’t charge it in the middle of the day at work. And while I don’t text a ridiculous amount, I do rely on it a lot and need it to work consistently. I also regularly use Maps to get around since my GPS unit pretty much stays in my car, and it’s saved me and my friends from walking miles when we thought a restaurant was closer than it was and vice versa in planning on taking a taxi when we didn’t need to. 
From what I’ve been reading online, it sounds like many of the 3.0 bugs so far affect the features and functions that I count on and use the most.
Add to this that my previous smartphone, a Treo 680, was buggy as hell. Yes, I got it the week it came out, but Palm had been working on Palm OS smartphones for years by that time, so I didn’t consider it as a truly new device that would have a plethora of bugs as such, but it did. I was sick and tired of dealing with its utter crappiness and even my 1.0 iPhone was a blessing of stability and a solid feature set in comparison. 
So, what I’m trying to say is that I just don’t think I can handle my iPhone flaking out on me given how much I rely on it. I’m not chicken. I’m not. I’m still a geek. I am. I am, I tell you! Right?

iPhone 3.0 firmware only means I’ll love my iPhone even more

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Phew! I kept up with the Apple press event today to get the scoop on the iPhone 3.0 firmware and I came away very impressed. Apple addressed nearly every issue I have with my iPhone – MMS, copy & paste, calendar subscriptions, and turn-by-turn GPS, to name the items at the top of my list of day-to-day complaints. To see a good summary of what’s coming, Engadget has a thorough list here.

There are still a few things missing for me, however, including video recording, the ability to see agenda and new message information on the lock screen, wireless syncing, and folders/stacks organization for the home screen. But I’m not going to be a negative nancy about this since 3.0 is packed with new stuff that will keep me occupied for a while. And I’m 100% sure that we’ll see some stupendous applications given the new APIs devs will have access to. I’ve read that TomTom already has their GPS application for the iPhone up and running – hopefully this will be available quickly after 3.0 is released and I can sell my TomTom Go 720!
I am quite surprised that some of the new 3.0 features, namely MMS and A2DP, won’t work on the first-generation iPhone. I can’t think of any hardware-related reason that neither of these should work on it. If the first-generation iPhone can send an email with a picture attached, why can’t it send an MMS? A Bluetooth radio is a Bluetooth radio and it should be able to work with any of the many available profiles, non? I am most personally disappointed since a first-generation iPhone is my spare phone to use when snowboarding, the activity during which I would primarily use these exact 2 features. Dang.
So, now we wait. As usual, I’m sure time will drag to a crawl as we get closer to June, ensuring that I’ll become anxious and impatient to see 3.0 released. I’m guessing that 3.0 will come with the release of the next-generation iPhone and I wish the design engineers and manufacturing staff godspeed and good luck to make sure it can be released on time, if not early! Even though I don’t need a new iPhone, I think I’ll be a little helpless in the face of shiny new tech to avoid buying one. I suppose I should start saving now…

iPhone 3.0 firmware and Palm’s massive failage

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Apple sent out invitations to the press yesterday for an event to be held on March 17 to preview the 3.0 firmware for the iPhone. (No, I did not get this press invite for my day job, unfortunately. Even if I had, I wouldn’t get to fly to the west coast to attend.) I am quite excited about this event, though I do worry it will essentially be another massive teaser where they’ll show all this cool stuff and nothing will be available for months. I hope I’m wrong about that.

The internets have been aflame with rumors and guesses about what 3.0 will include. Like many others, I’m still hoping Apple will finally implement copy & paste, MMS capability, and the push notifications promised months ago. I also hope they’ll throw in video capture capability and will start to allow voice-guided navigation apps into the App Store, but I think these are unlikely at this time.
I do think that Apple will surprise us with something we either haven’t thought about in a while or just really don’t expect. What if they add the ability to sync the iPhone with your computer completely by WiFi? Once your iPhone is on your home WiFi network, it will search for your computer and start a sync automatically (though you have the option of turning off automatic syncing as you do now). This is the kind of smart behavior that increases ease of use that Apple likes to throw at you.
Or, what if they add the ability for the iPhone to be more like an intermediary between multiple computers between home and work by allowing the iPhone to act like a portable drive, as most iPods models can already do, with the ability to manipulate files directly on the iPhone. I know there are already 3rd-party apps that allow you to store files on the iPhone and even edit some file types, but what if Apple built that all in so that documents would be saved/synced during the sync process and they provided Apple-made apps to do the editing and whatnot? I think they could come up with a really slick way of doing this seamlessly on both ends.
You get the gist – I think Apple will come up with something we’re not focused on to do that “surprise and delight” thing they love so much. I only hope it’s truly useful and not fluff that just sounds cool, whatever it is.
On my “I really want this but really don’t expect Apple to do this soon” list are things like additional Bluetooth profiles to allow file exchange and internet sharing, the ability to create folders to better manage multiple pages of apps, and profiles that will automatically manage sounds based on the time and/or location. How cool would it be if my iPhone would automatically switch to silent mode as soon as I got to work based on my GPS coordinates or upon connection to the WiFi network there? Also on this list are lock screen upgrades that would show my upcoming appointments, missed calls, waiting emails and messages, and more without requiring me to hack my iPhone, much like IntelliScreen for jailbroken iPhones, but more stable and free. 😉
Okay, enough iPhone daydreaming and on to other news. Palm held a webcast for the press yesterday and I was really hoping for more new information on the Pre. Instead, they pretty much repeated information already provided at CES when the Pre was announced. I think they knew this event was going to be a let-down for the press since the very first announcement out of the MC’s mouth at the start of the event was to say that they had no information on the pricing or availability of the Pre to announce. Why the hell would you bother with a press event when you have precisely nothing new to announce about a product? I’m sure it was intended to keep up the hype about the Pre, but I don’t think this is a good tactic when you have nothing to add at all beyond what you already said 3 months ago. Seriously. Don’t jerk us around like that and waste our time for absolutely nothing.
If I hadn’t had to cover the event for work, I wouldn’t have even bothered with a news announcement for my work site since I don’t think Palm nor Sprint deserved any coverage at all for that useless event. Though I’m talking it here on my blog, I’m going to make it clear that it was a pathetic event by including a few choice keywords for search purposes: Palm, Pre, webcast, pointless, poor, fail, suckage, waste of time, repetitive, iPhone, iPhone, iPhone.
There. Palm and Sprint: please don’t freaking bother me again until you have something new and truly newsworthy about the Pre to announce. And it better be soon – you don’t have nearly the cachet or style of Apple to keep me patient enough to wait several more months for your version of the Jesus phone. Got it?
For the record, it took a fair amount on my part to not drop the f-bomb a few times in this post given how irritated I am with the whole Palm thing. However, I’m trying to stay calm and professional here. It’s working so far, but I don’t know if it’ll last if Palm does something asinine like this again. You have been warned.

Safari is the bane of my existence

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Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. Safari is still crashy after the latest iPhone firmware update, despite the “Improved stability and performance of Safari” line in the release notes. I should know better than to expect that this major problem that has plagued my iPhones through every firmware version would be magically fixed in a single update. But I thought that maybe, just maybe, the iPhone software engineers at Apple had figured this one out. Cue wrong answer buzzer sound now.

I think there’s some other sensor in the iPhone that Apple has never disclosed. It senses when you’re looking something up on the internet with desperate urgency and then causes Safari to crash at the penultimate moment before you get to what you need. I should know, because that’s how it always works for me. Bastards.

Want more features on your iPhone? Vote here…

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If you’ve been following my adventures with my iPhones over the past year, you’ve frequently heard me lament about some features I wish the iPhone had. Of course, I’m not alone in this, and I heard about a site that is aggregating all of the various desired enhancements in one place, and you can “vote” for the ones you want to increase the feature’s respective wish counter. Right now, copy and paste is the number one wishlist item – I did vote for that one, and a number of other ones as well. The site is PleaseFixtheiPhone.com. It’s a little repetitive – there doesn’t appear to be much moderation of the items submitted, so there are duplicates once you get beyond the first couple of pages. With a little clean-up, I think it could be a useful tool that the iPhone software engineers in Cupertino should really keep an eye on. Where is Scott Forestall’s email address when you need it?

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