Jul 19 2008
New Toys! 24″ iMac, iPod Touch, iPhone 3g
I am not a Mac head, but we’ve had some additions to the toy cache. The campus bookstore had a great deal on a 24″ iMac, with a rebate on an iPod. So Elaine got the big Mac and I got an iPod Touch. It’s a ton of fun!
Our newest arrival is an iPhone 3g that I got for work. It is even cooler than the Touch because it has a camera. I’ll have a lot of lower quality photos now, but it’s super convenient.
A couple complaints about the phone, that I’m sure I’ll get the whine about on the MacVeritas podcast soon:
Battery life – with 3g, wifi, and heavy use, don’t expect this thing to last more than 5 hours.
Charging change – this just kills me. The device won’t charge in my car now. Lots of discussion on the forums that Apple decided to drop the pins where most car systems charge the phone. I’m hoping there can be a firmware fix. If not, maybe my car device has a switch, or I can build a little wire switching dongle. Either way, shame on Apple for messing with this with no real warning.
Exchange email set up was a snap – but I think I’m missing some emails… It’s being a little flaky with the ActiveSync. More experience with the device is needed.
Calendar confusion – some recurring events that have canceled exceptions are showing up as valid meetings. I know this is complicated programming from the WirelessKnowledge days. Apple needs to get ahead of this or people will lose confidence in their data.
Apps crash a lot – and have to be reinstalled. AIM, Twinkle, and others just try to start, then go back to the home dock. I’ll even get an occasional reboot.
Other than that, the device is nice! It’s sleek, so it slips in and out of pockets nicely. So far it is way more resistant to scratches than my 60G iPod.
Now that I have the phone, I don’t know if I need the Touch. The girl wants it, but I might sell it and the cool Surefire flashlights I won and buy a proper lens for the camera.
Some learning on the iPhone 3g:
The “missing mail” was recovered by checking the “Mail days to sync” under the Exchange mail account. I’d set this to 1 month, but it had been reset to 3 days.
This reset issue has thrown me a bit. I initially synced the device with my Mac at work to finish activation. I had to set up an apple account to add apps, I guess, so I did so. Later that night, I plugged it in to the Mac at home, because that’s where all my music and photos are. In the process, I guess I reset to my wife’s Apple account, which then invalidated all of the apps I’d installed earlier in the day. I’ve slowly reinstalled everything, but why should I have to?
I’m using Twinkle for Twitter, which is pretty neat, but got messed up by the S3 outage yesterday. I could never publish a tweet with a picture, and people were getting tweets from me with invalid URLs. I’ll check to see if it’s better today.
The charge problem isn’t going to be an easy fix. It’s definitely not fixable in firmware–they simply stopped connecting to the FireWire power pins. If you’re lucky, your (car’s) cable manufacturer brought out the USB +5V power pair, and you could hook something up to that. If not, all they brought out was the FireWire +12V pair. Soldering that 30-pin connector is tricky, but I haven’t had the need yet to work up the nerve to try it. There’s a breakout board from SparkFun.