Living with the iPhone

These are the days I dread, but like in some sense. Release day for an iPhone firmware update. This always happens: I'm on my way out the door to work and want to synch my iPhone just to update any playlists or iCal entries when "BAM" - an update is available, "would you like to download now?" iTunes asks invitingly.

Of course I do, even though I have no idea what the difference between 2.0.1 to 2.0.2 is, it's just that it's better, right? (I would hope so, but take it on blind faith that something is improved). Also, a .1 of an update shouldn't be too big or involved, right? No, I always overestimate how long an update takes. In this case it's about 250 MB and about 10 minutes (so far), this includes the time to download, install, and not to mention a just-in-case-all-else-fails backup. Well, the benefit is that this install limbo period forces you to wait, pause and even take time to blog. A nice moment of calm in my day. In my case it means my commute is actually shorter because I would have missed all the rush hour traffic. (Tell that to my boss!) But also, let's hope this .1 of an update is worth the .2 of an hour that I've devoted to it. (or .3, or .4 of an hour...)

Instead of trying to scrawl down lyrics, doing a search on Google (only to be lead to some bizarre lyric website repository that may or may not work, all the while offering me free ringtones and ceaseless pop-up ads), with Shazam's app, I've actually found songs by, well, listening to them. Shazam is slick. You hear a song, start the app, hold your iPhone's mic up to the sound source and viola! It's been 'tagged' and identified like a wild bird you caught on Animal Planet. Another app by Midomi even lets you hum a tune in, search by title, artist and even lets you listen to samples.

Sending the sample for off-site sonic analysis, querying the proper artist remotely, album art and sending a response back to your iPhone in less than 10 seconds is pretty dang slick. The sample time itself is only about 12 seconds! Once you get your result, you can bookmark it, and, if you're in a WiFi hotspot, launch iTunes to buy the song. Most popular songs are on these services. Shazam doesn't work in loud places like clubs, bars or restaurants, but works well in cars or at home.

What these services haven't been able to do, however, is to analyze classical music. I've tried a few times. Shazam says the Beethoven Fifth Symhony is "unrecognized." What would Ludwig say? After humming the piece into Midomi, I got the strangest country folk song in response. This isn't surprising. There are very long phrases in classical music and it makes even die-hard fans puzzle as to "what was that piece?" Having these services decipher classical music presents a lot of challenges. First, recordings of pieces are almost nearly indistinguishable especially if you only had a 12-second sample of them. Also, unlike pop music, where there is one artist performing one song (sure there are cover versions), with classical you have hundreds of ensembles, conductors and performers spanning 50 years of audio recording doing the same 'song' over and over again. For example, there are more than 200 recordings of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony alone!

When (or if) classical music can be deciphered by these types of services it will probably be a great engineering feat. Progress, if this is ever attempted, would probably be incremental. First, identifying a particular symphony, concerto or quartet is, in itself, very difficult. Next, identifying the particular recording will be staggering. All those ensembles and conductors perform pieces many times over leading to various versions and editions that would be a morass of data to sort through. While there's probably not a market demand for this type of service or application, it may serve as Shazam or Midomi's Everest.

Was it worth the wait? The 5-hour phone service/text/data outage? Do you really have to get the new iPhone on the first day? The first weekend? From a rational point of view, the answer is probably not. But, from an admitted early-adopter Apple-phile, a resounding hot tamale train YES is the answer. But, this is not without caveats of course (battery life, hassle, and jittery/buggy application crashes). Overall, the new iPhone 3G is slick. The applications (which work 90 percent of the time) are even slicker (many worth special attention to come in the next few posts). Sound quality is much improved. The handset feels bigger, but is lighter. It's more than a refinement over 1.0, but I wonder if that has to do with the 2.0 firmware update that allows those long-awaited, legitimate third-party application bringing in outside innovation.

iPhone 1.0 say hi to iPhone 3G

(Credit: Kevin Ho)

In any case, with the white 3G version that yours truly got, people stop and notice and ask questions like they did last year. Today, I've already had two people stop and ask about the iPhone when they noticed it wasn't the typical one that we all have grown accustom to seeing. Sure, they've seen iPhone before, but when they spotted this one, which is different (it's white for Pete's sake) they stopped and asked to see it and the new applications with a lot of attention paid to the GPS-maps feature (deservedly so).

The fact that people stop, look and ask, and that there are still long of people willing to spend part of their weekends in line is pretty fascinating - even given the tough economic that 2008 had over 2007. As the Field of Dreams quote goes: If you build it, people will come.

It didn't take a check of other CNET stories to confirm that Apple/AT&T's registration servers have either went back to bed or checked out early on a Friday. After the cheers at 8:00 a.m. the line moved less than 20 feet within the first hour. There were at least two announcements from Apple reps (one in a utila-kilt even) that things are "a little bit slow," because of the "overwhelming demand." An insistent, we could always come back later was touted too.

At one point, I was getting discouraged. The Apple Store'ss WiFi connection was increasingly out of range as the line arced around itself. Laptop batteries were fading. Many with iPhones in line started to look antsy and bored too. A geek 2.0 shantytown was at risk of developing. Gripes about AT&T and it's 'ease' of in-store activation were heard. And yet, the line grew longer and added more people. Somehow, the line started to move - or maybe it was just my turn...

But, after 2.5 hours of waiting I was in! And yes, the white 16-gig iPhone 3G was indeed available. "Mike" my handy Apple assistant told me stories of the various difficulties that AT&T has presented to its new and existing customers. Rightly so, as I had to talk to an AT&T rep about my upgrade. Eventually, I won. But others in the store weren't so lucky. One customer apparently dropped his new iPhone 3G and returned it wanting another one. After processing that return, moments later AT&T told the customer he was no longer eligible for the 'incentive' upgrade pricing. Oops.

As for my iPhone is still begging to be connected to iTunes and I have yet to snych it yet. So, more to come. But at least I have one. And it was tax-free too.

I still stand by my original post that the updates promised for the iPhone released today as firmware "update 1.1.3 "should be given a better number, maybe a 1.2?, to mark the great features and updates. Hoaxes and teasers aside, I can't contain my giddiness - mass SMS text messages are back! That and many other neat features tracks the industry-wide trend of users being able to customize their iPhones to greater and greater lengths. Installation, via iTunes (which itself got an update) was quick - within 10 minutes I was up and running.

The changes I've noted and used so far that have made all the difference:

Google Maps qausi-GPS. Pretty cool to know where you generally are while stuck in traffic. After hitting a button a circle appears to indicate where you are generally. Kind of looks more like a targeting device for Kang and Kodos but eh, I can see how this will be pretty useful.

Customized iPhone application homepages - without a hack! Finally, I can change my icons and shove Stocks and YouTube to the second page! I never used those applications anyway and, finally, here's a way to get rid of them, well, not seeing them. That and I've added Safari icon links to this newly freed real estate to The New York Times, Facebook mobile for the iPhone, SFGate and to CNET (of course). The best part of this new feature is the seizure-inducing icon-shake when you want to change the ordering and inclusion of icons (via a drop and drag feature) on the various pages (up to 9 pages, I've read) that contain your iPhone menus - perfect for all those developer applications that are coming.

And, finally, SMS-texting en masse One of my New Year's resolutions was actually to text less and call more. Well, with 1.1.3... let's just say I probably won't be keeping that resolution. I had been finding that, because mass text messages weren't available, that I communicated with fewer people than I did with my Razr. After all, there are only so many individual text messages you can send while at a traffic light, or waiting in line at the store, it wasn't only time-consuming, but tedious. Now, you can add multiple recipients - what the maximum number of recipients are is currently unclear, but sending the message does take longer. These text messages are denoted with a little group of people icon (how cute and convenient). What's more, early polling data seems to indicate that recipients of the mass text message can't tell it's a mass text message. Responses from individuals are also segregated and not contained within the original mass text thread. Excellent.

Early adopters are an impatient lot, especially Apple boys and girls. With Macworld looming Tuesday (a 3G/GPS iPhone? I will so be in line to get one if or when it comes out) and with reports of impatient iPhoners being hit with a Trojan masked as "leaked" 1.1.3 firmware, you can see that the line between enthusiasm and caution can be thrown to the wind.

While there don't seem to be any lasting or major effects from 1.1.3 Trojan, it made me wonder, when the iPhone is finally opened up for "legit" third-party developer applications, how common hacks like this will be in the future and how many more people will be affected by them. The 1.1.3 Trojan involved tinkering and hacking, so average Johnny Appleseeds like me, weren't hit. But, I'm sure future Trojans will be more malicious and more insidious, just like PC-based viruses. So, whereas viruses were uncommon in the Mac world (or so I'm told), I would predict this to change.

After asking how current iPhones were affected when an official firmware update hadn't even been released, and after many confused IMs later with my iPhone guru friend Patrick, I was exposed to the nuts and bolts of hacking your iPhone. Apparently, the "shift" key and a disc image becomes important during a sync in iTunes that allows you to install neat things like Labryrinth (the rolling ball game over a pegged-hole game board that takes advantage of the iPhone's accelerometer--so cool) and other applications.

From all that, I gathered that you had to take affirmative steps involving disc images, jailbreaks, and other incantations to have gotten the 1.1.3 Trojan. In other words, it took time and more know-how than I'm willing to devote to get this first round of evil-doing code. But, as the iPhone platform is opened up (next month) and as Apple cedes control over iPhone applications, and as average users like me start to take advantage of them in greater and greater numbers, I do worry about the hassle a future Trojan/virus/worm would cause. Just take a look at the "Free Public Wi-Fi" phenomenon (no, it's not really free, it's more like an innocuous social disease that is really widespread), and just imagine the possibilities if it weren't as benign.

You would think the iPhone's touch screen--the hallmark of the whole dang thing--would last for more than five months. Well, think again.

After a particularly wet bike ride on Saturday here in the Bay Area, my iPhone got somewhat damp. (You know, the type of rain that soaks through a coat but doesn't ruin anything.) After the ride, I wanted to text people and noticed the top row of the text keyboard was not responding. I had to press, no squish, down to get a letter. And the cursor would flip out. And the screen looked bad when I did so, just like when you press down on an LCD screen too hard.

After a reset, power-cycle and testing out different touch-based functions (aren't they all?), I was convinced I needed to get help at the Apple store. I made an appointment online for the next day. (All the Saturday appointments were gone by the time I looked online.)

The next day, I found out I wasn't the only one who had a "dead zone" on their screen. The guy next to me at the Genius Bar had the same problem. After attempting a restore, the Apple clerk (who asked me to write that customer service was fast and efficient--it wasn't) brought out a white box (a coffin I thought?) with a new iPhone in it. The clerk said Apple would exchange my phone, and there'd be no charge. It was exactly as I had expected.

The clerk swapped my SIM card out, with a pin conveniently stored in his name tag, and I was on my way, after half an hour.

What surprised was was how all of my settings had been "restored"--ringtones, photos, SMS messages, IMAP settings. The iPhone was activated by AT&T in seconds, the transfer of all the junk on my iPhone took about 30 minutes. Not too bad.

The downsides: the process was a bit of a pain and the restore missed a few pictures I took. (I have to re-assign all the pictures to particular contacts again.) Also, it's a little distressing that such an integral feature failed after five months. The clerk who helped me did say that the technology was very new, and that, as an early adopter, I should have expected as such.

Hmmm.

Finally, the iPhone's first major update!

My optimism for this 1.1.1 update was muted as, after a couple of months of waiting, I was excited for the ringtone feature that has ultimately proven lackluster. If my iPhone is in my pocket, I honestly cannot hear the ringtone portions of songs I've picked - even the jarring ones! The only reason I know I'm getting a call is because of the vibrate feature. So, with yesterday's major update, I was cautious. It should follow, however, that the speaker adjustments in the 1.1.1 update may solve the ringtone-being-too-quiet issue. Verdict: eh, not really.

The 1.1.1 update, however, was still welcome. Apart from allowing the homekey to access the iPhone's iPod features, a redesign of the calculator, my favorite feature thus far is the WiFi iTunes store that was already available on the iPod Touch.

Ironically, I downloaded "Wrapped Around Your Finger" by The Police and, after hoping onto a WiFi network. After hearing it, taking note of it on the notebook, I found the song, downloaded it and started playing in about a minute's time. The iTunes WiFi interface in terms of search and purchasing features are slick, clean and fast. Transferring the purchased song to my main desktop was seamless too. A new category of playlist, "songs purchased from the iPhone" (or something close to that) also appeared in my iTunes.

You might think that having access to iTunes on the go is unnecessary - but to me, it's both brilliant and dangerous. Brilliant because if you're like me, you hear music and songs around all the time. For me, I tend to think: oooh, what is that song? I'd like to have it. And now, I can get it, provided that I'm near a WiFi hot spot. (Usually, someone around me will know what song is playing. Not being able to identify the song is an entirely different matter). And, iTunes WiFi is dangerous because I hear a lot of music during a day and I think I'll be buying songs left and right. So, in a surprising turn-around, I guess I'm glad that my purchasing capacity is limited by iTunes WiFi only being accessible via WiFi. (I wonder how quickly the EDGE network would implode if iTunes WiFi could be accessed over AT&T's EDGE Network).

So, this leads to the next question: What about 3G transfers? In the long run, it looks as if the trend appears to be moving a time where storing music on a desktop or iPod may well become pretty obsolete. This is all the more so especially with larger online servers and storage dumps becoming more widely available. Like Google Apps and Documents, one day, it seems more than likely that I'll be able to access all my music along lines like iTunes WiFi. Perhaps a constant streaming, or perhaps I'll access an entire playlist in chunks at a time, thus eliminating the need for an obscenely massive HDD-based iPod/mp3 players. The only limit now seems to be speeds of over-air data networks. Even if you were on a plane, or in a subway, you may be able to beam yourself enough music to carry you to the next WiFi rich area you get to.

While that may be a while away, iTunes WiFi is definitely a starting point.

So I haven't yet downloaded the iPhone update, so here's a customer-issue story until I get the update tonight.

When I bought my iPhone I actually bought two handsets. The other ended with a close friend of mine who switched over from Verizon. Today, we met for lunch in San Francisco at, appropriately, the downtown Apple store. He had questions to ask the Apple people.

There were no answers for the following questions apart from: Call AT&T and/or call Applecare, specifically:

Question 1: Why is it that everytime his iPhone calls back home (New Jersey) it echoes and you can hear the conversation twice?

Answer 1: Have you tried turning on and off the iPhone? Yes? Is the area calling populated? Yes? Oh, well you'll have to call AT&T.

Commentary 1: I too had this problem calling Iowa, that's to be expected, it's Iowa and reception could be spotty, right? I typically hang up and call again with good results, but I've noticed the same problem but not with every call.

Question 2: On passcode mode, the iPhone won't unlock, calls are missed, what gives?

Answer 2: Have you tried turning on and off the iPhone? Yes? Oh, do you have the latest update? Yes? Oh, well you'll have to call Applecare.

Commentary 2: I've also had the same problem, but it seemed to stop after the last mini-update.

Question 3: My Apple iPhone $100 credit got screwed up, can you help?

Answer 3: Us retail stores can't access that database, have you called Applecare?

Commentary 3: No comment as my credit issued in less than 30 seconds.

Overall commentary: It's a bit frustrating that you have to use your iPhone to call in to answer these questions that would seemingly best be answered in a real-life live-person setting. What if you're passcode wouldn't unlock? Would you hear everything twice?