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Steve's phone
I suppose it's time for my iPhone blog post.

My Sony finally become too unlike a phone to bother carrying around, so I got the damned Apple Phone. Since it's me, I'm sure you're just dying to hear my complaints so far:
  • It's giant. Kind of like stuffing a shipping palette into your pocket. Yes it's thin, but it's WIDE. I had special candy-bar-phone-sized pockets in all my clothes for my Sony... gonna have to rethink my whole wardrobe now.
  • RIP T9.The virtual keyboard is pretty challenging to type on while walking or driving. Yes, driving :)
  • abysmal battery. I think I charged my Sony phone like, 11 times in its whole life.
  • laggy UI. This is just as I feared, but I'm putting up with it, because it's so... shiny.
  • SMS charges make my blood boil. Charging me for a data plan AND SMS is the most insulting thing evar.
  • Clipboard. I'm already angry that there's no clipboard. Even my Sony had a clipboard.
  • Fragile. I think I threw my Sony on the ground 50 times. The iPhone would probably have survived about 1 of those. Or maybe zero.
But on balance, I pretty much love it. Here are my favorite things so far:
  • Endless fun on the toilet.I had not considered the on-can usefulness of the iPhone. Now I know what you're all doing in there.
  • Remember the Milk. The RTM iPhone app is even better than the full web interface. I haven't been this wildly optimistic about the possibility of productivity improvement since I got a Palm Pilot in 1996.
  • Conspicuous distraction. An exciting new way to ignore my racist hair dresser.
  • 2 way Calendar sync. Finally, calendar has a way to nag me that I can't ignore.
  • Sudoku. Say no more.
  • Fact-checking at my fingertips. Let no wild cocktail party assertion go unchallenged! I am now just a Safari crash away from remembering the name of that actor who was totally in that one movie that none of us can remember.
  • Everything else. Oh who am I kidding, the list of awesome things about it is impossibly long. Weather, traffic, directions, search, visual voicemail, Remote, threaded SMS, yelp, Gmail, Reader, Twitter, GPS, and Apps. I even love pinching the screen. Sorry, GPhone.
Anyway. Since I'm always the last to the party on these things, I thought I'd let you know that I have an iPhone now, and it is therefore officially no longer cool.

(I even ordered a Mac Mini to try out iPhone development. My first Macintosh ever!)
What kind of website, exactly?

I was poking around for some press information on the website of the home automation company, X10. They sell gadgets for your house such as remote controlled lamps and thermostats.

On their "about us" page they have a bunch of the obligatory "Why we're great" paragraphs about customer service, etc. But I didn't expect to see this one!

The notion that X10's gaudy, flashing, soft-core-porn-animation-festooned website (pictured here) was built "the way we would want it if we were you" is either grossly hypocritical, or else a delightfully revealing glimpse into the psyches of the home automation geeks over at X10.

I find the girl in the skimpy police uniform to be particularly user friendly.

The views expressed on this site are mine personally, and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.