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Rip van iPhone

It’s been about twenty months since I lost my first iPhone. As I mentioned in my blog post about it, I didn’t have insurance, and I decided that I wouldn’t replace it immediately.

I deliberately distanced myself from the world of iPhones during this time. I didn't want to know about cool apps or interesting ways of using them, it was just too frustrating.

It’s been an interesting experience, to see what has changed during these twenty months. When I got my first iPhone, I was an early adopter in Australia - the iPhone had only been released for a couple of weeks here. Strangers would notice it and strike up conversations with me about it.

Now the iPhone is mainstream. There’s nothing special about having one - even some of my more technically challenged relatives have them. For a moment I considered one of the so called iPhone killers, the HTC Desire, which runs on a version of Google’s Android operating system. I had a look at a Desire in a shop - and although it seemed fine, it did not live up to its name and ultimately wasn't very compelling.

I was more of a fan boy of Apple two years ago than I am now. These days I still prefer to use Apple in my home computing and generally wish it well, but there’s an ambivalence growing in me about the company. I’m starting to wonder if Steve Jobs is such a benevolent dictator. Three things have happened this year which have made me uneasy about Apple:

1. How Apple attempted to ban Mark Fiore’s iPhone app. This has now been rectified and later described as a mistake, but I wonder what they considered to be their mistake? What is attempting to stifle satire about politicians and the political process, or was it that they banned the wrong person - a Pulitzer prize winner with a profile high enough to cause embarrassment to Apple?
2. Apple’s hostility to Flash. Apple says it’s just about the technology, but the effect of its poor relationship with Adobe is having a wider impact.
3. The allegation that Apple has discouraged music labels from making special promotions with one of its competitors, Amazon’s online music store.

My circumstances have changed too. Two years ago, I had a lengthy train commute from the Blue Mountains into Sydney. The iPhone was a godsend during this commute. Now I don’t have such a train commute, and so I won’t be using the iPhone in that way. But I’ll still find use for it, particularly at work and out and about in Canberra. The IT environment where I work is extremely locked down, so I’m looking forward to having the iPhone as one area where reasonable personal use and preferences are still possible.

I’m finding that many Apps are better developed and more useful than they were in 2008. It's nice to be able to copy & paste text.

In hindsight, I wish I had been able to have my iPhone replaced shortly after I lost it twenty months ago. But I didn’t. My new iPhone is a better model than the one which I lost. So why doesn't it seem as good?

Tom Cruise and I have one thing in common

It’s not acting. I’m not one of these librarians who is moonlighting as a movie star. It’s certainly not Scientology - about which I will say nothing further, lest they sue me for defamation and/or copyright infringement.

No, it’s something more tragic.

We have both recently lost a tremendously important electronic device. He has lost his Blackberry which is supposedly full of personal emails [since my initial draft of this post, I’ve found one source which says that the Blackberry was only lost momentarily. Other than this acknowledgment here, I’m going to ignore this possible development]. Should this Blackberry end up in the wrong hands, it has the potential to make the unauthorized biography industry completely impervious to the current financial crisis.

Over a month ago, I lost my iPhone and I can understand a little of what Tom may be going through. For a moment I wondered if this was a bad dream, from which I would soon awake. Then I frantically looked for it, not wanting to think about the implications of it being lost or stolen. So I offer my commiserations to Tom for his loss, and my sympathy to the unfortunate person who was Tom's personal assistant on that day.

The iPhone is an amazing device. I realize this more in its absence. It allowed me to carry much of my online life with me in my pocket. It worked surprisingly well as a mobile phone. But I valued it more for its email and web browsing and RSS reading abilities. Towards the end I was feeling quite at home with its touch keyboard. I was drafting blog posts on it, including ones relating to a new blogging project.

I have learned that there was a very big down side to letting the iPhone embed itself into my life. It was convenient to carry emails with me in my iPhone, but when I lost it, that meant that someone else potentially had all my emails. Not that I have anything terrible to hide, but it still made me feel very naked. My situation was probably safer than Tom’s because of two things. I am not a celebrity and fundamentally nobody would care about examining my life in this level of detail. I also did have some security settings invoked which would make it more difficult to for somebody gain access to my data.

But while I had the iPhone, I found it annoying to have to enter a PIN every time I woke it up from sleep. I wanted to turn it off. When it comes to these devices, does convenience always come at the expense of security?

I have decided against getting a replacement iPhone. I foolishly hadn’t insured my first iPhone. I bought it on a plan and I still need to pay it off. I’m not going to be paying for two simultaneously. Also I have realized that I have a bad track record when it comes to losing things like this. I’ve lost regular mobile phones before as well. No more iPhones until I’ve kept my current mobile phone for at least two years without losing it.

At first I felt so embarrassed and pained by losing my iPhone so I could hardly mention it to anyone, let alone write about it here. That has dulled a bit with time. Not completely, because every time I see someone else’s iPhone, or an iPhone ad, I remember and I’m not happy.

Here’s what I learned from this whole debacle:

• Always use the maximum security settings, even if it’s not convenient. I don’t know if I’ll ever have an iPhone again, but if I do, I will ask myself every day, what will happen, what will be compromised, if this is lost or stolen?
• If there’s a option for insuring the phone, take it. If I can’t afford the insurance, then I can’t afford the phone.
• It is a terrible thing to lose writing - I don’t care if it’s handwritten or electronic writing. In the future, I’d like to store all of my writing on the cloud, with backups stored locally.

This may be the last iPhone-related post I write in some time. And I think I’ve used up my allotment for posts touching on celebrity gossip for many months.

still here

I'm writing this with Typepad's iPhone blogging app. It seems to work well enough but it has a number of short comings which means it would only be useful under very limited circumstances.

The most obvious difficulty is with writing anything substantial on the iPhone's keyboard. Just getting a sentence right on the touch keyboard is a challenge. Writing paragraphs does not seem practical at all. The writing ends up lagging too far behind the thought process. The keyboard is workable for short things but definitely not for anything lengthy.

Shorter blog posts tend to be link blogging, but it's not possible make links on the iPhone. There's no option in the Typepad blogging app, probably because the iPhone doesn't allow copying & pasting.

So I can see iPhone being useful for photo blogging, for those people who are brave enough to rely on the iPhone's rather limited camera. It would also be useful for writing short posts which don't need links. But those sort of posts seem more appropriate for micro-blogging applications like Twitter.

I haven't forgotten about the rest of ALLA conference. I was hoping to get most of that finished last weekend, but unfortunately I've caught a nasty cold which I'm still dealing with. There is something wrong about going through all this when it's not winter.

the dreaded first iPhone bill

This is following up on my previous iPhone post. The background to that post is that I had the phone for only two days when I received a scary SMS saying I'd already used 80% of my month's data quota. That's when I decided to try the data saving ideas I mentioned in that post.

So I got my first bill yesterday. Although it was pretty thick, it still wasn't very illuminating. But the key thing is that I managed not to go over my limit, and still I checked and sent email whenever I liked, checked and updated twitter whenever I wanted, and read as many blogs on NetNewsWire as I fancied. Although I really like the Google Reader  on my desktop computer, right now I think NetNewsWire is the better choice for a data conscious iPhone user. It strips out a lot more stuff than what the Google Reader on the iPhone seems to.

So the first bill wasn't so bad. Maybe I won't need to be quite so frugal this next month.

reducing iPhone data charges

This is not going to be a post about how cool the new iPhone 3G is. In some ways it is an amazing product but I don’t think another post like that is going to contribute anything further in this discussion. I wouldn’t say that the honeymoon is over, but I’m starting to feel a little more ambivalent towards the iPhone, at least how it is sold in Australia.

I think that the iPhone experience in Australia is going to be a little different than it's been in many other countries. The reason for this that the Australian mobile networks have fundamentally misunderstood the iPhone. They think it's a phone first and an internet device second, and have priced their plans accordingly with data limits laughably low.

There is no denying that the iPhone is a data hog. Some people are going to receive a very big shock when they receive their first bill for the iPhone, mainly because of excess data charges. The ACCC is sufficiently worried that it’s just issued a warning about this.

In this post I'm going to look at ways of reducing iPhone data consumption.

• Be careful of what you view in Safari. Safari is one of the iPhone's best applications, it is very nice to use with the ability to turn the phone for landscape browsing as well as zooming in and out when browsing web pages. But if you're anywhere near your bandwidth limits, using Safari for an extended browsing session on the iPhone is not a good idea.
• In particular be wary of newspaper websites and other bandwidth heavy sites. If you want to stay on top of the news, it's more data efficient to subscribe to that news source's RSS feeds rather than refreshing Safari on the website.
• If your carrier has any free unmetered web content, don't forget to make use of that if it's at all helpful (I know, often it's mediocre, but maybe it's better than nothing).
• If you want to read blogs on your iPhone, you really must use an RSS reader, unless you like the idea of paying more to your mobile phone company. Using an RSS reader strips out a lot of the junk which can increase your data usage. Don't click on outbound links if you can help it. If a post has some links you'd like to follow, mark the post (star in the Google Reader, “add to clippings” with NetNewsWire) and follow that up later on your home or work computer.
• Change the fetch new data settings to manual, so the iPhone only updates when you tell it to update and not on a regular schedule.
• Think about turning off email accounts at times when you’re not interested in reading or checking your email.
• MobileMe users: you may want to disable the push updating, unless you really need it
• Think about having a separate email account to use on the iPhone. You can set up automatic forwarding rules on your main email account, so that you only see the more important email on your iPhone and hopefully avoid the lolcats pictures and other large files being forwarded around
• Telstra and Optus users: make the most of any free wifi you may have access to in your plans.
• I love watching things on YouTube, but there's no way I'm ever going to look at YouTube on my iPhone unless I'm using "free" wifi. It's just not worth it.
  
• The iPhone supposedly has a way of tracking data consumption in Settings / General / Usage. I have found these figures to be wildly inaccurate, significantly less than the data consumption records kept by my carrier. Do not rely on that to track your data usage.

I write all of this with very mixed feelings, because right now it seems that occasionally  or regularly crippling the iPhone is the only economically sustainable way of using it. I hope this will eventually change, but in the mean time, it’s not so helpful to dwell on all the cool things the iPhone can do, focus on what you can afford.

still no iTunes Music Store in Australia - a casualty of squabbling between Apple and Sony

[7 September 2005: This post has been followed up]
[15 May 2006: The portion about Australian intellectual property law has been followed up]

An Australian iTunes Music Store (iTMS) was supposed to open in May 2005. This unexpectedly fell through. At the time, there were rumours in Slashdot that one major record company (possibly Sony) was the cause of this delay. Three months later, there is still no iTMS in Australia and there is more confirmation that Sony is the company which has been stone-walling in negotiations with Apple over licensing rates. Joshua Gliddon, "Burning issue", Bulletin (7 June 2005).

In Today's Australian Financial Review there was another article about this, "Apple's turn to bite the download bullet" (9 August 2005). I'm not linking to it, because the AFR has a nasty pay-per-view system. The gist of this article was that the Australian iTMS store has become collateral damage in the larger competition between Sony and Apple. Although Sony did not block the original iTMS in North America, or its other expansions, this time it is putting its foot down and insisting that Apple give some ground over licensing rates and access to Apple's FairPlay DRM system. The Australian market isn't that vital to Apple, and it's not going to make these concessions to Sony, and if that holds up the Australian iTMS, so be it. At this rate, it's possible New Zealand will have its iTMS before Australia. Good on them too (my Mum's from NZ, so I have major respect for the country and its people).

Meanwhile, because of an absurdity in Australian copyright law, there is still no legal way of using an iPod in Australia - unless your iPod is filled with music which you have yourself created. So I'm a law-breaker if I buy a CD and format-shift by ripping the music onto my iPod. So are two other Australian bloggers whom I know (I promise not to turn you in, F & S), so are the dozens of people I see everyday in Sydney with some sort of iPod, whether it's a big one or a mini or a shuffle. We're all law-breakers on this issue, even the lawyers. I'm waiting for the day when police will stop me in Martin Place, "Oi, you with those white earphones, what do you think you're up to?"