Plaidophile

Specifically I got a used first-generation iPhone 8GB, since I got lucky and found someone selling one on Craigslist for $250, with a preference for in-town and cash, and I was the first person to respond who was in-town and willing to pay with cash. Go figure.

Right now it's just basically a slightly-thicker (but not much heavier) version of the iPod Touch, though, since I need to get a new SIM (the previous owner had upgraded to a 3G, and apparently rather than doing a SIM swap they do the upgrade by just killing the old SIM). So I'll have to head to an AT&T store tomorrow after work or something. According to the Interwebs they'll give out a new SIM for free, so there shouldn't be a problem. (I'm not interested in unlocking it and continuing to use my T-Mobile service.)

Of course, the silly thing was that I found the iPhone listing right after I broke down and paid the $10 for the iPod Touch upgrade and installed a bunch of free apps. So far I'm not that impressed with the games (including Monkey Ball, which I can't figure out how to control), but the location-aware apps are pretty interesting — I definitely like the native Yelp client, for example. (Obviously right now I'm just using them on the iPod, since there's no sense setting up the iPhone for anything yet.)

I did play around with it in phoneless mode, and was pleasantly surprised by the way the camera works. You take a few pictures, and then when you dock the phone, if there's any new pictures it opens up iPhoto and treats it like a camera. Go figure! Of course the same thing happens when I pop in the memory card on my old phone, but then I still have to manually sync the music. So, as usual for Apple, things integrate nicely and Just Work in exactly the way you'd expect them to (I hadn't even considered how that part of things would work previously).

9:46 PM I decided to mess around with the iPhone even disconnected, and I'm glad I did! Several of the apps I'm trying make use of the microphone, and they're pretty awesome. The voice recorder is kind of meh, but "Midomi" is quite neat. It's a music search engine, which you can search by humming, singing, or even just saying the name of a song or artist. I sang a few songs and it managed to identify every one of them (well, except for my songs, but I wouldn't expect it to have anything of mine). MUCH cooler than the TrackID service on the W580i. On the other hand, its "grab from a speaker" doesn't work as well as the W580i's. Oh well.

UI-wise, it'll take some getting used to this, since on the W580i I had memorized the fast keypresses needed to get to my commonly-used things, and also it'd be nice if there were some sort of structured organization rather than just pages of Stuff, but I am sure it won't be a problem.

It's a bit annoying that the iPhone still doesn't expose the shuffle-by-album setting, even though the setting is there if you're willing to Jailbreak it, which I'm not. Urgh.

10:28 PM Also! Native Pandora client! Woo!