[SkaredShtles]

Yep, the $20/mo text message fee is what really burns you. The total is closer to $70 with my student discount. I don't have a home phone and don't pay for internet, so I feel slightly more justified in having an outrageous cell phone bill

I don't pay that for a land line, internet, AND a mobile...

 

[blue]

I don't pay that for a land line, internet, AND a mobile...

?

 

[SkaredShtles]

You're wasting your money.

 

[berkshire_rider]

I don't pay that for a land line, internet, AND a mobile...

What is this land line you speak of?

I haven't had a home phone in 5 years and don't miss it or the $45 + a month the bastards charge just for local service.
(I do understand why some people still have one).

 

[SkaredShtles]

What is this land line you speak of?

I haven't had a home phone in 5 years and don't miss it or the $45 + a month the bastards charge just for local service.
(I do understand why some people still have one).

My land line is $23/mo. And the vast majority of my phone calls are local (I think my last LD bill was $0.78). Couple that with fairly lousy mobile coverage at the house...

My combined internet/land line/mobile = $88.

That's going to drop to less than $75 once I get DSL instead of cable.

 

[blue]

If I could edit photos and write papers on this thing I'd ditch my computer...just that awesome. Battery life is a killer, you do need a generator to keep up with it if you use it a lot. As I am right now, riding the train to sf.

 

[Transcend]

Why do i find i am getting way better battery life than reported? Push is on, retrieval at 15 mins, wifi and location services on. I didn't charge for 3 days on standby in Europe?

I watched movies for 6 hours straight and got a 20% warning on a flight home from europe last week as well.

This sounds way way better than what most are reporting?

 

[binary visions]

I get pretty good battery life. I don't turn push on but I have location/3g/WiFi on and use it lots during the day for browsing and music, I charge about every other day. Usually tells me I've used (i.e. non-standby) the phone for 6-7 hours between charges and a majority of that is web browsing.

Standby barely uses the battery at all. I would expect more than 3 days of battery life on simple standby mode.

 

[Transcend]

I agree about standby, but people were reporting less than a day on standby. I have just under 50% power when I recharged.

I can get about 6-7 hours of video it seems out of it, perfect for euro flights.

 

[BigMike]

I'm looking at getting myself and my wife one soon, as in the next few days, but now there are rumors of the 32GB coming out. I don't know why they'd do that after the Lets Rock event, but hey, Apple is crazy lately.


Plus, I have a 30 day return time if it does happen to come out

 

[Silver]

Battery life is a lot better after the 2.1 update. The keyboard lag is gone as well, and the contact list actually loads decently quickly now.

 

[blue]

Battery life is a lot better after the 2.1 update. The keyboard lag is gone as well, and the contact list actually loads decently quickly now.

3 hours of use and 8 hours of standby has me at about 50% battery.

 

[binary visions]

BTW, Apple recommends a reboot about once a week (hold down the sleep and home buttons simultaneously for about 6 or 7 seconds).

Safari crashed a couple times loading an extremely photo-intensive page and a reboot fixed the issue. Just got the tip from a friend.

 

[BigMike]

I'm now an iPhonein' Mobile Mein' fiend!


I totally dig it

 

[SkaredShtles]

I'm now an iPhonein' Mobile Mein' fiend!


I totally dig it

Aren't you living with your MIL?

 

[BigMike]

Aren't you living with your MIL?

No.....




But my wife is living with her MIL



What's that got to do with it?

 

[SkaredShtles]

No.....




But my wife is living with her MIL



What's that got to do with it?

I thought you guys moved in with your MIL 'cause you were poor or something... maybe it was some other Mike.

 

[stinkyboy]

I thought you guys moved in with your MIL 'cause you were poor or something... maybe it was some other Mike.

I don't know the difference either. Skinny, Big, Dirty, Cheesy, they're all the same to me...

 

[BigMike]

I don't know the difference either. Skinny, Big, Dirty, Cheesy, they're all the same to me...

Umm.... blow me?

 

[Ciaran]

I don't know the difference either. Skinny, Big, Dirty, Cheesy, they're all the same to me...

That's why I go by Ciaran. I don't like using my slave name.

frikkin mikes... they're all the same.

Looks like we're two weeks away from phones and the iphone/at&t service is neck and neck with the LG Dare/Verizon service.

 

[binary visions]

I jailbroke my iPhone this morning. Utterly painless - took about two clicks and 15 minutes including downloading a 250mb firmware file.

You should find out of the Dare has similar quantities of cool utilities because there's some awesome stuff here. Tons of standard utilities like ssh, networking tools like DNS servers, HTML servers, lynx, whatever you can think of. You can access the command line of the phone, share internet wirelessly... enough local network utilities that WiFi is even more useful. You can even get stumbler

 

[blue]

I jailbroke my iPhone this morning. Utterly painless - took about two clicks and 15 minutes including downloading a 250mb firmware file.

You should find out of the Dare has similar quantities of cool utilities because there's some awesome stuff here. Tons of standard utilities like ssh, networking tools like DNS servers, HTML servers, lynx, whatever you can think of. You can access the command line of the phone, share internet wirelessly... enough local network utilities that WiFi is even more useful. You can even get stumbler

Any chance of the phone getting bricked because of it? What benefits (aside from being able to use another carrier) does unlocking offer?

Aaaand...link?

 

[Toshi]

Any chance of the phone getting bricked because of it? What benefits (aside from being able to use another carrier) does unlocking offer?

Aaaand...link?

unlocking = allows T-Mobile. jailbreaking = allows 3rd party apps and hacks outside of the iTunes App Store framework.

there are many jailbreaking apps out there. for os x here's one: http://code.google.com/p/independence/

 

[binary visions]

Right, as Toshi said, this isn't a carrier issue.

General consensus is the chances of bricking are slim to none. Of course, blah blah blah anything is possible but the phone has a recovery mode that will allow a new firmware image to be restored to it.

Benefits are strictly the allowance of third party software. Initially I was thinking that was pretty limited because the App Store has a lot of good stuff but there are bunches of apps that won't ever make it to the app store, such as applications that allow your phone to act as a modem, boarderline legal apps like NES emulators, theme apps that will let you skin any part of the phone and applications that require additional core functionality in the phone such as SSH apps, webservers, etc.

And, of course, some apps that Apple is determining trods on their own software and is removing from the app store (most recently there was some fluff about a podcaster app).

I used QuickPwn and this guide:

http://www.iphone-hacks.com/2008/09/25/how-to-jailbreak-iphone-3g-21-with-quickpwn-21-for-windows/

 

[blue]

jailbroken! this is fun.

 

[binary visions]

Download Winterboard for themes, BossPrefs to hide some of the useless default apps, and quake4iphone because, let's face it, being able to play Quake on your phone is just plain awesome.

 

[blue]

Download Winterboard for themes, BossPrefs to hide some of the useless default apps, and quake4iphone because, let's face it, being able to play Quake on your phone is just plain awesome.

I wasted the past 30 mins of my life attempting to play Quake. Good times.

 

[binary visions]

The NES emulator has a bookmark function so you can save games, and the landscape play method is great - buttons are nice and big.

Let me tell you, small wait times are much less painful with this. It has considerably reduced my road rage - when some stupid person doesn't pay attention and makes me miss a light cycle, I just blow some zombie soldiers into tiny giblets and imagine their face.

 

[Ciaran]

We went with the verizon service, and a Blackberry 8830 World Ed for the wife, and an LG Dare for me.

So far I really like it. I think the iphone is less expensive. (I had to buy an 8 gig mem card for the Dare) to purchase, but verizons service is cheaper. (For my needs at least)

We'll see how well I like the Dare in a week or so.

 

[binary visions]

Bump for a couple month update.

Really happy with it. The novelty of browsing strictly for the sake of browsing on the phone has worn off and it's still an excellent browser. I've gotten pretty proficient at typing and the auto-correct helps out quite a lot.

I've got a new jailbreak app called PDAnet that lets you set up an ad-hoc wireless network between the phone and the laptop and use the EDGE/3G data connection. There are lots of apps for this, but this one is particularly good since you just set up the connection and go - no fussing with proxy settings.

Games are hit-or-miss. Some games that you'd think would be really fun end up being impractical. The acceleration/tilt sensor, for instance, makes for interesting games but I don't end up playing them because of the actual body movement involved - it's just not subtle and I'm not going to be playing phone games at home where I don't need to be subtle.

Not everything is roses: Safari crashes more than I'd like. Not a ton, but trying to load a large page full of images (e.g. the "post a photo" thread) sometimes brings it down. Crashes are graceful and simply return you to the home screen were you can re-launch the browser but it's still not quite robust enough yet. Also, it really does need to be rebooted about once a week - after enough time without a reboot, the frequency of quirky behavior and crashes goes up. Hardly a deal breaker, though, since it's a two second process.

My other couple beefs: no true flash integration into the browser, and lack of copy-and-paste really makes itself known when you're using the phone for business purposes.

If you were planning on using this phone for a primary GPS, keep looking. It works okay, and is excellent for me since I wasn't looking for a turn-by-turn, just something to say, "take me here from my GPS location." However, when moving the location dot can be slow or lag behind you - when it's caught up, it's very precise, but I'd say about 20% of the time it's a little slow or hasn't quite caught up to you.

Overall, it's great. The UI is clean and pleasant to use, multi-touch and "flicking" really make the device. Without those two things, the browser (actually, the whole phone) would be significantly more painful - with them, it's a joy. My niggles with it are not significant - I expect we will see both flash and copy-and-paste show up eventually but I can live without them.

What I wanted, I got: a single device to carry that handles a bunch of tasks very well.

 

[Transcend]

Good review. From what I understand, turn by turn GPS is coming in 09 through an apple partner. A few GPS companies have already said they want to do it, and apple has said no?

 

[binary visions]

Right, Apple has a contract with TomTom and I'm sure TomTom wanted exclusive rights to the turn-by-turn.

When I say it won't work well as a primary GPS, I don't really mean the lack of turn-by-turn. The actual GPS tracking simply isn't quite as accurate or as fast as a standard GPS. I don't know if this is a flaw in the implementation with Google Maps and better software would fix it, or if it is a limitation inherent in the smaller, less power hungry and less expensive GPS chip itself.

When it's tracking, it's tracking well and it's accurate within ~10 ft. I just see a fair number of times where it's either not caught up to you, or it skips a little, or sometimes it'll just have trouble following and will show you veering off into the wilderness before snapping back into place. Not a majority of the time, but enough that I'd guess it'd be pretty easy to miss an exit or a turn.

Might be a software issue, though.

 

[valve bouncer]

Right, Apple has a contract with TomTom and I'm sure TomTom wanted exclusive rights to the turn-by-turn.

When I say it won't work well as a primary GPS, I don't really mean the lack of turn-by-turn. The actual GPS tracking simply isn't quite as accurate or as fast as a standard GPS. I don't know if this is a flaw in the implementation with Google Maps and better software would fix it, or if it is a limitation inherent in the smaller, less power hungry and less expensive GPS chip itself.

When it's tracking, it's tracking well and it's accurate within ~10 ft. I just see a fair number of times where it's either not caught up to you, or it skips a little, or sometimes it'll just have trouble following and will show you veering off into the wilderness before snapping back into place. Not a majority of the time, but enough that I'd guess it'd be pretty easy to miss an exit or a turn.

Might be a software issue, though.

My sat nav in the car does that, usually when it's cloudy out. Could that be the reason?