iPhone Quirks - Before you call tech support...

I have experienced 2 quirks and both were easily resolved.

1. my primary e-mail account did not sync properly and I had problems sending e-mails. If you have any problem like this, first try deleting the account directly via the iPhone and then re-entering the information directly on the iPhone. This cleared all my problems up and future syncs didn't change anything for me.

2. I had a very frustrating problem with the keyboard where during data entry, pressing keys on the keyboard would take me out of Safari and throw me back to the home page. I thought this may have been the result of the phone falling 4' glass side down on the floor (not a freaking scratch by the way) and was somewhat distraught about the prospects of going back to the Apple Store for an exchange. I simply powered off (hold power key down 5 seconds and then "slide to power off") and powered back on and my keyboard works fine again. I probably learned the "off and on" trick from using Microsoft for years and am glad to see my past trouble shooting skills will not be lost on the iPhone.

Troubles sending mail fixed

I was on hold, over 20 minutes trying to figure out why I couldn't send mail to anyone (other than myself) via the iPhone. I gave up and just deleted the account info from the iPhone and reentered it directly into the iPhone and everything worked fine. While I had stated earlier that I couldn't send a pix message to a phone, that's not quite true. It can't be done via MMS, but it can be done if you know the phone's full e-mail address. This didn't work for me earlier due to whatever issues with sending mail I had. It works now.

I do not like how the iPhone Synchs

it's official, it's MUCH slower than synching a regular iPod. Additionally, as mentioned previously there is no drag and drop support. I can't delete stuff directly off the device as I can with my iPod and I can't add to it directly either. I have to update the playlists (add and subtract) and then they separated "movies" from "TV Shows". I can't make a playlist for movies, I have to use the "checkbox feature" for movies within the synching menus. That's annoying...but that's not what i mean by slower. Once it actually starts synching it takes about 5x as long (maybe even longer) to move 5GB to the iPhone as it does to move it to the iPod.

I think that the issue with drag and drop and forcing me into their synching menus is due to a desire to keep this phone from being "unlocked/hackable", I'm OK with that. I think the issue with the synch times is...bad coding, at least on the Windows platform.

Strike 1 on the iPhone

I knew it didn't take videos and that it only had a 2 megapixel camera (which is plenty enough for me!). But i didn't know I wouldn't be able to send pix messages easily by sending them to another phone. Apparently this is not allowed and I get error messages when I try to send directly to a phone # (with area code, without area code, it doesn't work).

Nor could I e-mail the photo to my cell phone's pix e-mail address (ending in @vzwpix.com). There is no way I could find to send a picture from my phone to another phone. I could send a picture to a regular pop e-mail address just fine though with apparently reduced image resolution. This seems like a pretty big deal.

I hope Apple isn't thinking, "who cares, someday they'll all have iPhones and regular e-mail will be easy!" and are thinking, "yeah, that's dumb and going to hurt us, we need to fix that fast!" and that in the bowels of Cuppertino some software engineers are working furiously on a fix. I have a couple of e-mails out to people "in the know" and hopefully the issue is I'm dumb and couldn't figure it out.

Update 6/30/07 13:05 PDT: confirmation is in, there is no phone to phone direct transfer of pix messages, it's e-mail only.

Update 6/30 16:25 PDT: you CAN e-mail to a picture phone if you know the complete e-mail address of the phone -- I had issues with my setup which I fixed by deleting my EMAIL acct info on the iPhone and reentering it on the iPhone

more iPhone miscellany

a couple of things -- the good news is even with the sun shining right on your screen, it's readable. the bad news is this is the one time all the smudges show up -- the polishing cloth helped, but still left me wanting to break out the Windex. I moved 2 feet, and the problem was solved.

on some of the songs there are digital blemishes (squeals, pops & clicks) that I don't hear in iTunes or on the ipod (and we're talking about the same original source files). This could be something with the way the synching is handled which in general, seems noticably slower for music and video than it does with the regular old iPod. hopefully it's something that can be fixed with an iTunes software update.

I have not noticed any blemishes with video (or the soundtracks for it) but I have only watched about 25 minutes. I've probably used the iPhone for music 4 hours already.