Tuesday, June 16, 2009

iPhones Kick Ass

Ten days ago I wrote a post about our awesome GPS, Dorothy. I said how amazing it was guiding us around Maryland and Washington, DC and how we wouldn't have had nearly as good a time without it.

That was written in an airport while traveling from Maryland to California. Wouldn't you know it but the minute we touched down in San Diego it became virtually useless? We turned it on while waiting for the rental car, in the hopes that it would have acquired a fix on the GPS satellites necessary to plot our course to our hotel. No Dice.

As we sat in the crappy car (dodge nitro... avoid them at all costs) waiting for Dorothy to get a signal I went to the maps function on my iPhone and tried getting a GPS signal there. It didn't get one right away, but the iPhone can use cell phone towers to get an approximate position. It's not nearly as accurate as the GPS, but it locates you within a few blocks. Jen used the approximate position to figure out exactly where we were and map out a route to the hotel. By the time we got to the highway Dorothy was back on track (I said, "virtually useless," not "useless." There is a difference.) but on that first short drive she was more or less supersceded by a pair of soon-to-be-outdated (on Friday) iPhone 3G's.

For the rest of the West Coast week the iPhones were used for much of our mapping, direction routing needs. (Jen also used an actual, physical map for much of the navigation. Remember those old fasioned paper things? They still work!) We also occassionally used a couple of iPhone GPS applications (in all three honeymoon locations, VT, MD, and CA). Specifically, Yelp and Sitorsquat. Both are user generated content. Yelp gives you just about anything you can think of within specified distances from your current location. Everything from restaurants to government buildings to tourist attractions. Sitorsquat works the same way but it shows you the locations of nearby public rest rooms.

Generally speaking though, while in California we relied very heavily on the iPhone's Maps application. Whenever we went off the planned route it came in handy. When we decided to find a hotel to stay in after the Dodgers game we used the Maps app. When we found out that we couldn't watch the sunset from Point Loma because the military closes the road at 5:00pm we went to the Maps app and found our way to Ocean beach. Lots of good things like that.

The iPhone absolutely kicks ass, and tomorrow it might be getting even better. OS 3.0 will be released at some point tomorrow. Some of the things iPhone users have been desperate for since day one will be ours at last. Copy and Paste, which seems like such a simple thing, has never been available. It's hard to select and copy text when the only tools available to you are your fingers, and just about every finger motion is already used for some other functionality. While multitasking (running more than one process at a time) is still not possible we can get alert messages from different applications. People have been jonzing for that in a bad way. Also, we should finally be getting multimedia messaging (pictures in text messages) with this OS, although there seems to be some question as to how AT&T is going to handle billing, or if it's going to be functional right away. We'll have to see on that one. Finally, for the first time iPhones will be able to run turn-by-turn GPS applications. Basically something like Dorothy on our phones. Tom Tom supposedly has an app ready for release. I might get it if it's not too expensive. I suppose I will name it Toto.

I am hoping the update will be available real early, like say 6:00am. I want to install it before I go to work so I won't have to be jealous of all the folks who get it before me.

On Friday however, our ass kicking super smart phones will become pretty much obsolete. The iPhone 3GS comes out. It includes a couple of things that are drool worthy for me. Specifically, a 3 megapixel camera (3 megapixels in a camera phone? Surely you jest!) that also lets you shoot video. There is also video editing functionality. Twitter is likely to explode!

I will not be upgrading my phone this time. I will take this software update but wait for the next hardware upgrade. Hopefully by that time we'll be able to run Flash in Safari. Only time will tell.

Whichever hardware and software you are using, take heart in always knowing that the iPhone Kicks Ass.

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