The list of bugs in this blog entry has been replaced by a iPhone bugs category

Someone is going to write a piece like this so I thought who better than an Apple fanboi? Why wait for an industry pundit who is paid to write hate pieces when you can get it here first!

The iPhone sucks! Here is why:

• They only sold like a bazillion phones. There are still phones in stores! Clearly Apple overestimated how popular the phone would be.

• Some people are having activation issues. Of course when you launch the most sought after piece of technology ever and you do it needing to work with a cellular provider (We all know cell companies are perfect after all), that if things are not 100% smooth, you have failed. Shame on you AT&T and Apple for those hundred, maybe one thousand out of five-hundred thousand people having issues.

• Edge is slow! Its so horribly slow! OH MY GOD its so slow! Edge is so slow that KGW in Portland reported it as slower than dial up. Wow! That is slow! I mean it’s so slow that I was only able to show two you tube movies from my car to the McDonald’s workers at the window. That is damn near useless!

Let’s see, what else sucks. Oh yeah.

• There are issues, like the speaker volume, some web browsing crashes, etc. Clearly this phone was not tested.

• AT&T Plans are confusing. This has never happened before and clearly Apple dropped the ball.

I could go on and on, but I’ve got to get back to enjoying my iPhone. After all, it sucks.

Very nice indeed, I’m going to sleep better knowing how much abuse they put the phone through and it came out ok.

Watch

I am going to make these posts shorter and more often just so its easier for others to track updates.

Pros

• You get a nice little “E” or WiFi icon in the status bar for Edge or WiFi. Really easy to tell which network you are currently on.

• Setting per contact photos and ring tones is super easy. Now where is that iTunes update that lets us use our own ring tones

Tips

• To get the text editing loupe, You must tap and hold between letters. You cannot tap in the whitespace at the end of a field and drag back into the text.

Bugs

• I changed the contact list to short and display First Name, Last Name. The sort is totally messed up now. Under “L” I have H R (first last initials), then I L S, then D I B, I S, I S, I & O, etc. Makes no sense for being in the “L” grouping. So I set it back to Last, First sort order, then back to First, Last sort order, and now it is displaying properly. Weird.

• When setting the time zone, I entered Portland and iPhone only offered Portland, USA. There is a Portland, Maine so I didn’t know which one iPhone had suggested. Accepting Portland showed it is indeed Portland, Oregon. Maine may take a quibble with this.

Missing Features

• Voice Dialing

• Voice Memos

• Video recording

So of course all of us new iPhone users made a bunch of calls last night to play with our toys. I checked my bill this morning and found that all of the calls had been billed against my 5,000 night and weekend minutes, not my unlimited mobile to mobile.

Oh AT&T, you sly dog. But you have Apple customers now who don’t suffer crap.

So I called them and the very nice lady checked with her manager and yep, they burn your Night and Weekend minutes FIRST and then go into your mobile to mobile! Shame on you AT&T.

She said she fully understood how poor that was and she would bring it up with her V.P.

I suggest you call AT&T and let them know that shady practices suck.

haha the Verizon booth bit is great.

Watch

(But he won’t be recording cruddy video on that iPhone, it can’t do video at all! )

Pros

• Conference calls rock. It is so easy to add people to a call, or go private with just one. Amazing.

• I paired my Jabra JX-10 headset. After finding bluetooth (Settings-General) it simply found my headset that I had put in pairing mode and listed it. I tapped the Jabra, entered the code and wah lah, I had paired it. Next, I made a call and as soon as I tapped the name of the person I was calling, a widget showed up allowing me to select the Jabra, iPhone or speakerphone! Once on the call, the upper-right “Speakerphone” had changed to “Audio Devices” which I could then tap and easily switch between the Jabra, iPhone or speakerphone. This is unheard of in my experience with phones!

• While using the Jabra on a conference call, I could play the iPod and music played in my earpiece only.

• The phone lists calendar alarms and missed calls right on the wallpaper when you turn it on. If you have only one event, such as a missed call, the slider will take you to the screen to deal with it. Got a voicemail? Sliding the phone on takes you right to voicemail.

• Aside from the playback bug, visual voicemail rocks! I accidentally hit the delete button, but a simple tap of the Deleted Messages button, tapping the message and then tapping Undelete did the trick. Now I have to convince sears I didn’t order a microwave. Wonder if iPhone will help with that?

Bugs

• When playing back a visual voicemail for the second time, dragging the time slider playhead jumped the voicemail to the proper time, but it then stuck at that time. The voicemail played properly, but the playhead no longer moved, unlike the initial playback of the voicemail. I tried a second time by going home and trying again. This time it worked fine.

• While on a conference call and using my Jabra headset, the WiFi connection to my Apple Airport N router kept dropping out. While trying to use Google maps, I’d continually get “Cannot connect to Edge” because I was on a call and WiFi had dropped. So I went to the wifi screen and could see three routers (two are mine) and watch them them go away and come back about every 20 seconds. I am not sure if this is because I had a laptop, Jabra, Express, Wii in the living room and two routers downstairs (one for the OLPC which does WEP only) or what, but it was sure annoying!

Tips

• My iPod’s Monster car/audio adaptor will charge the phone but the audio out won’t work. I will need an updated device I suppose.

Non-ATT Carrier: “Hello Mr. Riggins, it is nice to meet you. I’m sorry to hear you are leaving, would you like to tell us why?”

Me: “Would you like to guess?”

Non-ATT Carrier: “You got an iPhone?”

Me: “Yep!”

OK this is going to take a long time to write up. I’m tired as hell so let me get some talking points down on paper:

Cons

Let me do the cons first because its a short list

• The speaker is weak, weak, weak. Even on full volume, while in a restaurant we could only hear 2 of the 25 supplied ring tones. The volume of the phone is low volume also, even at max volume. Apple really needs to address this, either in the next rev or better yet via firmware. You would not hear this phone ring in your purse.

• Safari crashes – A lot. A crash is evidenced by a sudden return to the main menu.

Thats it! Ok so edge is slow, but its much faster than GPRS which is all I had before!

Pros

Oh boy this is a long list!

• Amazing. Simply Amazing. Easy to use, no manuals.

• Fast, 5 minute activation right at the mall on my laptop

• Fast initial sync, did just contacts, bookmarks and mail accounts.

• Pinching. Kicks. Ass.

• Whoever designed the rubber banding of the UI, so you know the phone is still responding to your fingers, should get a huge raise.

• Gorgeous screens.

• Pictures sync via iPhoto when the phone is connected

• Battery life is good and long it seems. 3 hours nonstop use, still half battery left.

• When a call dropped near my home, iPhone beeped, said call failed and offered a nice big green “Call Back” button.

• It’s an awesome, awesome, iPod

• Safari rocks! (when its not crashing)

• The you tube app is really cool

• Animations everywhere give excellent feedback.

• Flicking and scrolling is very intuitive

• Turning a call into speaker/non-speaker is so damn easy its silly.

• Activating voice mail and setting up the password was a snap.

• I really like the silence button

• Seamless movement between apps

• Typing on the keyboard is really easy. I totally fumbled spelling “goodies” and yet it offered “goodies” as the word I meant to type.

• The phone just looks and feels gorgeous

• The calendar apps is very very nice

• The world clock is a welcome feature!

• Google Maps rocks!!!

Tips

• Don’t make your girlfriend your wallpaper. Otherwise you may answer the phone “hey babe!” and it might not be her

Bugs or little glitches to fix

• the iPhone should not enable mail accounts that were not enabled in mail.app

• Emails should rotate when the phone rotates

• The iPhone auto hopped to a wifi network called “wireless” that had no internet access. It must have been some goofy mall network, but we could not surf at all. It should have realized the network was bogus and switch to Edge.

• Existing headphones don’t work without an adapter.

• The headphone jack has no rubber plug – Seems like it will fill with junk quickly. I hope those iSkin covers are good and ship quick!

• If you use the drag to zoom in on text near the top of the screen, the loupe does not flip downwards, so you can’t see what you are selecting.

• Elizabeth sent me two SMS messages 4 hours ago and they still have not arrived in. Is ATT just hammered?

This really is am amazing phone, especially as Apple’s first shot. I can’t wait to see future revisions.

10:23pm

Whew! What a day! First off, let me say a huge thanks to my excellent girlfriend Elizabeth for coming and swapping batteries for me, to John for coming to Wash Sq to buy his phone and hang out all day, to Starbucks for all of the free goodies, the Washinton Square mall staff and security and to Apple for the excellent line experience, coffee, water, donuts and other goodies.

Ok so since 3pm it went like this:

• Charles showed up to hang out with us and take photos.
• Barry showed up to check out my phone and hang out
• At 6pm, they opened the doors to a loud countdown and let 10 of us in the store.
• The entire purchase experience was 5 minutes. It was seriously excellent. With Apple’s handheld scanners, they moved us through very quickly.
• I went across to the Made in Oregon store and activated the phone in 5 minutes. No issues, no delays. smooth as silk.
• I synced mail, contacts and bookmarks quickly, then we went to dinner with Elizabeth at the Cheesecake factory.
• We played and played and played, I will make another post on phone impressions.

Today rocked! Check out new photos!

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2:53pm Photos Updated.

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2:36pm Rob Griffiths of MacWorld and MacOSXHints fame is now in line with us and even captured me in a photo on his blog entry.

Apple has closed the store and will re-open at 6pm. Overheard from the security guards is that they will be letting 10 people at a time into the store for purchasing their phones.

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1:45pm Someone from last November’s Wii line outside Fred Myers just looked me up. I didn’t remember him and he sat next to me!

Photos updated, sorted descending now

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12:30pm While eating lunch I hear my name being called. It’s Elizabeth’s parents! Odd seeing them here, as they live up in Washington. Turns out they are not here for the iPhone, but rather their car is in the shop down here and they had 3 hours to kill. Also funny is that Elizabeth had just left after dropping off this battery (she is swapping dead batteries with me and charging them at home. Does anyone dare ask why I love this woman?). They caught up to her though as the Crocs booth had slowed her departure from the mall. Imagine that

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11:16am John got lunch after they passed out food court coupons, but not for what he wanted heh.

Quote of the day: “are you in line for that new iPod?”

Line has wrapped into the second stanchion.

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8:26am Apple delivers coffee from Starbucks!

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7:20am John “CatCow” and I are in line at Washington Square Mall in Tigard (Portland), Oregon for the launch of Apple’s much awaited iPhone! I arrived around 6:20am to find 11 people in line ahead of me. They had already started an informal list of people in line. John arrived just before 7am which is when they let us into the Mall.

Apple was present along with mall operations, reminded us to remain civil and already had stanchions in place for the line.

Upon getting in line, Apple informed us that Starbucks will be delivering coffee at 8am! And then the awesome mall operations folks moved the mall benches along the wall for us to sit on all day! How awesome is that?

Then it got even better when mall folk brought by donuts for everyone!

There were rumors in line that Apple would be charging us for our phones at 7am and letting us go home. So far Apple has only reminded us that phones don’t go on sale until 6pm.

I will update this single blog entry and keep adding photos.

The photo album can be found here:

Photos from the iPhone launch

Talk about a home run. $3 cheaper than my current t-mobile plan and unlimited data, rollover minutes and 200 SMS minutes.

Check out the plans!

I stopped in at an Apple store tonight to discuss iPhone launch logistics, as many of us will be there at 8am or earlier. The nice floor guy had no info but listened to my ideas and sent me off to the manager.

The manager of the store informed me that there will be no braclets, no lists, no nothing. What will be there is increased security, whatever that means. So lets figure out how this is going to go.

• People start lining up
• 100 people are in line hours later for potentially forty phones (nobody knows)
• 9 hours later, 5 friends show up to the fifth person in line, either: ** Causing no issues, people leave ** Causing a confrontation, scuffle, security hauling people off, etc

Apparently Apple wants this frenzy. They want it to be a zoo. After all, any press is good press. But do they need this kind of press? Everyone who shows up is a rabid fan. Why should they be put through a shoving match?

I can think of two reasons why I was told this:

The Lie

There will be crowd control – They just don’t want people to know so they ensure lots of people show up

The Truth

There really will be no crowd control and it’ll be a pushing and shoving match to get into the store, with smaller people being shoved, possibly knocked down, etc. Remember the guy who ran into the pole during the PS3 launch? Yeah.

I also spoke with a nearby AT&T store. They too have no plan. I explained that they should do something to reward the loyal customers.

I proposed the following to both Apple and AT&T, based on the plans of the Boston AT&T store:

• Hand out bracelets at 10am based on who is in line
• Take personal ID to associate with the bracelets
• Require that people be back no later than 4pm to get in line, in order of their bracelet number.
• Put up a sign when phones are gone for the day

Why? Who wants to stand in line for 11 hours to find out they ran out the person in front of you? That would suck. The iPhone already has plenty of press, plenty of buzz and more than enough demand. Do your best to make this the best, most fun experience for everyone. Let the crazies show up, get their bracelet and go home to blog about how excited they are. Come back at 4pm and have two hours of mad excitement.

• The customer wins
• Apple and AT&T employees win
• The malls, stores win having less madness all day.
• Apple and AT&T win with the two hour frenzy ahead of the sale.

Ok so who knows what will happen, but the goal of this blog entry is to get people writing to Apple and AT&T to at least voice concerns and ideas. We all want this to be a smooth, fun launch.

What I plan to do, which I did not do for the Wii launch (and should have) is:

• Bring my own bracelets
• Ask people in line if they want to use them
• Take a codeword with each bracelet handed out (as well as name)

This ad hoc system would not be honored by either store, but at least if there was a contested spot in line, people would have some data to present to security to help resolve things in a calm and proper manner.

I hope the day is smooth and fun – I know many of us are looking forward to using our iPhones! Apple is all about the user experience – Lets hope they make our experience in or out of line great.

Apple has released a 20 minute iPhone demo movie that anyone, anyone who thinks they handle the small details should watch.

The iPhone is going to blow people away. Seriously. Even with the stuff its missing.

Apple has a winner. A huge winner.

I have a plantronics m2 (I think, the white apple one) which has worked fine with a PowerBook and rev A macbook pro, but the santa rosa, no go on the mic. The headphones work ok.

I had migrated from the old macbook pro to the new one using migration assistant. Apparently some audio preferences got borked and the only way to fix them is via the MIDI setup utility!

Thanks to MacOSXHints and my brother’s recent bout with MIDI setup:

• I went to the /Applications/Utilities/Audio Midi Setup.app.
• Under Properties For: and chose Plantronics Headet
• Then on the Channel “M” (for master) I UNCHECKED MUTE.

Now my headset works fine!

Thanks to Elizabeth’s mom for this tip, cheap $20 ottomans that have storage inside. Picked up two black ottomans!

People following my blog have noticed that I’ve a lot of problems with my Airport Extreme N, from VPN, to dropouts, to AirDisk.

Throughout all of this, Daniel has been giving me excellent service, including phone updates, new equipment and status on the issues.

I’m looking forward to the day I can report that my issues are fixed, but I do appreciate them staying with this obscure problem until its resolved, especially right in the middle of iPhone madness.

I’ve just discovered a nasty bug with AirPort Disk on firmware 7.1.1. While using Chronosync to backup my iPhoto library, CS kept complaining about a file already existing. Well replace it! So I finally started looking at the files.

On the source, the filename was: 100_0002_2.jpg

On the Airport Disk: iNode142770

Oops!

So I unmounted the disk, connected it locally and checked the file. It had the proper filename of 100_0002_2.jpg! I then ran DiskWarrior 4 and the disk passed with flying colors.

Ok, back to AirDisk. No change. Still borked.

Unmount from AirDisk again and now mount on TiBook. Turn on File Sharing. Mount drive. Proper filename!

I don’t know if my MacBook pro has cached a bad set of filenames, or if the AirDisk just has a major bug, but I’d be wary for now.

While Charles reports he’s had one dropout of AirDisk (My name for Airport Disk) since 7.1.1 shipped, I’ve had an entire day of a disk mounted and operating quickly, about 2-3MB/s, over 802.11n and USB 2. Not bad I guess.

I even used ChronoSync to sync 25gb of data to the AirDisk. Its been going for hours now, but no hiccups.

Next test will be in the morning after the drive has had a chance to sleep.

My new MacBook Pro 15″ arrived today. It has the Santa Rosa chipset and LED backlight screen. Its late so I will make a quick bullet point list:

• Screen is great. Compared to my 14 month old MacBook Pro, its brighter at the max setting and dimmer at the low setting
• World of Warcraft runs at similar speeds to the x1600, except when it comes to smoke/particle effects. There are no more slowdowns. The overall performance may be a driver tuning issue.
• The machine runs much cooler playing World of Warcraft
• I have not noticed must difference in 802.11n speeds but then again, I have 4 other 802.11g clients on the same router.
• The hard drive feels plenty fast
• Total transition time was 6 hours, including the 2.5 hours of firewire Migration Assistant, then reinstalling things like LIttleSnitch, mySql, Sunversion, etc.
• The migration assistant copied the contents of my boot camp volume onto the main volume, which is ok i guess, but it would have been cooler if it had made a partition and just moved my boot camp over
• I have not tried parallels yet
• I now have 10gb more free space after copying all of my music and photos to the 160gb drive.
• The 4gb RAM from Crucial.com appears to be working flawlessly and was easy to install. Two minutes tops.
• The space bar squeaks when pressed in the center.
• The wifi has been solid all day.
• Moving windows feels snappier, not sure why.

For some time I have been a big fan of Path Finder as a Finder replacement. One of the things I missed tho was changing desktop photos.

It turns out, I could have had this all along, but the convoluted preferences are well, convoluted!

You see Path Finder has a much nicer display of desktop icons. They can have info below them, they layout on the desktop better, etc.

Path Finder can also hide the Finder’s desktop. But this is where it gets confusing – The Finder is not in charge of the desktop picture, the Dock is! The Finder’s “Desktop” refers to the icons on the desktop.

So if you use Path Finder and would like to get your changing desktop photos back (via System Preferences->Desktop) here is what you need to set:

• First, click on the Desktop

  • From the View menu, choose Show View Options
  • Next click the “Set Background…” button
  • Uncheck “Show Desktop Background”
  • Close the Desktop Options palette

• Secondly, open Path Finder’s Preferences

  • Path Finder -> Preferences
  • Click General
  • Check “Hide Finder’s Desktop”

This will hide the Finder’s desktop icons but not occlude the images being shown by the dock with Path Finder’s desktop image.

Whew! I told you it was confusing.