i really did want the 3gs as soon as it came out and did my best to convince myself that i didn’t have any need for any of the new features. since i had bought my 3g only 6 months prior i wasn’t eligible for an upgrade, and there was no way i could justify $600 for a phone that wasn’t *that* much different than the one i currently had.

then last week, my wife’s mio gps stopped working and living here in an entirely new area, a gps is pretty much a requirement, especially for her. i realized that she hadn’t upgraded her phone in a while (she took my 2g when i got my 3g), so i upgraded to the 3gs on her number and just swapped sim cards, so now she’s rockin’ the 3g and i got my 3gs for $200. an unlocked/jailbroken iphone 2g is going for almost $200 on ebay so it’ll end up being a wash.

the speed of the iphone 3gs is much improved over the 3g. the internet is faster and every app (especially when compared side-by-side with a 3g) opens almost twice as fast. the new screen coating really does help with smudges, and prevents that “sticky” feeling that my old phone would get. i haven’t really had a chance to use the still or video camera, but i was impressed with ben’s a couple of months ago, and with a kid having a good camera always at the ready is key.

while the upgrade seems to be more worthwhile than i expected, i still couldn’t've done it for $600, but for the $200 contract-subsidized price, it’s completely worth it.

unlike some traders, i’ve had love for my iPhone ever since i got one. i admit i was a hater until i was an owner, but since then, we’ve been like peas and carrots. the phone obviously had some serious short comings, but love is blind and we worked through our differences. finally now though with the latest 3.0 firmware, the iPhone is everything i ever wanted it to be.

of course the simple, obvious things like cut-and-paste, and the ability to search throughout the phone and through my imap email server should have been there from the start, and while i’m happy to have those capabilities now, i still resent a bit that i had to wait for them. and while the other features also could’ve been ready a while ago, i’m not quite as bitter, probably because i’m enjoying them so much. the full stereo a2dp support (and my growing gut) has got me back to the gym. i used to hate that stupid wire between my ipod and the headphones. they’d always stick to my head, or get pulled out when i got on a machine. it also meant i usually had to have the phone within 2 feet or so. now i can set it in the corner of a gym, rock out with no wires and control the ipod from the headphones themselves. i’m living in a better future (although i’m living in texas, so maybe it’s a wash). i also like that i can actually chat on my phone now while doing other things. ironically, i’m too busy to be chatting from work though, so i hope in time to use that feature more. finally, i’ve found xGPS, a free app available through cydia (the jailbroken version of the app store) that makes my phone a full-fledged turn-by-turn navigation device. the best thing? it uses google maps, so everything is very current and accurate. it also also has text to speech, so it tries to say the names of the streets instead of the general “turn in 100ft” like most lower end models. the speech is pretty robotic and could use some work, and the auto-rerouting feature doesn’t work very well, but it’s better than my tomtom 100, and if this is the beginning, i can only imagine where it will go.

fieldrunners is my favorite game on the iphone. it’s fun all by itself, but when you have a couple of friends that are constantly sending high score screen shots back and forth it makes it a lot more fun. we pretty much maxed out the first two maps and over the last couple of days i’ve been working on the new drylands map.

the highest level i’ve been able to reach (playing on hard of course) is 125. i really think that might be the best i can do, because i actually came into that level with 10 lives and the helicopters on that level just ran through my defenses like they weren’t even there. my strategy is to create a “U” shaped maze so that you can reroute the ground troops through your heavy defenses which are in the center sides to combat airships that come through vertically. i also found that i needed at least 1 extra tesla and googun in the center of the map to be able to beat all 3 blimps on level 100.

here’s a screenshot of level 125 after being destroyed by the helicopters. notice that the few that you can still see on the screen still have almost full life left:

the best way to start off building this maze is to just build the entire thing with the guns. you should be able to get to about round 20 before you need to start replacing them with heavier weapons. after playing around with the new fire canon and rock throwing weapons, i decided to stay with the good ‘ole googun / tesla combination as they seem to have the best cost to effectiveness ratio, and after all of my time on the first two maps, were just more familiar.

update
here’s my highest score playing the same map on easy up to level 189:

i haven’t been updating this or any of my other blogs as frequently as usual because i’ve seriously been spending almost all of my free time building, flying, crashing and researching r/c helicopters. a post or two ago, i mentioned how taka had bought me and r/c helicopter for christmas. after learning how to hover that thing (the axe cpv3), i’ve become addicted. i don’t want to even think about how much money i’ve spent repairing that thing from various, ridiculous and often comical crashes, but each time i do, i learn something new, and tend not to make that same mistake again. i can now hover in any orientation, fly circuits, do pirouettes and most other forms of basic flight, so pretty soon i’m going to move to 3d flight (rolls, flips, flying inverted), and i’m sure that learning process will be just as expensive if not more than my last one.

while i’ve been learning to fly with the axe cpv3 (and also on realflight g4, a simulator that has amazingly accurate physics), i’ve congruently been building an align t-rex 450, a larger, more professional and a woefully more expensive helicopter that most enthusiasts prefer. i’m happy though to learn most of the kinks of flying with my cheaper heli, before i start flying this one probably sometime at the end of the month.

i’m also about to start an electric r/c helicopter blog: miniheliblog.com. that will help keep the helicopter posts here to a minimum and i’m also going to experiment with movable type on the site, just because i’m getting kinda bored with wordpress.

while i’m waiting for batteries to charge, or for replacement parts to be shipped from the hobby shop, i’ve been playing fieldrunners on the iphone. i actually stopped playing for a while when i thought i had a secure position at the top among my gaming buddies (eric, ben and stephan), but stephan came back at me with a ridiculous score, and yesterday i spent a good chunk of my day regaining my crown. i’m sure stephan will take it back any minute it now, so i’m working on a higher score to have ready for him when he does.

edit: so stephan beat my level 104 by getting to level 129. i spent about 5 hours today getting to the same level and we agreed that it’s unbeatable. so for now we’re going to continue our competitiveness on the crossroads map.

at the very end, i was moving my inventory up to the end to try to get in front of the seemingly unstoppable helicopters on level 129 hard.

I finally decided to jailbreak my 3g 2.2 iPhone so that I could tether the data connection with my new netbook. The jailbreak process couldn’t've been any easier, but the tethering process is pretty complicated and not very practical. Anyway this morning I realized that none of my apple store apps work! When I get home, I’ll try to jailbreak again and if my regular apps are still broke, I’ll just restore the orginal firmware. Why can’t apple just allow a real tethering program in their store already?

edit: so my apps weren’t working, because i had synced the iphone with my netbook, and i guess that wasn’t properly setup or something. i re-sycned with my main computer and apple apps and hacked apps are playing nice with each other now.

’cause i bet i’ve wasted more:

[dr.evil] one hundred, meeeeellion dollars! ha, ha, ha, ha! [/dr.evil]

when the 2.0 firmware was released for the iphone, it included support for lots of different languages. while she could navigate the phone in english just fine, the japanese setting allows her to type and receive texts and emails in japanese. she can also send japanese text messages to my phone (which is of course in english) and i can read them just fine.

(pay no attention to my wifi network name :p)