the new apps available for the 2.0 software make the iphone a much more useful and entertaining device. they’re all very stable, unlike the hacked versions that were previously available for a jailbroken phone running installer.app. of the 500+ apps initially released on the itunes store, i’ve only bought 2, monkeyball (which looks amazing, but the controls are too difficult to enjoy the game) and hold ‘em poker which i am completely addicted to. i imagine that there will be hundreds of new apps this year, turn-by-turn directions for the gps being one that i’m anticipating the most. here are some of the apps that i have that i love:

hold’em poker

this game was written by apple and is only $4.99 in the itunes store. amazing graphics and intuitive controls aside (you can throw your cards away by dragging them into the center of the table, and push all your chips in doing the same thing), the ai of the other players are really good. they bluff unexpectedly, and usually play their cards exactly as they should. they do seem to hold on to pocket pairs a little too long, and they don’t seem to understand the concept of “pot-committed”, folding to my all-in $20 raise when there’s $5000 in the pot. Other than those few glitches though, it’s a great game and i’ve wasted plenty of hours playing. it’s a great game for anyone who plays hold’em, and well worth the 5 bucks.

streaming radio apps

aol radio and pandora are two other apps that make the iPhone much more useful. both stream music over wifi, 3g, and even edge directly to the phone. aol radio lets you select local stations like kroq and jackfm (it knows your local stations from the gps locator), so i can listen to kevin and bean in the morning when i get to work. pandora allows you to make radio stations based off of artists you like. my “weezer” station plays weezer, jimmy eat world, killers, foo fighters, and other bands that i would’ve never knew about but that play similar music. pandora also pushes the cover art of the album it’s playing, and looks just like you’re playing your own mp3s. whatever song is playing also links you to the itunes store, so you can directly purchase the music. the only problem with both apps is that you can’t use other programs at the same time. once you leave the app, the streaming stops.

location based apps

the revolutionary aspect of the gps feature in the iphone is that it interfaces with social network sites, making them much more current and interactive. twinkle, a twitter client allows you to include your exact location while you twitter, so not only can other people know where you’re twittering from, but i can view on the phone, everyone twittering within a mile of me, or any other distance i set. the yelp app has awesome gps integration, allowing me to find all restaurants of any type closest to me, with all of the yelp reviews. whrrl and loopt are two other location based apps that some friends are using that i haven’t set up yet, but plan to.

midomi

midomi isn’t that useful, but it’s definitely fun to play with, and an amazing app seeing that i can’t sing worth a damn. midomi let’s you sing, or even hum any song (it has english and japanese support) and it will tell you the name of the song, play you a sample, and let you purchase it directly from itunes. it’s been very accurate with the songs i’ve sang to it in english and the japanese songs taka has tried. we haven’t used it for any songs we were trying to find the name of, but it’s kept us entertained.

i was on the fence, leaning pretty strongly towards not getting the new iphone. when i loaded the 2.0 software on my iphone 2.5g, i thought that that was going to be all i needed to keep my geekdom at bay, but on friday when i saw the gps feature on ben’s phone (that he waited in line for 8 hours to get) i was sold. i figured that the madness that the new iphone owners endured on friday would have died down on saturday and that i’d be able to just walk in and pick one up. so on saturday, eric and i rolled over to the manhattan beach apple store, only to find a 5 hour long line. we decided to wait and just go to the gym instead.

now at this point, not being able to have an iphone 3g was making me want one more than ever. so on sunday, i lined up at the apple store at 8am (it opened at 11), #35 in line, and once the store opened up, it was 1.5 hours later until i had my shiny plastic phone in hand. the wait really wasn’t all that bad, the people i was next to were all very entertaining to talk with and the time went by quicker than one would imagine. but no matter how you look at it, i’m a dork who stood (sat) in line for 5.5 hours to have a phone that i wasn’t really dying to have in the first place.

the new phone is great, but not amazing-great. the faster internet and gps is rad, and the new software is incredible, a “game changer” as eric keeps calling it. but the new software was available for my old phone (now taka’s new phone), and the plastickyness of the new back is cheesy in my opinion, but i’m sure i’ll get used to it. the new shape does feel better in my hands, and audio quality for phone calls is noticeably improved.

i drove by the apple store today at lunch, and there was still a 3 hour line to get an iphone. on a monday! apple really screwed the pooch with their registration system, making the purchasing process far longer than it should be. as far as i know, none of the apple stores have sold out of iphones yet, and it seems unlikely that they will. as of today, apple has sold 1 million iphone 3g’s worldwide, and that’s *with* insanely long lines, or at least here in the united states.

last monday in all my sickness, i opened my laptop to watch the live blogging of the unveiling of the new iphone. only about a year after the first one came out (and about 6 months after i got mine), rumors were flying about what features the new device might have. i have to say i was pretty caught up in the moment, especially when i heard the pricing started at only $199 (the original phone started at $499).

but now that the dust has settled and i’ve had time to think it over, i really don’t see the point in upgrading. there are really only 2 new features in the iphone v2.0: 3g, which purportedly makes web browsing about 2-3x faster, and built in GPS. the design is pretty much the same, with thinner edges, but thicker overall. i really only browse the web to answer the random bets that i have with ben and eric, and i have gps in my car which is the only place i’d ever use it, so what would i be paying $200 for? on top of that, the 3g iphone requires you buy a special 3g wireless data plan, which is $30 compared to the current $20 plan, plus it doesn’t come with the 200 bundled text messages that the original plan has, so that’ll be another $5 for 200 messages; $15 more total/month.

there’s a lot of small things that could’ve sold me on the new iphone, like 2 way video conferencing, a2dp bluetooth support, flash support, a faster processor, or mother fucking cut-and-paste, but yeh, the new phone doesn’t really have anything that i can justify spending $200 + $180 extra a year on. but i’m a conspicuous consumer, so we’ll see what happens.

hillary clinton finally “suspended” her bid for the presidency this morning, in a rather eloquent speech where she unambiguously threw her full support behind the democratic nominee, barack obama. i was surprised at how her concession speech made me dislike her quite a bit less, and not out of pity but more from respect for what she accomplished, particularly in “cracking” the glass ceiling for women politicians. this democratic primary was going to be historical either way and while i am pleased with obama having becoming the democratic nominee, my hat’s off to her for a hard-run race, and now trying to bring unity to the democratic party.

i’m somewhat indifferent on whether or not she becomes obama’s running mate. i think it could bring over lots of hillary supporters, but i think it could also make the democrats seem hypocritical since the race was so heated at times, i imagine that many would find it unbelievable that they could work well together. obama/? ’08!

this afternoon the earpiece on my iphone stopped working and i couldn’t hear anything. first i restarted the phone and then tried doing a restore figuring it was probably just a software glitch. when neither of those solutions worked, i figured it was a hardware problem and drove to the apple store expecting a replacement.

when i explained my problem to an apple employee, they said it was probably just dust and they’d clean it for me. i assumed this was just some lame protocol since the phone worked fine one minute and then not at all the next, but the damn cleaning worked, and the phone was fine after that. the girl told me that the speaker is so small that just a little bit of dust or lint can completely block it. weird.

a few weeks ago, i noticed a stuck green pixel on my phone and kinda disregarded it because it wasn’t every noticeable. when the firmware 1.1.3 came out and i could move my icons around, i wanted my alarm clock icon in a particular space and since the icon has a lot of black in it, the green pixel was noticeable all the time.

on tuesday i went to the apple store near my office and some goofy salesguy told me i’d need an appointment with a “genius” and to come back on thursday at lunch. i showed up, told the guy my problem and he swapped out my phone right there. no questions or fancy paperwork or anything. just my signature and a new phone. yay apple!

s2000 edition!

so while i wait for february’s iphone sdk release, i installed the new appsnapp installer which jailbreaks the phone’s firmware and installes the apptapp software to install apps directly from the phone, over the web. i could have been a good boy and waited until the official programs start coming out, but 5+ months is a long time in the life of a cell phone. i figured i might as well get the most out of this phone while i still have it. i’m guessing that in 5 months, there will already be leaked details of the next amazing phone that i’ll be eyeing and saving my pennies for.

the scary part of this new install is how easy it was to perform. the original jailbreak app, required me to download back-up firmware updates from apple, restart several times, and then run a couple different apps before the system was ready to go. the new appsnapp only required me to visit a website, and while using a .tiff flaw, instantly gained root access to the phone, jailbreak’d the firmware and installed apptap, all without a single prompt from the phone itself. the most ironic part of the process is that appsnapp closes the .tiff loophole that it used to gain access, making it more secure than it was when i started.

if you’re so inclined, hit this site from your iphone for the jailbreak:
http://www.jailbreakme.com/

thank jebus. the cat and mouse game with apple and the iphone dev team, while fun to watch, has been ridiculous. i bought my iphone when developers were starting to put out some cool programs using the ‘jailbreak’ by the iphone dev team. it seemed like almost every day the installer tool was getting updated versions of all the programs and iphone life was great. then when v1.1.1 came out and broke all of those apps, development of the apps stopped, and the dev team went back and started working on a new jailbreak. and now, just about a week after the ipdt released a working jailbreak with friendly gui, apple announced that they would be releasing an official sdk in february.

so no more programs that are restricted to web 2.0 apps, and wacky-hackiness. i had mixed feelings about the cat and mouse game anyway. with so much interest in how to hack the iphone to make it run third party apps, software developers were finding all of the security holes in the phone that could be used for evil. on the other hand, i thought it might force apple to offer better native apps in their updates so that i would want to install the new firmware. i guess it doesn’t matter now though. with all of the development that has been done so far in the hacked state, i can only imagine how much support there will be from third parties with an sdk.

to

i’ve been rocking the macally msleeve for about 2 weeks now, and am still diggin’ it. i wanted a svelte case that would protect my phone from getting scratched up by keys or loose change in my pocket, and wouldn’t make the phone much bigger. the msleeve fits the phone like a shoe, securing it pretty tightly, and leaving the headphone jack and volume buttons available. most of the other options left the screen unprotected, so that you could use it while it was in the case, but that wouldn’t solve my scratchy key/change problem, and i can’t stand those silicon cases because they get pocket lint and just about everything else stuck to them, yuck.

also yesterday, apollo released their v1.0 of their instant messaging software, that now supports aim, icq and msn. the notification system is also the way i’d expect it to be natively and so far it seems really stable, and they completely re-did their interface to make it look mac-like without being too geek-like. i wonder if apple will even bother releasing an ichat now that the third party guys have come so far?