What can I say? I’m a bit of an iPhone klutz. I was taking it out of my jacket pocket and sort of caught my finger in the process, causing me to fling the phone onto the concrete garage floor. I feared the worst – picked it up and sure enough the screen was horribly fractured. Of course I immediately poked at it to see if it was still alive, and got a nasty little glass splinter for my eager finger.

Luckily I was able to backup the more badly damaged 3G and restore everything onto the older machine, which seems to work perfectly. Remarkable! Then I packed the busted-up 3G off to PDASmart.com for repair. I’ll update on how that goes when I get it back.

Side note: now that I’m temporarily back on my older 2G phone, I’m reminded how much better the battery life is… wow. And how much 3G sucks – so far at least, I’ve had to keep it turned off 100% of the time. All these 3G-related lawsuits are no surprise. 

Mail.app fix: Once I resored I was having a problem with Mail.app crashing every time I launched it. I found the fix – described here as a permissions problem, probably caused somehow by earlier hacking. Since I had un-jailbroken when I upgraded to 2.0.2, I had to use QuickPwn to re-jailbreak, install OpenSSH, and then I could connect and run chown -R mobile:mobile /private/var/mobile, which took care of the problem (no restart required). As a bonus, now I have both App Store and Cydia/Installer.

UPDATE: I got my 3G phone back from PDASmart.com in just a few days, and they did a great job with the repair. I think it was $130 and good as new… Funny, it seems that the iPhone screen repair info is gone from their site… Hmm.

Yes, I stood in line. My old phone was crunched – not dead, but it would have cost more to buy a replacement screen than to simply upgrade/replace it.

Bugs/issues

• Battery life is definitely much worse. Received wisdom is that this is due to the 3G radio… Turning off 3G to save battery life really isn’t practical without something like a single button toggle app — any takers?
• The new device won’t take a charge from the little Belkin Griffin adapter that I have in the car. Apparently this is a known issue. Luckily, this adapter is in two parts, the plug that goes into the 12V “lighter” socket, and a USB-iPhone cable that plugs into that.  It turns out that while the Griffin “USB” cable doesn’t work with the new phone, if I replace that cable with the USB cable from the iPhone power adapter, it works fine.
• Apps take a long time to load in general. A friend of mine who works for Apple says that the SMS and Contacts apps in particular can slow down when you have a lot of SMS messages (or Contacts). If you have a Mac, you can backup and clean out old SMS threads with SyPhone, but I’m not aware of an equivalent for Windows.
• Contact list right-hand alphabet index scrollbar takes 5-10 seconds to start responding after contact app is loaded. I can understand that it takes a while to pull 1000-2000 contacts into memory, but still, ugh! Apple can do better.
• Contact search input field should float as you scroll so it’s always visible.
• There should be a preference to always allow Camera and Maps to use GPS location services, instead of prompting me all the time.

Good stuff

• Appigo’s Todo app with built-in support for over-the-air sync with RTM. It’s not “push”/real-time sync, but the app is very well done, and the sync works well.
• Pandora – free! rocking!
• Tuner – streaming internet radio stations! Check out WSUM, WFMU, KALX, Little Radio…
• Pandora & Tuner streaming over 3G, jacked into the car stereo!
• Movies.app
• Remote

Missing stuff

• KeePass/KeePassX password manager. I switched from SplashID to KeePass a while back because KeePass has a much better UI, and also because SplashID has Windows & Linux versions that use the same database… I don’t really need the Linux feature, so I could switch back to SplashID, which does have an iPhone version ($9.99 in the App Store). I took another quick look at SplashID though, and the UI kindof bites, and I bet KeePass will come out on the iPhone before too long.
• Notepad sync – so lame that this still doesn’t exist
• Google Calendar sync. I was using NemusSync on my 2G phone, but an equivalent doesn’t yet exist for the 3G. A native Google sync app would be better.
• Google Contacts sync. Something like Funambol might eventually work, but a native Google sync app would be better.
• 1Shoot – best little one-function app ever!
• uPoze – automatic Flickr uploading – I want this back!
• jailbreak, of course – not quite out yet, but almost…

I’ll update this post as I learn more