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

A while back (before I smashed up my iPhone), I had the idea that I wanted to change the stock “Answer/Decline” and “End Call” messages on my phone to something more creative. While there may be utils out there that enable this, but I figured, hey, it’s UNIX, those strings must be in files, and I can edit files.

iPhone ‘nix doesn’t have find built-in, but it does have grep -r, which allowed me to find out the two files I was looking for:

• Most of the strings for the phone application are in /System/Library/Frameworks/TelephonyUI.framework/English.lproj/General.strings
• In-call text strings are in /private/var/Applications/MobilePhone.app/English.lproj/InCall.strings

iPhone strings files are stored on the device in a binary format known as “plist“. (Luckily the binary format retains enough text to allow you to grep for what you’re looking for). You can’t edit the plist format directly; there are two ways to deal with that.

1. Copy the strings file to your PC and then use this online tool to convert the binary plist to ASCII text. Edit the resulting text file, and then copy the text file back onto the iPhone in the same place as the original binary file of the same name — the iPhone will read the text version of the file just fine.
2. Install EricaUtilities (download the zip file to your PC, unzip, and then copy the contents of the bin directory to /usr/local/bin or your iPhone), and and then use plutil to edit the strings files on the iPhone itself. Note that the command line arguments in plutil seem to be sort of reversed; to set a key I had to do plutil -s KEY -v VALUE instead of -s VALUE -v KEY, but whatever. There is also an older EricaUtility called plist2txt that simply converts the binary plist file to text, right on the iPhone. You can then edit the resulting text file right there, with, say, vi. There’s an even older version of this utility as well, but you’ll need perl to run it.

In any case, once you’ve edited the strings file(s), restart the phone, and you should see the new strings.

One final neat little trick is that if a friend of yours has a jailbroken iPhone with the default root password, and you’re both on the same WiFi network, and you know his IP address, you can ssh to his phone and change his strings to whatever you like, all while you sit there at Cafe Ritual, sipping your coffee. You can even restart his phone remotely - just use the unix restart command.

It’s easy…

1. Make a short MP3 file by ’snipping’ out the section that you want to use as your ringtone. I use an old copy of TotalRecorder
2. Convert the short MP3 to to AAC. You can do this in iTunes if you set your Preferences | Advanced | Importing to AAC Encoder, add the short MP3 to your iTunes library, and then right-click on the MP3 and select Convert to AAC
3. Use Get Info to find the .m4a file that iTunes creates (it puts them in silly places) and change the extension from .m4a to .m4r
4. Copy the .m4r file into /Library/Ringtones on your iPhone using ssh/scp.
5. If it’s not loud enough, you can use mpTrim to pump up the volume of the MP3 a bit and then re-encode, etc…

I found these basic instructions very helpful in figuring this out.

Using iTunes to convert to AAC is a bit of a pain — does anyone know of a good standalone MP3->AAC converter?

I must be a haxx0r now. I managed to brick my iPhone yesterday after installing some stuff, so I had to restore it from scratch. Once it was restored, I jailbroke it again with ZiPhone, and went to install BSD & ssh again, but those apps aren’t listed anywhere in the package lists. I tried updating the URL of “Ste Packaging” (site) to http://repo.smxy.org/iphone-apps/ as detailed here, and also added http://ride4.org/shai.xml as a new source as noted here - that source links to a ton of other sources, and so I was hoping that it would make the BSD package available again.

No dice. No BSD package. It seems some others are having the same problem. What gives?

I found a couple of references to Cydia Package Manager and the “Fake BSD Subsystem”… Installed Cydia… And Mobileterminal… And I’m in. Nice.

One thing that really bugs about the basic Installer.app is that you have no way of knowing which category a package is in, so if someone says “install openssh”, you have to poke around through all the categories in the hopes of finding it. Cydia has a search button - awesome!

Now that (FBFW) I have an iPhone, I want to be able to use the nifty compact iPhone headset with my laptop PC (for Skype, etc) as well. It would seem that all I need is a little adapter with a female 3.5mm 3-contact iPhone jack on one end and the two separate 1/8″ headphone/mic male plugs on the other end. I found a similar adapter with a 2.5mm “mobile phone” socket on one end.

Others are looking, but nobody seems to have found one yet. Has anyone found what I’m looking for?

Update March 22

Sure enough, someone is now producing something close to what I want. Unfortunately, this is the reverse (PC headset -> iPhone) of what I’m looking for (iPhone headset -> PC), but it’s almost there. I bet another month or two and it will turn up.