New iPhone

Sunday, May 03, 2009 by Dave Winer.

It was raining on Friday, and I went for a long walk up and down the hills, very vigorous -- but I got soaked and so did my iPhone. After taking its last picture and uploading it to Flickr, it died. It wouldn't respond to attempts to revive it, so I took it down to the AT&T Store in downtown Berkeley and bought a replacement for $199.  

My old iPhone truly was old, this bright shiny new one is so much nicer -- and faster. And the restore process worked flawlessly. Everything from the old phone was backed up on my Mac, and when I inserted the new one it asked if I wanted to restore it from the old image. I said yes. It took a long time, but I lost nothing, except passwords, which is the right way for it to work.  

So now I have a new iPhone and where almost everything was broken on the old one, nothing is broken on this one. So the iPod functions work, and it can play videos -- the old one couldn't do eitehr of these things. All my headphones work with the new one, the old one had a non-standard jack for headphones (yes, I know I could get an adapter, but I can't manage to keep track of things like that, it was pointless).  

But I still want to bring a music/video player with me because the iPhone, apparently -- can't multitask! If I'm watching a movie and it's going through a boring spell, or I just want to listen to the dialog, why can't I check my email or Twitter -- or look something up on Google? When I use my laptop I can do all these things and watch a movie. 

And I'm reminded how shitty the keyboard is on the iPhone, and think it's a paradox that Apple's COO says netbooks have "cramped" keyboards. The iPod has the worst keyboard. Even if I type something correctly, there's a pretty good chance it'll change it to something ridiculous. When the Newton first came out people used to laugh at how it would mess things up. The iPod really isn't much better, but people stopped laughing. I wonder why? Cook is wrong -- my Eee PC has an infintely better keyboard than the iPhone, and you know something -- it costs less than an iPhone too.  

Anyway -- net-net -- it's a nice new toy to have. In a way I'm glad the old one broke.