iPhone

We picked up a pair of iPhones yesterday. Not only are we technology geeks but one of the products that we’re working on will have a phone interface in one of the future releases. The wait wasn’t nearly as bad as I had anticipated. We arrived at a local AT&T store 3 hours before the release and were only 25 back in line. They were super secret about the number of phones they had and wouldn’t tell people the number. Not only that but they took them out of the back room one at a time in secret so people couldn’t see how many they had. It was all rather odd and a bit over the top but that’s Apple.

A few first impressions and tips:

If your using DreamHost and IMAP then under “Mail > Your Mail Account > Advanced > IMAP Path Prefix” enter INBOX. This will allow you to browse all of the folders within your IMAP directories with their weird hierarchy that they enforce under INBOX.
I plugged the iPhone into our Bose Sound Dock and it warned me that: “This device is not designed to work with the iPhone. Would you like to turn on Airplane Mode to reduce interference. Yes or No” I chose Yes and it worked perfectly, no issues at all. I then turned it off after a while of playing in safe mode and it also worked fine. I wasn’t able to access any wireless or get phone calls while it was in Airport Mode but since it worked fine outside that I was fine. I don’t know why they had that dialog but it worked perfectly for me.
The AT&T EDGE network is a lot snappier here in Chicago than I was expecting. I’m not sure exactly what performance everyone is expecting though so to be honest I was surprised then I was able to check 4 IMAP accounts in around 20 seconds and web pages were coming up in around 10-15 seconds. I know it’s not a replacement for my cable modem but I’m very happy with the speed. Heck, I can watch a YouTube videos with about 10 seconds of buffering.
When using applications like iGoogle or any application that pops up nonstandard JavaScript dialogs you have to Zoom out and scroll around to get to them. So if Safari doesn’t appear to be responding or frozen to a request look for weird JavaScript windows.
When Safari crashes on a web page it just closes and returns you to the Home of the phone. No errors, no crash reports, nada. It’s kind of annoying that you don’t see anything. I have seen a crash report posted online that apparently showed up during the last sync to iTunes. I haven’t seen anything like this yet though.
You can’t yet save random “files” on your phone yet. I have a few PDF reference files or other things that I’d love to have access to offline but on the phone but can’t yet. So if your looking for offline access via your iPhone then email them to yourself as an attachment on your IMAP server and open them from E-mail.
Not all video streams work within Safari, even if they are QuickTime. If your looking for a new video check out iPhone Trailers on the Apple website. It will launch the trailer in their own video player in Safari.
If your a user of Campfire I hate to burst your bubble but it doesn’t yet work in Safari. To many AJAX tricks make it completely unusable.

In short the phones are perfect replacements to our aging (4~ years old) T-Mobile phones. I’ve been waiting for a while in hopes that they would release something and my waiting paid off. Look for some future announcements from us around the iPhone and one of our applications.