Well... I've sold out.  I have an iPhone

My mobile phone contract was up for renewal, and the phone company has been nagging me to renew it.  They were calling me once every week or two, they were sending me letters.  I kept humming and hawing... not biting on their sales pitches.  They kept sweetening the deal, offering me more for my contract price... different phones and so on.  Still I wouldn't bite... I was busy looking at what phones were available and which ones met my minimum "I want" criteria.  I would find a phone that looked right, do some digging and discover it was running on WinCE.  Bzzzzt.. automatic disqualification in my books.

Anyway, the phone company finally offered me a free 3G 16Gb iPhone with an all the extras contract for the same price as I was paying already, plus a couple months free, plus a few other goodies.  I went for it.

Like a numpty.

And now....

Well....

I am kinda of impressed with the silly thing   I love the reasonably fast internet access it has, and the interface is slick and easy to use.  it has the gadgets I like... like interactive Google mapping that ties in with its internal GPS receiver.  it works well for other things too.. like being a phone.  And most of all..... I can turn the volume up high enough for my deaf ears to hear when I am using it as a phone!!!  That was actually my number one criteria... volume.  This is the only phone that has enough punch in the volume that I don't have to keep it at max and then ask people to repeat themselves all the time.  I can even have the volume at half and still clearly hear the person I'm talking to.... yay!

OK, that's all the gooey puppie dogs and butterflies part... what isn't so good?

Well... within an hour of taking it out of the box I broke the OS it runs on... broke it so bad it went into a corner to pout and refused to come back out for about 3 hours.  Basically, to activate the phone I was forced to use iTunes, and Apple refuses to support Linux with their iTunes monstrosity.  This means I was forced to find an old copy of Windows XP, install that in a virtual machine, and then try to activate the phone.  It all seemed to go OK until iTunes decided that the phone needed a firmware upgrade.  In the process it rebooted the phone a few times... which kind of confused the virtual machine a little with the connect, disconnect, connect, disconnect, and the firmware upgrade failed.  No worries.. right?  Just boot the phone in recovery mode, reconnect it to iTunes in the virtual machine and "fix" it right?  Nope... more of the same, and then worse... total lockup of the virtual machine... and then for some bizarre reason.. the Linux host died a horrible death too.  There was nothing I could do to get that combination to work and do the firmware upgrade.  I was seriously annoyed.. broken iPhone, broken virtual machine, broken Linux... nothing in my apartment was happy... in the end I was forced to dig up an old hard drive, install XP on it natively and boot that XP on the "bare metal", and then fix the phone using iTunes.  That worked... just.

So... phone fixed, I disassembled the XP side of things, booted back to Linux, apologized
profusely to my computer for making it run XP. and things slowly returned to normal.  Mostly.

Since then I've been exploring the iPhone apps library - loads of free stuff in there, and just basically having fun.

Last night though... last night... I discovered... Podcasts.  OK, I knew about Podcasts before, but never really got into them all that much.  The bad part is.. in the podcasts listings... are... all the episodes of Happy Tree Friends which are now saved to my phone   Oh right... there are other Podcasts too.

So despite the rather annoying start... I am starting to really like this silly phone.  Have I joined the iCult of iApple?  Mmmmm not quite yet.