iPhone Saga - Part 1

Mondays are generally pretty chaotic in my world. All the stuff people request on Froday at 5pm they expect done when they walk through the door Monday morning. For some reason they're always surprised to find that the IT department doesn't work on weekends or holidays.

iPhone Monday started with a rant in the face of all the people who were flaming up on my facebook page. I find people are less likely to confront you when you're standing in front of them asking them to make a case. Way to fall flat on your faces gentleman. 

Things I did with my iphone today:

• connected a bluetooth headset - super simple
  
• looked for some useful applications to help me with day-to-day stuff - didn't find any yet HOWEVER, I did find that for 99 cents I could download the top application in the app store called iFart. I could see this being useful for chris patterson, but not myself. Brian Cary showed off an application that fogs up on the screen so I can wrong on what looks like a mirror that on which moisture had condensed. That led into the "naked women pushed up against glass background" conversation - again nothing really useful here. Ben Guthrie demo'd a free 'flashlight' application: basically it turns the screen blank - thanks ben, not really what I'm looking for considering I can get the same brightness out of the screen by just hitting a button. I'll try again tomorrow.
  
• A colleague IM'd me for some password settings to a VPN tunnel and after I inquired further to understand the scope of the problem, he mentioned that the iphone had cisco VPN support built-in - cha-ching! Now that's what I'm talking about! I did come across some VPN settings earlier, but neglected to hit the 'ipsec' button, but lo and behold and pretty cisco symbol. No time to fully explore this today, I'm going to tackle cisco vpn on the iphone tomorrow. (funny how that suggestion came outside IMD... btw, IMD does not use cisco so this function in their context is pretty useless).
• tweaked some phone & email settings - one of my main initial frustrations with this device was it's inferiority to blackberry in the email realm, my main area of concern. After some tweaking of the phone settings (namely auto-lock set to NEVER, passcode lock set to OFF) and some email settings (push my IMD exchange email, fetch other accounts as often as possible) email has be come... usable. If auto lock is set to NEVER, the phone doesn't seem to fall asleep. Meaning, even if I push the lock button up on top, if will still fetch emails in an email account However, something I'm a little perturbed is that the fastest fetch time is "Every 15 Minutes". Blackberry email delivery feels instantaneous...
  
• Left my phone is audible mode instead of vibrate - this is new for me because I was so attached to the vibrate function on my old 8820: quiet enough not to piss people off; loud enough to hear from across the room or feel in a hip holster. I found ring tones on the iphone to be less annoying than blackberry's... the default choices they offer, anyway. Either device gives one the ability to upload their own ring tones if you're so inclined (I have no time for that ATM). I found a good volume and ringtone right away on the iphone that didn't annoy the hell out of me, much less those in the immediate vicinity. I find that audible rings draw so much attention which is something I'm trying to avoid when my phone goes off. Initial SMS and email delivery tones are very subtle as well, but have me reacting to a nearby mac (same sounds) instead of my phone. I think I can get used to that.
  
• Sent 15 text messages - low volume day; still trying to get used to this damn keyboard.
  
• Received 127 Emails - replied to none of them from my phone. I was close to my main computer most of the day and I prefer a full keyboard to any mobile qwerty any day of the week. I'll work on this one throughout the week. getting used to the keyboard is going to be a major factor in the evaluation.
  

Nothing knocking my socks off on this Monday... day 1... other than maybe the Cisco VPN capabilities I have yet to try. Both good and bad experiences today... 

I'll write more about email functionality and the email app as the week goes on.