Unproductive Day

I did nothing yesterday... because James delivered a surprise (I'd forgotten about the purchase) from his Techcrunch trip during lunch:

The picture here shows iPhone running a VT100 terminal, executing "ps" command. Neat.

The SIM card is working. Contact list imported via the long way: Nokia 6233 -> PhoneDirector -> Address Book -> iTunes -> iPhone (all this trouble b'cos iPhone's Bluetooth is crippled... for now)

The display is very bright, brilliant and colorful. Basically, its like holding a fishtank of widgets. Reading and nudging the email with my finger feels like I'm pushing a piece of real paper. Very nice asthetics.

After getting pampered with the flick interface for a while, doing the 2-finger scroll on my MBP (which I'm usually very happy with) makes the laptop feel... limp. A more subtle Compiz maybe good? I don't know.

Oh ya, there's an app called Apptapp Installer that comes with the hack, which is basically a "apt-get" (or "synaptic" or "yum" depending on which Linux flavour you come from). I'm an idiot because I can't seem to figure out how to get pass the welcome screen for Doom :-P

Generally, lots of stuff on the device to waste my time with (I guess the same for all smart phones). But most of the [application] features are flawed in some small way. e.g. My mails from Gmail isn't my Gmail inbox, but my "unread emails", i.e. ignoring my gmail filters, and there's no way to do otherwise. The wifi reception is much weaker than my MBP (1/3 bar vs 3/4 bars in this corner of the office).

But I can ssh to it, deal with the phone's filesystem like a computer (sshfs). That alone makes the phone head and shoulders above other phones, IMHO.

PS: Had a little scare after 2 hours of using it - my SIM card wasn't working (oh no! a brick!). I ran the "Installer.app" (which I wasn't supposed to) and it worked again. Looking at the difference in "ps", my guess is (if this helps anyone), that this process had crashed earlier: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreTelephony.framework/Support/CommCenter

Comments

[Andy Croll]

Damn you CK. How dare you have an iPhone! If this doesn't appear on Thursday I'll be disappointed.

Are you able to get a reasonable plan for data in Singapore?

As for me, I have resolved to *not* move back to the UK just so I can have one. For now.

[choonkeat]

@andy: I'm already on Singtel's "Data3 Unlimited" which is insanely $exp$. I'm looking at other plans since I can (and speed wise, most probably want to) tap on Wifi now.

[Harish Mallipeddi]

Seriously I'm going to actually move my ass and come down to Thursday's Ruby meet-up just to play with your iPhone. Bring it with you! Bring it!

[choonkeat]

@harish: I see its gonna be a crowded Bezurk office this Thursday :-D

[Damien]

Hi CK, nice IPhone and nice wallpaper on the notebook. Where can I download that wallpaper? :D

[choonkeat]

@damien: the wallpaper came from bestpicever.com, but I don't have the URL anymore (sorry took this long to reply, the comment was marked as spam)