the iphone
background
This section originally started out covering my Psion Series 3 handheld - later replaced by a 3a. After approximately 10 years with the Psions, which were lovely machines, I realised that what I wanted was a combination of the Psion with a mobile phone. I'd seen the original Nokia communicator, which was exactly that, but it was huge and expensive.
Then along came the Handspring Treo and I took the plunge. The Treo was my first encounter with PalmOS, and while in many ways it was an excellent smartphone (and very pocketable), PalmOS seemed incredibly crude after the Psions. Plus there was a design fault (well actually more than one, but hey...) which caused the speaker/earpiece on the flip to stop working after a while. I had an early Treo 180 (greyscale screen), which had to be replaced when the stylus holder got blocked so you couldn't put the stylus away, then the replacement got the earpiece fault. I replaced it with a Treo 270 (colour screen), which was much prettier, but then that got the earpiece fault too after about a year/18 months. By this point Handspring had been taken over by Palm, and both web support and after-sales service had gone to pot (Handspring had had a fully-functioning European operation), so I decided that a switch back to Symbian was in order, Symbian being the successor to the Psion operating systems. By this point I also really wanted media playback functions, too, as I was switching to mp3s for portable use.
The choice at the time boiled down to a Nokia with Series 60 and no QWERTY keypad or the SonyEricsson p910i, which had just come out with glowing reviews, the UIQ interface and a QWERTY keypad. The Sony won, and for the next five years (-ish) it served me very well. Though it did have its quirks... The QWERTY keyboard was obviously an afterthought, being unlit and poorly balanced, and the touch screen was if anything even more fragile than those on the Treos - or maybe just more vulnerable as the top half was never fully protected, and the soft plastic was easily scratched. UIQ was also weird as, while it did full multitasking, applications wouldn't stay in the state you left them in when you switched away, so it could be very frustrating at times. I also stopped using it for mp3 playback as it juts ate battery life, so i ended up with a separate player.
Anyway, by early 2008 the p910 was showing distinct signs of age and starting to do odd things like switching itself off by itself for no apparent reason etc. At that time the original iPhone had come out, but seemed to be effectively an overblown feature phone, and one missing some basic features at that, but then rumours started to spread about what was planned for the follow-up and I started to get interested. When the 3G was announced I got even more interested, but I was finally swayed when the App Store opened, and most of what I wanted it to do could be sorted with a few apps. I decided I could live with the missing bits (since pretty much fixed anyway with the inclusion of MMS and cut and paste functions in later OS updates) and took the plunge.
Since when I haven't looked back, really. The phone is so slick in operation, and just so nice to use, the apps are mostly cheap and some are exemplary: yes I know there is a lot of tat in the App Store, but there is some really great stuff too. And some of the tat is amusing/entertaining anyway. *grin*
iphone apps
In a mad moment I'd planned to do an annotated list of the apps I have installed, but I've now come to my senses! There are just to many, and who else would care? So, suffice it to say that I have a ludicrous amount of apps installed, many don't get a lot of use but are fun to have, others get a great deal of use, for instance Stanza, the e-book reader.