My relationship with my iPhone hasn't been an easy one. On the one hand, it's an absolutely brilliant platform -- I just love programming for it. On the other hand it's a money hole. To keep it legit, I'm forking over a wad of cash each month to AT&T and from there on to Apple (not to mention the $99/year new iPhone play tax). One of my biggest decisions on that end involved giving up my data plan. Leaving the $20/month data plan behind as my "optional extra" has saved me $240 over the course of the year.
Read on for more about the iPhone and EDGE and my 3G service dilemma.
Alex at iPhoneBlog.de (Germany) tipped us off to a simple "hack" they discovered while doing speed tests between EDGE and WiFi. It involves creating an ad hoc network with your computer or a hotspot and changing the default route of the network to point to the IP address of your EDGE connection. Accomplish that and you should be able to run applications over EDGE that are normally WiFi-only, such as the iTunes store.
I can't test it right now, but I'm sure that some of you will be eager to give it a shot. The speed tests in the video look decent considering the obvious handicaps. If you happen to sprechen Sie Deutsch you'll probably be able to glean more details from the post. You'll also want to check out the podcast on using Skype over EDGE.
With all of the excitement about the 3G iPhone, one question you should ask yourself is "Am I actually in an area with AT&T HSDPA 3G service?" After all, a 3G iPhone will only poke along at EDGE (or even, God forbid, GPRS) speeds unless it is in a 3G service area.
Fortunately, AT&T Wireless has a list of the major markets that have HSDPA service. Unfortunately, you have to go through the list by state and city name before you can actually click on a map and see if your house or office is in a zone of 3G love. My house, which has sucky AT&T service at this time, is allegedly in a 3G-happy area (blue on the screenshot). That's the good news. The bad news is that I'm right near the border of one of those orange zones, which indicate no 3G service.
My sister currently enjoys EDGE service in her home town of Richland, WA, but is anxious to get her iPhone connected with 3G service. I hate to tell her that she's not on the list.
Yesterday, I wrote about AT&T's new $20/month unlimited data feature pack. Today, my daughter was home sick from school. Why is that important? Because we gave her a cheap AT&T Pay As You Go phone, which she uses to keep in touch when her bus is late or if she needs to contact us for some reason. Pay As You Go plus idle phone = Data Plan Experimentation!
Lots of annoyed iPhone users today in the central US. Apparently, the servers responsible for running the EDGE network for AT&T are down, depriving many iPhone users of their normal connectivity.
This outage is affecting users from Chicago to Kansas. If you're part of the affected customer base, let us know in the comments. According to poster BBuehner at the Apple Support discussions forum, AT&T says the problem should be fixed by the end of today but could go as long as February 5th.
Yesterday, TUAW reader Stephen wrote and asked whether dropping EDGE would "stick". And that simple request led me a lot further than I expected. So let me start from the beginning. As you can see from this picture, this month I was charged only for voice minutes. So as far as that goes, dropping EDGE does "stick". But there's quite a bit more to the story.
Josh Walker tipped us off to his post today about AT&T removing their online iPhone plan specification options. You can no longer go online and take EDGE off your plan. In addition, customer support representatives reportedly will no longer remove EDGE as a feature option, as they did for me when I called up a week or two back.
So what does this mean for iPhone customers? It looks like my contract-free $29.99/month iPhone option is officially at a dead end, at least for now. As for those of us who cancelled our EDGE service when the option was in play, we'll have to wait and see what AT&T decides to do.
Removing EDGE is not a great option for people who use their iPhone on the road--for maps and directions, for SMS, and so forth. For those of us who live and work around ubiquitous WiFi hotspots and who rarely, if ever, use the data features on the go, this downgrade was a great way to save $240/year.
Let us know in the comments if you've recently attempted to remove EDGE from your plan and whether you succeeded in your efforts.
Update: Reader Zak Kitzmiller says this is a normal downtime screen that regularly occurs. Have you been able to remove EDGE recently? Let us know.
Sick of paying $20 a month for EDGE? Want to save $240/year? TUAW reader Josh tipped us off to his iPhone News post that reveals that you can now remove it from your plan. If you rarely use EDGE and live around ubiquitous WiFi (like I do), this is a great way to save some money.
I gave this a try myself but my GoPhone account didn't have the on-web option shown here. So I gave AT&T a call. It was, as always, an adventure and although I was told that you had to do this over their IBR IVR voice recognition system, I did find a service agent who was able to help me in person. (The IBR kept putting me in Spanish mode for some reason. Go figure.)
So as of my next billing cycle, my iPhone will now drop its EDGE/Data plan. This means I'm losing visual voicemail and EDGE access. Neither is a big deal for me. I can still check my voicemail by calling my iPhone on a landline, typing star (*) and entering my passcode. It also drops my monthly cost to $29.99/month--more than I want to be paying but not quite so much as before. I keep my AT&T account and, presumably, some level of Apple support and warranty service.
This option won't be of interest to those of you who pull down the big megabytes over EDGE but for us WiFi folks, it's fab.
Update: You may want to install Services.app, a program that allows you to disable EDGE while retaining calls and WiFi service.
Bill Palmer sent along this list he put together of all the iPhone features you won't find on the iPod touch. When a lot of people, including myself, first saw the iPod touch, we called it the "iPhone without the phone," because it seemed to pretty much have everything the iPhone had without actually being able to call anyone-- MobileSafari was in there, as was YouTube, Gmail and Yahoo Mail (via the browser). But as Palmer notes, it's not as complete as we first thought.
The EDGE network is probably the most obvious and biggest omission-- the iPhone will let you do what you want from anywhere, while an iPod touch only works where your laptop does (unless you have an EDGE hookup, obviously). The Mail application is missing, as is the Notes application (that one has raised a lot of hackles, too), and Bluetooth is gone as well. There's no camera, volume buttons, or dock. The screen isn't quite as good. And strangely enough, Google Maps, Weather, and Stocks are all missing, too. Those seem so easy to implement, and such big selling points, that you wonder what the story is there.
Palmer doesn't mean to knock the iPod touch-- he says it's still the best iPod ever, and it really is. If someone did a list of features on the video iPod (or even the Classic) vs. the iPod touch, there'd be no contest. But if anyone was really worried that Apple might cannibalize their own iPhone sales by releasing the iPod touch, a feature list like this shows there's a lot less chance of that.
Yesterday, I wrote about setting up the iPhone with pay-as-you-go service. Without purchasing feature packs, the data plan goes for an exorbitant $0.01/KB. (With a feature pack, the data goes down to $2/MB, or $0.002/KB.) This got me wondering. It's been almost a month since the iPhone debuted. How much data have you used? My iPhone tells me that I've sent 608 KB and received 2.9 MB--although with all my resets and restores, that number is probably much lower than my actual usage. Still, that's nothing compared to our own David Chartier. He's at 12.2 MB sent and 59.8 MB received. (Data junkie!) So I'm curious. How much EDGE data have you sent and received? You can find out by selecting Settings -> Usage. Let us know in the comments how big a data user you are. Bragging rights to everyone who beats out David.
Update: It looks like the average is currently around 150-200 MB for readers who aren't hovering around WiFi hotspots. The current high is near 2.7 GB. The few of us who have ready WiFi access are way, way down in comparison.
And so it begins - with the release of yet another Apple product that has anything to do with media playback, software developers are beginning to release software updates that account for the new functionality. VisualHub, a TUAW favorite for its exceptional video conversion and batch encoding abilities, has released a new version with support for encoding to iPhone video formats. As you can see, the slider labels change slightly when selecting the iPhone option, giving users a choice between qualities like EDGE, Tiny, WiFi and of course, High and Go Nuts. In addition, using the EDGE or Tiny presets will also create FastStart videos that are optimized for streaming; this is ideal for content providers who want to open their doors to the unprecedented rush (thanks, Daring Fireball) of new iPhone owners.
As usual, a demo of VisualHub is available, while an invaluable license costs a mere $23.32.
As you might have heard, I ended up waiting in line for my iPhone at the Sherman Oaks, CA Apple Store. Yes, I managed to get one on Friday evening (two, in fact) and went with the 8GB variety. I was very excited to get the device and had a great experience in line with my fellow enthusiasts -- even with the long wait. All in all, a very pleasant time with some very interesting people who were just as excited to be there as I was.
Once I got home from the Apple Store, I proceeded through the activation of my iPhone via iTunes. When it got to the screen allowing me to port my existing mobile number over to AT&T, I hesitated, thinking I would play it safe and test out the iPhone a little before committing 100% to AT&T. So, I opted for a new number and went on through the activation process.
However, now that I've had the chance to use the device for a couple days, I will most likely port my number from T-Mobile over to AT&T. I anticipate being able to do that with a minimum of fuss but I will, of course, detail my experiences, good or bad, when I do it tomorrow via the AT&T "Porting Department."
After going through the entire activation process, I received the activation text message from AT&T about ten minutes later and was good to go to make calls, access the Internet via EDGE, etc. So, unlike some others, activation was a painless process for me. Immediately, I went to work on the iPhone. First, I adjusted my settings in iTunes to sync the various information, songs, podcasts, TV shows or movies that I wanted on my iPhone.
Another quick round of first impression stuff that covers some user problems with activation, EDGE speeds, Google Maps and Mail. We're working on some more focused, in-depth posts that explore individual features in their entirety, such as Safari, the keyboard, Mail, etc. For now, let's get started with trying to solve some of these activation pains and go from there.
Activation
Readers at TUAW and across the web are reporting all sorts of activation problems, and I'm truly sorry to hear about it, but I might have some tips that could help get your iPhone on its feet. As I recall, iTunes gave me an error message during the activation process, but the iPhone still kicked me back out to the home screen once it was done, and I received the standard 'your phone is activated' email a couple minutes later. I immediately was able to receive a phone call, and SMS and make an outbound call. I was also an existing AT&T customer, so all I had to do was add the $20 iPhone Data Plan during the process. I'm not trying to brag here, just provide context; by my rough calculations, existing AT&T customers seem to be having less problems than those who are first signing up or porting over service, as those operations probably entail a bit more work in the back-end on AT&T's part.
There are a couple tricks that might help here: First, some owners are reporting that simply soft resetting the iPhone (hold the power button at the top of the phone for a few seconds to receive the power off slider) and then booting it back up fixes the issue. Just for the heck of it, why not wait a few seconds or even up to a minute? It couldn't hurt, and it might work some network voodoo to wake AT&T up and get your iPhone rollin'.
I honestly don't know about this one as it is simply an idea I had, but: if you have a second Mac or PC lying around with the latest iTunes 7.3 installed, you could try plugging it in to see if the activation process begins again. However, remember: this is just an idea I had, and I have no idea whether that will illicit any results or get your activation process even more borked up on AT&T's books. I honestly don't believe it could do any damage, but I certainly am no AT&T activations engineer either.
This is another theory that I haven't seen tested or mentioned anywhere, so take this one with a grain of salt as well: If you're an existing AT&T customer with a SIM card in your current (or - hopefully - soon to be replaced) phone, you could try swapping out the iPhone's SIM card as outlined in the iPhone User Guide (not included with the phone itself). Simply open that in Preview and search for SIM; your first result should be a guide for removing the SIM card and inserting a new one. Then plug your iPhone back into iTunes to see if a new activation process can begin. Again: this is just a theory; I haven't tested or heard anyone try this as a solution for activation problems.
Update: More readers are reporting that turning off your old phone before activating the iPhone might help with activation issues. While this tip won't do you any good if you're already caught in the limbo of AT&T's activation system, it might help if my idea of re-trying activation with a different computer is worth anything.
EDGE
It's surprisingly fast. The best speed test I've found so far for Safari on the iPhone is dslreports.com/mspeed, offering a really scaled down page with a few download size options and no-nonsense results. I'm getting, on average, about 150 kbit/sec downloads on my phone. In light of the drawbacks of EDGE's (traditional) speed, the only reason that makes sense as to why Apple and AT&T didn't make some massive announcement of a network upgrade is that they're getting hammered this weekend with iPhone activations and people tinkering around with surfing via EDGE. If they're going to announce this at all, waiting until maybe sometime next week makes sense as the iPhone storm might be dissipating to more manageable levels where most users will see this increased speed across the country. Of course, this is just speculation on my part, but the tests don't lie: users across the nation are reporting that EDGE has upgraded from its previous 20 kbits/sec speed to anywhere from 100k - 200 kbits/sec. This is great (unofficial) news.
Call me crazy, but I think YouTube is serving up different movies based on whether you are viewing via Wi-Fi or EDGE. I've watched three separate videos via both wireless methods, one of them user generated with crummy equipment to start with, and I swear I see a higher quality version over Wi-Fi than when watching with EDGE. Whether this means there are literally two separate files encoded at different qualities or if YouTube is working some streaming + compression magic I have no idea, but I would love to hear other iPhone users chime in on this one.
Google Maps usually impresses me with its speed when viewing satellite images over EDGE. Simply viewing the standard map and searching for a location is almost always snappy over EDGE (sometimes there seems to be a delay, but not often), and even downloading satellite imagery is usable.
Google Maps
This was probably demoed and I just don't remember, but I'm talking to enough iPhone owners who didn't know this that I felt it warranted a mention: you can pinch to zoom in and out of either Google Maps views. This is fantastic.
Traffic reports are usually pretty snappy, again even over EDGE.
The Bookmarks feature of Google Maps (accessible by the blue book in the address bar) is a great way to save frequently used routes and quickly get at the addresses of contacts.
At first I was slightly disappointed that I can't hook the iPhone's Google Maps up to my actual Google Account, but after exploring that Bookmarks feature, I deem it a non-issue, at least for me.
Mail, selecting and deleting items
Some readers are asking about doing operations like deleting more than one Mail message at a time. While you can slide your finger across any single message to invoke that red delete button for just that message, hitting the Edit button at the top of any message list will invoke red buttons to the left of every message in the list. While this isn't exactly the same as holding the Command key on a Mac, selecting a bunch of messages and hitting the delete key once to trash them all, this is the quickest way I can find to perform large deleting operations.
This seems to be the UI for any situation where you have a list of items that can be deleted; there's no way to select a few of them at random and hit one delete key - instead, you enable a 'delete mode' which makes it easier to delete more than one message, but still one at a time.
I'm slightly disappointed at the lack of the 'One Inbox to Rule Them All' like Mail in Mac OS X has; if you have more than one account synched to the iPhone, you have to drill down into each account's inbox to view any new messages, drill back out to the accounts list and then drill back into a new account and inbox to view that account's new messages. It's clunky, but it's also becoming inspiration for me to consolidate email accounts.
That's about it for now. Like I said, stay tuned for those more in-depth posts on individual features, but in the meantime, I hope everyone's activation problems can get solved soon.
It was difficult, but I finally tore myself away from playing with my 8GB iPhone to put together a First Impressions post. I tried touching on a few things that we might not have discussed before, or at least things that I particularly appreciate that might not have made it into the keynote or video spotlights. Given the complexity and depth of such a ground-breaking device, you can be sure this won't be the only first post of its kind from me or the rest of our team, but for now, read on for some initial thoughts on one of Apple's most anticipated devices of all time.
I just need to get it out of the way: Words cannot describe how incredibly wonderful this thing feels to touch and hold. It is an absolute marvel of engineering. Gorgeous in every way.
It's light; surprisingly so. Not quite as light as I remember my Samsung BlackJack being (one of - if not the - slimmest and lightest smartphones on the market), but considering how bad the BlackJack and Windows Mobile in general sucked, it's honestly a non-issue.
Amazingly, just about all facets of the phone's software work as advertised. Switching from the browser back to the Home screen is a snap; hitting the Home button the middle of a YouTube video is also a snap.
However, YouTube videos take a bit longer than advertised on TV to buffer and begin playing, even over Wi-Fi. Not too worried about it.
Google Maps is surprisingly responsive, even over EDGE (which wide reports are saying has received a significant speed boost in the last couple days. Hmm, wonder why).
The magnifying glass effect is quick and very, very cool. However, it unfortunately seems to negate the possibility of selecting a block of text for deleting. This would have been handy in instances like blowing away a URL already in Safari to start typing a new one; the only workaround for this is tapping at the end of the URL and holding the delete key down and waiting for each character to be deleted in succession. Kind of annoying. Update: Thankfully, a commenter pointed out the big grey X sitting in Safari's address bar, allowing for a one click deletion of an entire URL. Much handier.
The reader.mac.com app seems a little misleading - all it does is display a message on the iPhone instructing you to add a direct URL for a site's feed in Safari, in which case it will display that feed much like Safari RSS on a computer. It isn't a web-based app at all from what I can tell. Unless Apple has something more planned for reader.mac.com, I'm calling this another fumbled addition to the .Mac family (though, for the record: I'm a happy .Mac customer, I just increased my storage to 2GB and I fully plan to renew my account in October).
Have I mentioned yet that this seems to be a device designed and engineered by angels? Because it is.
Changing the ringer/phone volume or toggling the vibrate switch elicits a translucent Mac OS X-like volume feedback.
Seeing translucency on a phone with this gorgeous of a display is nearly worth half the price in and of itself.
The SMS app looks like iChat and almost sounds like iChat; it features a different sound for incoming SMSes, but the default iChat sound for sending SMS messages. My only question is: where is iChat!
YouTube H.264 videos look as gorgeous on the iPhone as they do on the Apple TV (remember: Apple got YouTube to convert a portion of their catalog for the iPhone and Apple TV into H.264 from the original uploaded files; this isn't a conversion from original > Flash > H.264). Note to YouTube: drop Flash, switch to H.264 video for your entire catalog. Now.
Snapping a picture on the camera features a virtual shutter that snaps shut and open again once the picture is done being snapped and saved. Kinda silly, but more entertaining than a 'saving' or 'please wait' message.
The 160 dpi display is even more gorgeous than in the videos and up on stage in a keynote.
According to John Gruber, the iPhone's UI is all done in Helvetica, which I am definitely a fan of. I also agree that Notes being done in some icky Comic Sans-y type is... weird.
That's about it for now. We'll hit up more of the (predominantly) wonderful impressions as soon as we can roll them out.
If the iPhone has an Achilles' heel, I'd say it's the sluggish performance of AT&T's "2.5G" EDGE wireless data network, which (while gentle on battery life) is substantially slower in real-world use than the competitive EVDO/CDMA technology from Sprint and Verizon, not to mention AT&T's own lightly-deployed HSDPA network... but has EDGE really been performing at top speed?
Those millions of dollars of network infrastructure improvements leading to "Touch Friday" must be doing something, and according to Engadget and the HowardForums & MacRumors boards, those dollars may have been put towards a bundle of enhancements called "Fine EDGE." Maybe it's a group hallucination, maybe a temporary anti-glitch, but forum posters are reporting dramatically better EDGE speeds than they were getting just days earlier -- around 200kbits/sec, edging up close to the maximum speeds allowed by the protocol and in some cases double the performance they were accustomed to seeing.
Is this the iPhone Halo effect at work? Or just a coincidence, a measurement error, an illusion? We'll find out more over the weekend.
My relationship with my iPhone hasn't been an easy one. On the one hand, it's an absolutely brilliant platform -- I just love programming for it. On the other hand it's a money hole. To keep it legit, I'm forking over a wad of cash each month to AT&T and from there on to Apple (not to mention the $99/year new iPhone play tax). One of my biggest decisions on that end involved giving up my data plan. Leaving the $20/month data plan behind as my "optional extra" has saved me $240 over the course of the year.
Alex at 
Bill Palmer sent along 
