iPod, Blackberry, iPhone: Then and Now
I was a holdout when it came to cellphones. Though everyone else had one, I was one of the few folks who decided to go without. Finally in 2006, I broke down and got a phone. I was sort of in this race with Dave, who was the only other friend I knew without a cell.
Fast forward two years to 2008, and I got a Blackberry for work. I’ve been using the BB for a little under two years. A few months back, the trackball started to go a little haywire on me. There wasn’t a lot the Verizon folks could do for me when I brought it in, and so I swapped the physical phone out with a spare we had at the office.
Over the holidays, the port where the charger goes in started to flake out. I was able to jimmy it for a while, to still get the phone to charge… but eventually, it stopped registering the charger, and my phone started to slowly lose power.
With my contract close to being done, I decided to switch over and get an iPhone. Here’s a photo of my new phone, compared to the 40 GB iPod I purchased, way back in 2004. Heh. I’m now remembering the difficult time I had transferring my music, literally hours before our big trip to Mexico.
Damn, what a size difference. My old iPod has always felt like a brick, but it’s much more pronounced next to the iPhone.
So far, I’m enjoying the phone a great deal. I’ve been doing some of the basics (setting up mail, moving apps around). And I’m really enjoying the simplicity of Mobile Me, which I’ve had for some time. I’m now really into trying to get my Address Book updated, and have high hopes of learning some newer Quicksilver-related shortcuts that take advantage of the Address Book.
I’ve only installed a few new apps: Evernote, Instapaper, TweetDeck and Scramble. OmniFocus and Pandora are on my radar, but I’m curious if there are any other iPhone app suggestions.
Also, anyone have any tips in terms of calendars? I’m leaning towards trying to come up with a good workflow using iCal, since it syncs up between my work and home Macs, as well as my iPhone. But I’m open to Gmail which I’ve only used sparingly.
Since Liz also has a iPhone, it’d be nice for us to find a way to sync up calendars. I’m debating whether it’s worth it to get her signed up on my Mobile Me account too…
You could give this a shothttp://www.goosync.com/Features.aspxI tried it a long time ago, so if you give it a shot, let me know how it works. I’ve been keeping all my todo/calendar organizational items in backpack for a while now.
TJ Mapes (January 6, 2010 at 9:38 am)I like Birdfeed for Twitter notifications, QuadCamera for photo fun, Lose It! and Mint for self-surveillance, Dragon Dictation for speech-to-text, Public Radio for my news fix, Shazam for identifying music, Flixster for movie info, CTA Tracker for public transportation planning, Dropbox for file access, and Byline for RSS reading. OmniFocus could be great but it loads very slowly.
Justin (January 6, 2010 at 12:16 pm)I use Google calendar, subscribe to my OS X iCal for home use and forward accepted appointments to my gma account. So I have everything in google calendar and the iPhone app for google is great and always up to date. John
John (January 6, 2010 at 5:44 pm)