The iPhone entry.

Here's your obligatory "I banged this out on my new iPhone" entry.

I'm using the Movable Type iPhone plugin, which has a nice chibi interface, but lacks some MT standards. Doesn't have an image uploader, for example. Still, it is worlds away from the non-functional Sidekick. And I suppose I could always use the regular interface anyway.

The iPhone not having native WiFi calling is going to be a huge problem. We have no ATT service at home. Right now I'm looking at one bar. You know, the little unusable one. Several times today I noticed it dropping off entirely. I wonder if WiFi calling can happen in a future firmware update, or if users will get screwed with a 3GS2 model at some point. So we're looking at Skype and iCall and whatever other WiFi apps could make this happen. Seems like incoming calls are the real sticky issue.

Rhonda and I have been installing and organizing apps like crazy. So far, I've made the sole purchase, I Love Katamari, and everything else has been free junk. I am moderately amused by the demo version of Metal Gear Solid Touch.

All in all, though, the world of iPhone games is a ghetto. Anybody who has one of these instead of a DS, particularly for kids, is living in denial. Not that the iPhone couldn't maybe someday get a reliable library of real hit games, but right now it's sort of like the Wii... way too much cash-in garbage that is just cheap dev work following the money train. Of course, the Wii has the strength of Nintendo behind it so you know you are getting AAA games from them (and selected key third parties)... Apple's iPhone just has the market share. It's nice that iPhone games are cheap - compared to $20-30 on DS and $40-50 on Wii - but you get what you pay for.

But I'm not in this as a gaming device. It's got all my email, facebook, AIM, iTunes, GPS, photos, Twitter, Movable Type, and who knows what will come next. Any halfway decent games will be gravy. ($6 for Pac-Man?!?)

One of the biggest changes for me is actually having contacts. Since I never cared to get the Sidekick to sync, I never used Apple's Address Book. The ATT store took the contacts out of Rhonda's old phone, that list ended up synced with our Mac, and presto now I've got a contact list! We haven't quite figured out the intricacies of how we will coordinate syncing two iPhones across one Mac, but we're working on it. I'm not really a fan of multiple user logins, which I suspect is the way most multi-iPhone homes do it.

I've never entertained that many contacts anyway. Even my list on the Sidekick was barely above twenty, and that includes nonsense like "York TRU."

I love that you can screenshot anything. I love that iPhoto sees the iPhone as just another digital camera.

I don't love the auto-corrector, which has presented some patently absurd "fixes" to my words as I type them.

So far, the greatest iPhone moment was when I used the Maps app to show Clark the aerial view of our home. Then his daycare, then Grandma & Grandpa's, then DisneyWorld, and then downtown Seoul. (Checking out Korea was 100% his idea, by the way, and that made me so proud that he did that.) Sure, you can use Google Maps on the computer, but the flicky, pinchy touchscreen is killer. Clark was pointing and dragging, really getting into it.

What's great, and I know we've all heard this for two years now, is that the world of cell phones was a bullshit awful nightmare of incomprehensible UIs and scam-artist-quality schemes. Then Apple rode into town with zero cell phone experience and made it all better. I mean, how crazy is it that it took us this long to get voicemail that doesn't completely suck? And now everybody has some kind of iPhone knockoff, even if the visuals are just a shell positioned overtop the usual terrible menu structure. I'll always love Apple for stunts like that.