Tuesday, 12 June 2007

Preparing for the iPhone

In an email to subscribers on Tuesday, Apple Inc. touted its hotly anticipated iPhone, offering prospective customers suggestions on how to best prepare for the device’s late-June arrival.

Even though I won’t be getting one until July, I had already started doing this a few weeks ago. Consolidating all of my contacts into Address Book was a little daunting, because I had three separate locations of contact info, all of which had large swaths of overlap. In a night, though, it was done.

I’ve been using iCal pretty much since it came out, however I do know that it could stand some cleaning up. I hardly ever open the application, however, due to the fact that it takes forever to open. Instead, I just use widgets to interact with the data in iCal. Perhaps I should just wipe my calendars and start over…

Email isn’t an issue for me because I’ve been using Mail since Cheetah.

I took care of Photos two weekends ago, creating albums containing only photos I will want to have on my iPhone. I’d started using iPhoto more since last winter, when I picked up a 60GB iPod Photo to replace my 4G iPod. (My old iPod had an unfortunate accident involving a toilet which I had just used. Maybe I should tell that story sometime…)

Last weekend, I spent an entire day fetching album art for everything in my near-40GB iTunes library. (To be fair, a good chunk of those are encoded with the Apple Lossless Codec, but I’ve still got somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5,000 songs.) So even though there’s no hope of fitting my entire library onto my iPhone — like I currently have with my iPod — anything I do sync to it will be Cover Flow ready. Now I just have to finish importing the rest of my music into iTunes… (A task nearly 6 years in the making.)

Video, on the other hand, is going to be a bit more tricky. I’ve got almost no video in iTunes, but I do have a lot of video files. There hasn’t really been a need for me to worry about video in iTunes, though, since I don’t have a video iPod. I imagine I’ll dig into this once I have an iPhone. I have a feeling that Handbrake is going to become my best friend in short order.

Apple

2 comments

Daniel Andrews @ 19/6/2007, 12:18 pm

So do you plan on lining up the day of the launch, or are you going to wait for the dust to settle a bit?

Have you had any luck tracking down what the pricing on data plans is going to be like?

My work is (allegedly) going to buy me an iPhone, so I think I might wait to see how that all pans out first.

Ian Adams @ 19/6/2007, 4:10 pm

I’m going to have to wait until probably August to get one. I got accepted into film school up in BC, and as it happens, on the very day that the iPhone comes out, I have to pay a seat holding fee of nearly $3,000. So I’m just not going to have the money for an iPhone quite yet.

I’ve looked a little at their data plans for their other smartphones, but of course who knows if AT&T is going to make iPhone data plans more expensive? That’s probably the one thing I’m really trepidatious about. But it’s not like there’s much choice.

The only other thing I’m concerned about is the year that I’ll be going to school in Vancouver, which could get expensive because of the “roaming” charges. Hopefully they’ve got a solution to that.

So the long and the short of it is that even if I did have the money on the 29th, I’d probably still wait anyway, just so that I could get more time to work one-on-one with a customer service rep to figure out what can be done to fit my needs. There’s just no way that would be able to happen on launch day.

What is this place?

Where is everything?

Tuesday, 12 June 2007

Preparing for the iPhone

2 comments

Daniel Andrews @ 19/6/2007, 12:18 pm

Ian Adams @ 19/6/2007, 4:10 pm

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