We went to Washington DC this past weekend to visit our son Vivek when I really put the iPhone to maximum use. It is a brilliant device. My only gripe is its battery life. Since Vivek is living in Washington area only for a short time, the apartment he is renting is really minimal. He does not have a TV. We solved that problem by buying a slingbox for one of our home cable box. I love this device. It basically connects to your network on one side and the cable box on the other. You configure it with appropriate protections such as passwords and open a port on your firewall. Then anyone connected to the internet who knows your IP address and the password can use the SlingPlayer client to watch TV. It is really that simple! Installation and set up was a piece of cake. Now, on to iPhone.
Because, the apartment is minimal, there was a broadband router with only one wired connection port and it did not have any wireless capacity. I therefore could not get that connection because it was occupied 100% between the two boys. This is where my iPhone came in handy. Of course, email features are great. It has a lot to desire, but I am sure the additional features are coming. For example, you cannot search your email, nor do you have access to ALL of your exchange folders. It also does not sync many of the folders. Similarly, calendar is a non-issue. There is always room for improvement, but the important thing is to know when and where the meetings are held and it does it well.
I had downloaded a fair amount of music from my iTunes library to the iPhone, so Nalini and I were listening to it (yes, our kids wanted us to reduce the volume!!!) while in the apartment as well as walking back and forth to get coffee. I used the jott client on the iPhone to record some tasks that I wanted to remember to do. While Nalini and I were having coffee, I managed to take some pictures uding the iPhone. The quality of the pictures are pretty good.
Nalini wanted to know the exact definition of a word (which shall remain a secret here) and I was able to use Safari and get the definitions on the fly. Of course, I had to scroll down until I found the definition that matched what she was looking for… And I watched a ton of Indian music videos on YouTube to keep me occupied while the boys were playing spore and Nalini was reading a book. BTW, Spore is an excellent game and there is a lot of discussion on the NITLE list about its educational use in Evolutionary Biology and other areas.
I also checked out an application called Stanza that I have had on my iPhone for a couple of weeks. It is an eBook reader, but my interest in it was that the desktop version of it allows you to save most of your documents in .epub format, suitable for reading by Stanza. If your iPhone is on the same wireless network as the desktop and you have shared your Stanza on desktop, you can see and download the “books” to your iPhone. I also downloaded Time Machine which was available for free through Stanza.
I used the iPhone as the GPS (using Google Maps) to walk from where we were parked near the Potomac to the World War Memorial and back…
Finally I managed to also write a few lines to a blog on Tamil Film Music that I write. This is a little painful because of the keyboard, but much better than a Blackberry keyboard. But the fact that I was able to do this is just amazing…
So, as you can see, it really is a brilliant device. It does have some issues in that it still does not act as the remote control for my TV, and does not open the garage door yet (amongst a few other dreams)… But I am extremely happy with it. I am probably going to pay and purchase a voice dialler next because the free version of the software just does not work!!!