xmz - Xavier Muñiz’s weblog |

A friend of mine (Victor Márquez) just asked me some questions about the iPhone intelligence in choosing the right connection when available (WiFi or cellular data).

The switch from WiFi to cellular network data is automatic, as long as you have WiFi activated. In the default behavior, the iPhone will constantly look for new WiFi networks while the device is not in standby, and will ask if you want to join when it finds one. You can easily turn off this feature to save battery (and to avoid nagging dialogs about unfamiliar WiFi spots).

When you get home (or your office, or any other place with a familiar WiFi network) the iPhone will join the WiFi and turn off the cellular data connection. You will only notice the iPhone is using WiFi and not GPRS/EDGE/3G by the icon next to the carrier name; there’s no notification dialog to confirm. If you daily visit 4, 10 or 20 distinct places and you have joined the WiFi networks of all of them, the iPhone will jump from cellular data to WiFi to cellular data to WiFi again each time you get to a different location (Try this, Windows Mobile!).

You can also turn WiFi off completely to save battery, and turn it on only when you know you are near an accessible WiFi spot; in that case, when you turn on WiFi the iPhone will look for familiar networks and if found, it will connect automatically (and turn off cellular data). Turning on/off WiFi is not so problematic, as the switch control is just 2 taps away from the home screen.

Another concern of Victor are the iPhone capabilities as a music player and voice recorder.

The iPhone is also an iPod, and the best iPod: I could say it is more an iTunes mobile (an extension to your iTunes library that goes with you). It can host your albums, music videos, movies, tv shows and classify everything in playlists, the same way iTunes does it.

There’s a downside for the iPod functions here, and is that you must control the play/pause/previous/next functions from the touchscreen (as any other application on the iPhone). That means when you are walking in the street and want to skip the current track, you must take the iPhone out of your pocket, unlock the screen and tap the “next” icon, then push the standby hard button (to lock the iPhone again) and return the device to your pocket.

However, the volume control of the iPhone is managed by a pair of hard buttons on the left border of the device; you change the volume here for a call, the ringer or the music, earphones or speaker. No unlock needed.

As for the voice recorder: There is no such thing on the iPhone. I remember a 3rd party application released last year for jailbroken/unlocked iPhones, but I don’t think I would try this. Maybe in the meantime somebody will release a voice recorder application developed with the official iPhone SDK. (UPDATE) Actually, there are various voice recorder / voice memo applications in the App Store; some of them are free (Thanks for clarification, Christian).

Hope this helps.

Now that I have the new iPhone 3G, and the configuration and initialization process of transferring my personal data has finished, I’ve been using it intensively for 1 day, and these are my first impressions.

First the bad stuff:

1. The Contacts application is kind of… slow when starting up. Maybe this is because of my 367 contacts.
2. The keyboard is not much reliable at the first impression. You need to use this keyboard some time before you feel comfortable with it and start typing at a decent speed. One good thing is the keyboard learns from what you type, so theoretically after some weeks of use, it will start suggesting me every word as soon as I type the first 2 letters. We’ll see.
3. Really miss Copy & Paste. There’s no copy & paste. I understand it is not an easy thing to do, mainly because of the user interface paradigm (How would you select text with one finger? And how would you send it to the clipboard when selected with one finger too? Now the same, but without breaking the UI?).
4. There’s no week view in the iPhone Calendar. It would be great to have a 5-day week view when in landscape mode.
5. The iPhone can’t show subscribed calendars. This is a big problem; some partners and I share our calendars by publishing them as “.ics” in some web hosting, or by setting the calendars as public in Google Calendar. At home, my wife and I are sharing our personal calendars to know about future compromises with the family more dynamically. By now this is available only at the computer, and not in the handheld device.
6. The birthdays calendar doesn’t show in the iPhone. The fact that it is not synced via Mobile Me is not a bad thing, as the Birthdays calendar on iCal and on the web calendar of Mobile Me is just a view generated “on the fly” with the information taken from the birthday field in Address Book. This it is just a feature that has not been implemented in the Calendar application of the iPhone OS.

The good news is, the good things about the iPhone are by far more important than the mentioned bad things, so I can live with them. The good stuff:

1. It feels solid and trusty. The phone has the right size and the right weight. It feels well in your hand, you never think it will slip. The back is made of plastic, but it is hard and doesn’t scratch. The glass of the front face (and the screen) feels smooth to your fingers.
2. It is glossy. Yeah, the entire device is some kind of fingerprint magnet, but when it’s clean, looks awesome.
3. It just works. The software is very responsive, very fast; whit the exception of the Contacts application (a bit slow on startup, as mentioned earlier) the entire OS reacts at your command. Everything behaves as advertised; every button and link takes you to the expected place. The scrolling, zooming and panning works very natural. The A-GPS is very precise, and Google Maps updates in real time.
4. It feels so familiar. Sometimes I just think the iPhone is an extension of my MacBook. I have my appointments on my calendar, which feels just like iCal, the Address Book makes me think is the same program, NetNewsWire shows the same information in the phone and in the computer, not to mention Safari is a great browser with the only limitation of the screen size; the overall interface is very Leopard. This is what a PDA or a mobile computer must be.

There is one more bad thing: In Mobile Me, you are forced to use the “@me.com” email account; there’s no way to configure your own domain (as in Google Applications for Domains). This is very bad for us who want to keep our email address. This is what keeps the overall experience not to be perfect; a 9 of 10.

This is by far the best phone I’ve ever had, and no doubt is the most powerful mobile computer in the market today.

Looks like my journey on finding a decent PIM sync solution is becoming to an end.

Today I have a very heterogenous setup:

• iCal, Address Book and Mail (Using IMAP) on OS X Leopard.
• A Treo 750, running Windows Mobile 6 and ActiveSync-ing my mail (sometimes active-stinking, like Phil Schiller just said some minutes ago).
• Zimbra Collaboration Suite account, hosted at 01.com (for the push-email).
• MarkSpace Missing Sync, for:
  1. Transferring my multiple calendars to the Treo, because Zimbra can send only one calendar due to ActiveSync technical restrictions. Most of the time, updating my calendars shoud be done on the Mac, and not on the Treo to avoid uncertain results.
  2. Syncing my address book. Zimbra does not transfer pictures, and sometimes it randomly changes the tag of the phone fields, say “business” to “home”, “other” to “fax”.

  Missing Sync works well, but you should keep an eye on it… it’s not good to leave this guy unattended.

• A Google Apps account hosting my domain, and my mailbox forwarding all email to the Zimbra account. Google has the best antispam filters I have seen.

In the past I have tried Exchange Server (It was a good solution while I was using Microsoft Entourage on the Mac side), Kerio Mail Server, and of course .Mac, and all of them had been far (very very far) from perfect.

Now with the “pre-launch” of Apple’s new Mobile Me I can see some light… I hope all the promised features are true and transparent. It would be perfect if they allowed you to use your own domain name (A-la Google Applications for Domains), but I don’t think it will be possible (just as they did with .Mac).

Of course, I will need an iPhone to evaluate the service, so… Anybody interested on giving a new home to a young Treo?

IBM’s Research Information Services is studying the possibility to switch a big number of employees to Mac, according to a report of a test program involving MacBook Pros replacing the ThinkPads until today used by the testers.

IBM sold it’s personal computing division to Lenovo back in 2005, and it’s main business today is in the enterprise sector.

The full story is in Roughly Drafted Magazine.

Via AppleInsider.

I’m talking about the press conference given by Apple yesterday, when full iPhone support for Microsoft Exchange OTA sync (a-la Windows Mobile) was announced.

There are some users (myself included) on the consumer side with necessities from the corporate world: Instant push email and instant calendar and address book sync, who surely would be jumping to the iPhone and leaving Windows Mobile devices and Blackberries back.

The only missing piece for the corporate ecosystem on the Mac side, is truly and reliable iCal and Exchange integration. Some dreamers think Apple could bring Exchange support to iCal, just as they did with iPhone, but I think this is less than improbable because:

1. There’s already an Exchange client on the Mac: Microsoft Entourage.
2. Apple said they licensed ActiveSync technology from Microsoft, and that makes me think they are paying a royalty to Microsoft on each iPhone sold. I don’t think they want to do the same for every Mac.

So we’ll have to stick to our current solutions and wait (Groupcal: Will you work someday on Leopard? Will you do it right?), and who knows, maybe I’m wrong; some days ago nobody thought the iPhone would replicate Windows Mobile devices’ friendship with Exchange.

Maybe it’s about time for my Treo 750 to prepare for an early retirement. Well, of course I have to wait for the iPhone to come to México in a legitimate way… and with 3G… and with bluetooth network sharing… and… bah.