It's been a while since my last posting. The BluRay vs. HD-DVD format war is over, so we'll see if my prognostications from my last posting bear any fruit.At any rate, my wait for a new mobile phone is over. I managed to accidentally crack the display on my trusty Sony Ericsson W600i handset, rendering the phone useless.. Well, not totally useless. It wasn't until a call came in that I pulled the phone out of its holster, and saw it was damaged. I tried to make do by putting my SIM card in my backup phone, but that phone doesn't do web browsing very well, and I can't reply to SMS messages on it. I was due to be on-call at work, and I rely on SMS for notification of on-call needs. I needed to do something about replacing the phone, or I needed to locate a temporary phone I could use until whatever 'ultimate' phone became available. I mentioned before how I was either waiting for the 3G iPhone, or for the OpenMoko phone to become usable. I ended up deciding the existing iPhone would be fine for my needs, and bought one. So, I've been an iPhone owner for the past couple of weeks.
(That's not all I've been up to.. We had hardwood floors installed in our living/dining areas and entry way, and I removed the nasty 'popcorn' texture from the ceiling in those rooms, re-textured, did drywall repair -- did you know termites eat the paper off drywall?-- and repainted the newly textured ceilings. Now that the new floor is installed, I'll be doing new baseboards and quarter-round this weekend.)
There are so many things the iPhone does well, but there are so many things that need work. Thanks to the efforts of many dedicated developers, there is a thriving, unsupported, 3rd-party application development scene for the iPhone. So much so, that Apple has decided to release a Software Development Kit, in order to bring this application development community into the mainstream. I doubt Apple will willingly allow the kind of intimate access to the internals of the iPhone that I expect, and I wonder if folks in my position won't be faced with the prospect of choosing whether or not to 'go legit,' and run only sanctioned applications on their iPhones, or choosing instead to continue to use un-sanctioned applications.
There's way more I could say about the iPhone, but most of what I would say is already out there on other blogs and message boards, so it probably does no good to re-hash all that information here. I'll probably have more to say about my iPhone if and when I end up doing something with it that wasn't already thought up by some other developer or hacker.
