OK - so I've been a little slack with the blog and haven't posted in way too long. After studying and doing my recent exam on the early New Testament Church at Ridley, I had a massive backlog of stories to write for APC, Australian Macworld, PC Update and The Age. I;m nearly caught up so I have a moment or two for some blogging and social networking.

Over at Hydrapinion, I've just published a story on some free iPhone apps.

 freebies • iPhone apps

I picked up my iPhone 3G about a week after the Australian release and have, for the large part, been really happy with the phone. The one nagging software hassle has been with Safari that seems to be very unstable for me. I seem to be able to crash it at least a couple of times per day. In particular, it doesn't seem to like me trying to scroll and zoom a page until it's completely finished loading the page.

My main beef has been with my carrier. Optus is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singtel, which is owned by the government of Singapore. Optus' cellular network, it seems to me, is oversubscribed and there seems to be little likelihood that the network will be augmented to the required degree.

So, in order to test my theory I've contacted Optus and had my iPhone carrier unlocked. The support tech on the phone, john, was very helpful and after i'd supplied my phone number and IMEI he informed me that my phone would be unlocked within 10 working days and that i'd receive an SMS telling me when the process was complete. Given that I anticipate an overseas trip next year this will make life easier as I'll be able to use a local SIM card and save on international roaming costs.

It also means that I can do some testing with different Optus SIM cards to see if the iphone is being speed-limited to "protect" the Optus network.

 iPhone unlocking • Optus

I've held back on posting this for a few weeks as I always thought that Apple would resolve the iPhone's software problems. One of the most compelling iPhone features, for me, is Safari. Being able to read web sites while I'm out and about is a key element of the iPhone experience for me. However, Safari is broken.

Firstly, I'm still suffering some serious stability issues. As an example (and this is not a one-off scenario) I was reading a story at www.theage.com.au. Safari crashed three times. This happens to me several times per day. The sooner an alternate browser is developed and released the better although there's little chance of Apple allowing that.

Secondly, I think that Safari's design is seriously borked. Why doesn't it cache pages so that hitting the back button a few seconds after clicking a link doesn't require that the entire page is completely reloaded? Surely, it would have been easy (after all, we're told that the iPhone is running good ol' OS X) to have retained Safari's caching functions. This design flaw means that the amount of data being transferred to the iPhone via your carrier is being increased unnecessarily. The lack of caching also means that oft used images, like banner images that appear on every page in a single site, are re-downloaded every single time you move to a new page within a site. It's almost like Apple is programmatically increasing the amount of data we use for the benefit of the carriers.

I guess that I could do a factory reset of my iPhone to see if that resolves the Safari stability problems I'm seeing but a troll through various user forums suggests that I'm not Robinson Crusoe so there's no guarantee that a reset would fix things. Besides, I'm a busy person and the iPhone is meant to "just work". Isn't that the "Apple Way"?

So, Mr Apple - please fix Safari. Get it stable and sort out this dumb caching behaviour. Having to reload a page I was at just a few seconds ago over a slower connection is driving me bananas.

One more thing: Please let me access the iTunes Store over 3G. Limiting me to WiFi while I'm travelling is just cruel.

 iPhone • iPhone instability • iPhone Safari

Being a Melbournite I wasn't able to shoot over to Silicon Valley for the Google/ T-Mobile G1 smartphone announcement. I've had a quick scan of the coverage at ZDNet and note the following:

Firstly - I know these live blogs are written in a hurry but, frankly, this makes no sense to me.

I have to say it [Android phone] does look nice, but as people have said recently it is really a new feature phone (like the iPhone) and not a high powered mobile device like Windows Mobile and S60 devices.

When did "feature phone" become a category? Whatever he's smoking - I want some.

There's a laundry list of features including

• accelerometer
• MP3 player
• Google with Streetview
• Drag and drop in the OS
• No tethering
• No out-of-box Exchange
• No desktop application
• No central sync page (use with you data in the cloud only)
• No A2DP

I've not yet had a play but the spec sheet doesn't seem to be anything particularly special. I find it interesting that the carriers have so much power in the United States. Tethering (the ability to use a 3G phone as a modem with a computer) is missing. No other market so abuses customer choice and options.

In any case, I'm really looking forward to the G1. It seems to be the only potential competitor to the iPhone's innovative edge as Symbian and Windows Mobile have really been left in the dust.

It's interesting that the release of Chrome came such a short time before the G1 announcement. Sounds a lot like Safari for Windows and the iPhone to me.

 Android • Google • iPhone • Symbian • Windows Mobile

Over at Hydrapinion today, I pose the question - what handheld would you want at the end of the world?

Sure, it's a little unusual as blog topics go but I thought it would be a fun thing to explore

 Armageddon • Handhelds

Over at Hydrapinion, I punched out a short story on some iPhone hits and misses.

Stop by for a read.

 iPhone

I've just popped this news story up at Australian Macworld. Australia's largest telco, Telstra, has boosted their anaemic iPhone plans to offer decent amounts of data by local standards.

Telstra has finally relented and is now offering greatly improved, although in no way market leading, data plans for all its NextG customers including iPhone users.

 iPhone • Telstra

Over at Australian Macworld, editor Matthew JC Powell says the following in a recent story:

Imagine, for a moment, an e-mail program that doesn't allow you to search for past messages you've received except by flicking through the list and hoping you don't miss one. Imagine not having the facility to mark messages as read so they don't irritate you with notifications, except by reading them. Imagine not having the ability to have all your messages in one unified inbox except by forwarding mail from your other accounts to that one — meaning that if you also want to have mail going where it's meant to go you have to receive everything twice

After over a week of using my iPhone I have to agree - there are many things that Apple's iPhone does really well but email isn't one of them. I'd go a couple of steps further. Apple has bragged about the iPhone running OS X. Not some half-arsed stripped back mobile OS but a proper desktop OS that's been scaled to run on smaller screens with different input. However, they've left out some things that users expect from any operating system.

1 - Selecting text: Why can't I drag my finger over some text to highlight so I can delete it or copy/paste? And that brings me to Issue Number 2.

2 - Cut, copy and paste: Why can't I take some text I wrote in one place and copy or move it to another? That's plain dumb.

3 - An accessible file system: Why can't I store a few documents in a folder? At the moment, the only way I can do this is to email documents to myself. There's a proper OS under there - why can't I use it?

Here's the thing - it's really frustrating to use something that is clearly very well made and delivers on so many fronts but misses on a really fundamental feature. With the Microsoft Exchange support it's clear that Apple is aiming its sights on the lucrative corporate market. However, they'll not usurp RIM and Microsoft from the pockets of mobile execs until they get these basics right.

Over at hydrapinion, I've punched out a story on my iPhone observations.

Stop by for a read.

Here's another little iPhone story I've penned over at Australian Macworld. This one's about Apple's little "secret" - many iPod accessories won't work with the iPhone 3G.

Now that I have my iPhone 3G I'm somewhat stunned at the fact that many of my iPod accessories are now either nobbled in some way or completely useless.

 iPhone 3G