Eh, 2.0, Brute?

To answer that burning question literally one(s) of my reader(s) asked: No, I did not get an iPhone 2.

Yet.

The only actual advantages the new phone has over the iPhone already in my pocket are, IMHO, 3G and GPS.

3G is great, but it is not, well, everywhere. Especially here in Louisiana. According to ATT's website, go just a few miles east or north of Baton Rouge and 3G goes missing, Right now you can not even keep a continuous 3G connection on I-10 from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. In Slidell? Sorry; you're on the Edge. So I'll wait until the map is more uniformly 3G, not just dots on the landscape.

GPS is something I have been longing for, but now that it's here I really don't know how I'd use it. I've seen a few of the mapping apps, and while nice, I don't need to know where I am with any more precision than the current location-by-cell-phone-tower position. There are needs for such GPS precision - emergency response, navigation and landing big bombs on nasty people - but locating friends in your "social network" is not one of them. Yeah, I know; I'm a curmudgeon. But I honestly don't like anybody enough (wife, kids excluded) to want to know where they are 24/7; and besides, can you say the word stalking? I knew you could.

So as for the new iPhone, I'm gonna wait.

But I didn't wait for the new 2.0 software. No siree. We were on Lookout Mountain in northern Alabama yesterday, and I was on the hotel wireless network at 6:30am downloading the 2.0 firmware upgrade. Got the download and.... oops. Since I use my office server as my default Outlook server, the install got to a point about syncing and stopped. Dead. So I had no phone and no e-mail all the way back to Baton Rouge. (Which was, actually, rather pleasant.) I went to the office last night after we got back, re-ran the install, and all is well.

Quick first impressions:

New calculator. I really like this. I use my iPhone as my default calculator for most things now, but still drag around a Casio scientific calculator for doing more complex math, like logs, tangents, arcs, etc. Now I don't have to.

Contacts: I like having that as a separate button on the desktop.

YouTube in websites: About time.

Outlook improvements: Sweet. Just sweet.

I know there is much more I haven't poked at yet, but I'll get to it. But the biggest improvement is......

The App Store. Real third-party apps! No more "web-only" apps! (Blogger commences to do the happy dance!) I downloaded several that interested me, and here are my first impressions (which are subject to change as experience increases):

Labrynth by Illusion Labs. A digital version of that box with holes and knobs that you had to navigate a steel ball through. Uses the iPhone's accelerometer. It's bloody addictive. Get. This. Game.

Color Tilt by IMAK Creations. A fun "doodle and paint" program, again using the iPhone's accelerometer to pick colors and change colors, with your finger as the brush. I can see this as a useful time killer in meetings.

Cow Toss by Digital Thought Software. You slingshot a cow. That's it. It moos, and makes some bouncing noises. The first time is funny. The second is cute. The third time is annoying. And if you have any brain cells there isn't a fourth time. Until they make it challenging - say, you have to aim a catapulted cow from a castle onto a clueless Arthur king and his silly English "Kennnnnnn-iggits," this is a waste of time. And of 99 cents.

iMahjong by Jirbo. Already played several games. Even worked with my fat little fingers. A definite keeper.
UPDATE: Wife likes it. Kids, too.

LiveSportz by Bluefish Wireless. This app is supposed to enable you to keep up with Major League Baseball, play by play. As a fan of God's Chosen Team, this seemed a no brainer - and since it's free it's a lot cheaper than the official MLB app. Plus, they claim that they will be doing the same for the NFL in the fall. But other than crap out, or crap out and cause my iPhone to reboot, I have not gotten this app to do anything. Not even to set up my "favorite teams." Maybe you must have a 3G connection. But if you do, they don't say it anyplace. Skip this one.
UPDATE: We tried out LiveSportz tonight with the Red Sox / Orioles game. I'm not impressed. We had the game on XM as we tried the app. First inning, when it wasn't freezing up or crapping out, all LiveSportz said was, "Updating..." Whole inning. After dinner, we tried it again during the sixth inning, and... it worked. Updates were lagging behind the XM play-by-play by less than a minute. But then it started giving this "Extended break" message and no more updates, even thought the game was going on on XM. We closed and reopened the app, and it started working again - for about three minutes - and then gave us the "Extended Break" message and some fluff about what a wonderful program this is. Maybe this is just teething trouble, because when this thing works, it's great. But if it doesn't improve in the next few days, I'm tossing it.

Morocco by Bayou Games. A freebie of the classic Othello/Riversi game, it plays well and the price is right. Another keeper.

No. 2 Pencil by Lint Labs. A cute "scribble" app that lets you sketch, doodle, make notes, etc., on a blank sheet of "paper". It's a bit crude, but worthwhile; especially in my profession. It has a lot of possibilities and they intend to improve it, so I'm giving this one a recommend.

Recorder by Retronyms. A simple, no frills voice recorder, with two big drawbacks - first, unliess you are in a very quiet room, or listening by earphones, you can't hear the darn thing in playback; and second, there appears to be no way to start/stop recording to the same recording file - it makes a new file every time. We use a recorder when doing observation inspections and punchlists, so this would be most annoying. I'll wait a few days for improvements - but if not I'll go with another recording app.

This is just a first pass. More later.