How I
Learned to
Stop Worrying
and Love the
iPhone
!oHNeHNs
Ed Word
Please send feedback and split-pea
soup to [email protected].I
had been a vocal critic of the iPhone since the
beginning. I have very little use for a “smart” phone
that doesn’t support third-party developers and the
applications they build. I have even less tolerance for a
smartphone that doesn’t support Exchange, which my
company uses for email and calendaring. The iPhone
supported neither of those features, which made it a
no-buy for me.
Then, on a glorious morning in March, Steve Jobs
erased both of those roadblocks at once, announcing
native support for the Exchange ActiveSync protocol
and a fully featured (albeit Mac-only) SDK for the
iPhone. Coincidentally, on the very same day, the
bottom row of keys on my clunky old Windows Mobile
phone stopped working. I guess I could have charged
on and learned to communicate without using the
letters C , B , N , and M , but I just couldn’t sacrifi ce the
comma and period. This was my perfect storm. At
lunchtime, I trotted down to my local AT&T store and
bought a shiny new 16GB iPhone.
I activated the phone and set up both my personal
Gmail and my work Exchange email (using the built-in
IMAP client). At this point it would have been handy
to know that full Exchange support is coming via a
fi rmware update in June. Oh well. I got the phone
working using IMAP and a Gmail hack. I copied some
MP3s from iTunes and was on my way.I spent that evening playing with the iPhone
and became simply entranced by the interface’s
lightning-fast response time and well-thought-out
default options. Even then, with the promise of full
version 2.0 fi rmware just around the corner, it was
mere hours before I strayed to the dark side. Lucky
for me, jailbreaking new iPhones, and thus enabling
the installation of thousands of third-party apps,
is simpler than ever before. I downloaded ZiPhone
http://www.ziphone.org and was running third-party apps
in mere moments.
What amazes me most about the entire iPhone
experience isn’t the intuitive multitouch interface, the
gorgeous hardware-accelerated graphics, or even
the slick integration between contacts, calendar, and
the phone app. No siree. What amazes me most of
all is that even the apps created by unsupported third
parties, without the benefi t of a real SDK, are polished
to a high sheen and eminently usable. Well done,
iPhone hacking community!
Of course, it’s not all wine and roses. The biggest
downside to the whole iPhone purchase is that
Gordon Mah Ung’s anti-Apple vitriol is no longer
aimed at associate editor David Murphy but instead
spewed directly at me.(^54)
Softy Awards Once again, we
bestow our coveted award upon the
best apps we’ve installed this year!
(^42)
RAID In an epic battle
of eight controller cards
and two motherboards, we’ll show
you which one does RAID right.
Features
MAXIMUMPC 05 / 08
We test and verdictize
the eight major movie-
downloading services.
18 Movie
Downloads
http://www.maximumpc.com | MAY 08 | MAXIMUMPC 0
Once again, we
bestow our coveted award upon the
http://www.maximumpc.com | MAYMAYMAY 08 08 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC 0