Hurray! iPhones Can Multi-Text or Group Text

You can imagine my shock when I went from multi-texting from my regular Nokia phone and later my Nokia PDA, to not be able to text to more than one person from the genius iPhone. Shocked and awed. So socked and awed that I could not recommend the iPhone with the enthusiasm that I wanted. Now, however, my iPhone can multi-text. It drank an update when I synched it, and I can group text! Sigh of relief.

Why would you want to multi-text or text to a group? To tell 2 people who you are meeting with in 15 minutes that the address has changed. Or to wish everyone happy new year at once. Or to ask your bridal party for their measurements all at once.

Here is an article at MacNewsWorld on speculation on the new iPhone. AT&T may sell it at $199? *whistle*. I bought it at $600, and now have the $99 unlimited talk plan (with $20 additional for data ie web and email), and am apparently locked in. As of 5/8/08, the plan is still being offered. Here are Apple's price plans for the iPhone. Apple features a $119 unlimited talk and data plan. This is really AT&T's plan that I have:

$99 unlimited talk + $20 unlimited data = $119 (plus taxes for your area)

You can buy the iPhone at Amazon, and activate via iTunes!

Apple Won't Fix or Take Back Hacked Phones

Just found this article from ZD Net via DIGG about a guy's friend who expected Apple to service his hacked iPhone. Apple wouldn't do it, and blacklisted his phone from future fixes, and refused to fix it. Um, duh? That's like: "Hi Mr. Store, I took apart your product and sprinkled some of my own stuff into it. Cool, huh? Got around your contract thing. So anyway, it's doing some weird thing that I need you to fix. Okay?"

He put a 3rd party application into it that opened the phone up to be used on TMobile, an accomplishment that happened rather quickly after its release. A lot of people want the iPhone opened up, like Free the iPhone.

My opinion? I wouldn't fix it if I were Apple. It's their product. They make the rules. Deal with it or invent something else. And don't invent something else to manipulate the existing product.

Related articles:
"Hackers" to share secret for iPhone free of AT&T
iPhone SIM Free

Apple to Issue $100 Credit to Early iPhone Customers

In the comments for my post on my iPhone flaws and pet peeves, fellow blogger MelissaHead informed us that her pet peeve was the lowered price of the iPhone of $200 so soon after the release - which is to the annoying dismay of us early customers. Then she found a letter from Steve Jobs stating that he received tons of emails from people like us (I didn't write in), and has agreed to issue a $100 Apple Store credit. Here's his letter:

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

Related Posts:
Stylepoll: Will you buy the $399 iPhone?

Annoying iPhone Flaws and Pet Peeves : One Girl's Review

We've gone over what features I love about the iPhone in this mini iPhone review. The annoyances aren't outweighing my love, but they are causing me to flatly say: "If you are not obsessed with the iPhone, do not buy it now. If you are obsessed with your Blackberry, do not buy the iPhone."

My iPhone Pet Peeves

• For $500, you can buy a phone that does not text the beautiful pictures it takes. That's right. One of the glorious features of the iPhone is its picture quality. You can email a picture to an address you hopefully have in your address book, if not memorized in your head, but you cannot text an image.
• I also think you can't take video. You can watch video on the iPhone, and you can click straight to YouTube, but you cannot take your own video - I don' think.
  
• The keyboard. I know it's cool and on the screen and all, but I can't thumb-type. I hold the iPhone in my right hand, and type with my pointer finger with my left hand. I've seen others do it this way, so I'm not alone. This means that texting or emailing while driving is very hard. Harder than when you were doing it before.
  
• Deleting emails at a time. You get all of your email, and can delete your email, but to delete it, you can't mass delete. There are no little squares to check so that you can delete a bunch at a time. Kind of annoying.
• Ok, so the Visual Voicemail is cool. You can see a list of who called and click on the name to listen. Love it. But, as with all lists in the phone, the spaces holding the person's name its too small. I have long, slender fingers, but even I have hit the wrong person before, and called someone who I least wanted to call.
• Can't highlight a group of words. That would be helpful to copy and past a link, change something all at once, etc.
  
• Adding to the Calendar. If I am looking at the Day view (vs the Month or List view), and I want to add something at 3:00pm, my instinct is to double click in the 3:00pm slot. No can do. I have to hit a little + sign at the top right of the screen (which, if you were a man with thick fingers, this would be hard to hit) to enter an event from scratch, where I have to assign the time.
• Vibrate switch is easy to activate. There is a 'quick' switch if you want to quickly switch you phone onto vibrate. Apple put the vibrate button on the side, so that if you slide it into your purse, you could move the switch over and silence your phone.
• Answering a call. I use the earpiece that came with the phone. And it's great. It's the iPod earbuds but with a speaking device in it. It comes in handy when I jog, in that if I'm listening to music, and the phone rings, which fades out the music, I can click the button on my earphones and answer the call. For some reason, I don't think to do this when I'm not jogging, so I use the slider to unlock the phone and answer. Well, if you don't slide the slider in just the right place, it won't unlock, causing you to miss or be being rushed on answering your phone. There may be a button at the top, actually, that does this. I'll have to check it.

I still have not read the user manual for the iPhone. But if you would like the PDF, here it is (PDF). There's a lot to be learned with this iPhone. For example: today I just learned that if I was talking, and then hung up by pressing the little button on my earbuds, if I press it a second time it turns on the iPod and whatever album I was listening to 5 hours ago starts playing right where it left off.

But, there are some basic functions that it needs to include, namely texting an image. That's just absurd.

I Got the iPhone.

I got the iPhone. Gerdy made me. My justifications:

• It was released in the month of my 30th birthday
• I got a new project today," and "Gerdy (my dog) dragged me into the store on our walk that usually never involves W.95th and Broadway. How can I deny her."

Every time I take it out of my purse, people ask questions. If it's a man, he says: "Is that the iPhone?" If it's a woman, she says: "Is that the iPhone? Oh, is that your cat on there? Oh! My cat...yadda yadda."
I have a picture of my gray cat Dinah on the phone as my wallpaper, which is not that unusual, but the screen is so big and clear, that it looks revolutionary.

I'm timing myself for this post, to show you how the iPhone has improved my life. At 10:42pm I took a picture of myself on the iPhone to show you how good it is.

See how good I look? ;) Kidding. I'm at Panera, working and listening to Sarah McLachlan. At 10:43am I emailed it to myself. At 10:44am I answered an email while waiting for my picture to show up in my inbox (Panera has free wireless). By 10:45am, I had received the email, saved it to my computer, loaded up my FTP software and uploaded the picture to the FashionMista server so that it could display here on this blog. This means that at 10:42am I took a picture, and by 10:45am it was ready to go live on the web, whenever I finish yapping away on this post.

I was super excited when I got the iPhone, but really, I just felt complete. I am a Mac girl, so I have been waiting for years and years for Apple to release something that gives us a calendar and address book in the palm of our hands, just like everyone else

iPhone Highlights (in no particular order)

• If it's not in a case, it slides into my cloth lined wallet.


• Address book and calendar synch with my computer via iTunes. It literally updates just like an iPod


• When I synch the address book and calendar, the iPhone actually alerts me to how many contacts on each device - the iPhone and my computer, a PowerBookG4 - will be updated. This means I can type an event into my iPhone calendar, and it will fly into my computer calendar when I synch the iPod. Same with the Address book. And by "synch" I mean plug in the iPhone into my computer.


• While jogging and subsequently stretching, I can: listen to my 1200 songs while I jog, answer an incoming call from Boyfriend about when he is finishing golf, then send an email to a friend to reschedule drinks, then call my sister-in-law to pass along a thought on how she can get married housing at Ohio State. The best thoughts come while jogging in the sunshine, so it's best to have all the tools in one place to deal with or nurture all thoughts.


• iPhone earphones, which include a microphone to talk on, work as regular earphones. So I can plug them into my computer when working in a coffee shop. You could also have surround-sound phone if you like. Too consuming for me, but you might like it.


• While driving cross country on the highway in Ohio, I could quickly tell Boyfriend where the nearest Jiffy Lube was at the next exit, thanks to the Map function in iPhone that uses Google Maps.


• The Map function lets you zoom very far in to see small streets.


• Love the calculator. So cute and easy to use. My old phone calculator on my Nokia PDA reminded me of my TI-81 graphing calculator, but without the graphing feature.


• Ring tones. A personal favorite. Boyfriend's ring tone is an actual motorcycle that is revving up. My mom is a barking dog because her dog is always barking in the background when she calls me. My sister is chirping crickets because those are peaceful. My morning alarm are actual church bells, which actually don't do a great job of waking me up because they sound like real church bells outside, which is very peaceful.


• The clock and alarm. Spin wheel and you set the time. Look at an iPhone and you'll know what I mean.



• Camera is fabulous. It sucks battery life, but is so convenient.

I'll stop here. I'm going to write more on the pros and cons of the iPhone on my That IT Girl blog, but I am happy I got it. Typing is one thing that will be quite different from what you are used to. It is not very easy to type and drive at the same time, since the keys are displayed on the screen. That's right. It means that you can not feel buttons for keys.

More to come!