iPhones don’t seem to be as durable as Blackberrys. At least that was my experience. I dropped my iPhone a couple of times last week and a few of the home screen buttons stopped responding to touch when you hit them a certain way. It still worked fine, but it was “flawed”.

So yesterday after work I drove to my nearest Apple store and did a few things:

1. Picked up a loaner iPhone while mine went off for repair.
2. Got the new Apple Bluetooth Earpiece I’ve been waiting for.
3. Purchased the new Apple Keyboard (wired).

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I’m typing on the keyboard now and it’s quite nice. The earpiece is also excellent. I like it far better than any other I’ve used (so far), but I’ve not seen how the battery holds up yet since it’s my first day with one.There is some background static at times — not popping and ticking static but more like a hiss.

I could do without that, but the integration with the phone is nothing less than phenomenal. If I can get two days of solid use out of the earpiece I’ll be happy, and that shouldn’t be a problem since I have hands-free in my car and won’t have to waste the earpiece battery when I’m driving.

Here’s a glimpse of the integration of the earpiece with the iPhone. So as long as I can make it around two days with the earpiece I’ll just charge both the iPhone and it together over night.

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So yeah, definitely enjoying the Apple experience right now. Even the swap-out of the iPhone was efficient and seamless. I was handed a completely wiped phone and within a few minutes it was identical to the one I turned in (thanks to the exemplary sync/backup process through iTunes). This went so far as remembering exactly where in my contacts I was currently scrolled to.

Now I just can’t wait for Leopard, which will be featured in all of its True UNIX goodness.

I like nice stuff. My current theme is reducing the amount of stuff I have, so it’s important that what I keep is of a high quality.

On that note I’ve been searching for good luggage for a while. I do a good amount of traveling, so I need something that will hold up to the thousand paper cuts of air travel. I tried Samsonite but my main bag lost a zipper on its second trip, and I’m not too impressed with the brand even aside from that.

That’s where Tumi comes in. This company is f’ing serious. I purchased one of their business bags last year and it’s been fantastic. Very durable + highly attractive. I just added to that a travel case for shaving and bathing items. This thing has tons of pockets and even hangs on a towel rack while you’re at the hotel.

Next I’m replacing my primary luggage Tumi — probably starting with a 24″ expandable model. They’re good for around 4-6 days, which is perfect for the majority of my trips. The great thing about Tumi is that it’s not just about form; their products are widely recognized as superior in terms of function and durability. And they have very high-end customer service.

If this zipper issue had happened to my new Tumi bag I would just take it in to any Tumi store and they ship it off for repair for free — for life. Oh, and in the mean time I get a loaner bag to use. That’s the kind of service I expect from a top-tier product line.

The new Blackberry is coming to AT&T and will have both Wifi and GPS. Unfortunately it won’t have 3G or a camera. A few things of interest here:

1. AT&T seems to have a major advantage with device selection. I imagine this will draw many customers from other carriers despite their dislike of the company in the past.
2. Blackberry still doesn’t have 3G. I think this is because of the battery life issue; the 3G radios are known to be quite thirsty, and RIM is famous for providing their customers with excellent battery life. I don’t think they think the tradeoff is worth it, and I agree with them.
3. It sucks they couldn’t have kept the camera. It’s nice to gain the GPS and Wifi, but it’s unfortunate that we had to lose something that is on the Curve to get those features.

It seems the N95 from Nokia is the only device doing pretty much everything, but it doesn’t call to me near as much as a Blackberry or iPhone does. To me it’s more about how you do the things you do than anything else.

Obviously I’d like both — iPhone’s execution with the N95′s features — but we’ll have to wait for that. Eventually someone will get it right. It’s an exciting time to be watching the mobile device market. I like the fact that all the various manufacturers are being prodded to excel by increased competition. It only helps us as consumers.

Time Since Last Full Charge Usage: 5 Hours, 53 Minutes Standby: 1 Day, 15 Hours

Call Time Current Period: 55 Minutes Lifetime: 9 Hours, 52 Minutes

EDGE Network Data Sent: 1.8MB Received: 13.4MB

…and I still have a bit of a charge left (roughly 10%). This is with considerable email and browser use. I’m quite pleased.

One of the most bothersome things I’ve noticed about the iPhone is the fact that it takes too many steps to enter a period (.), question mark (?), or any other punctuation. You have to click the [.?123] key to switch modes, hit the punctuation mark you want, and then switch back to keep typing.

Well, you don’t actually need to do that. Instead, just press and hold the [.?123] key, drag to the character you want to use, and then release. The character you release on is the one that gets entered (works for numbers, too), and upon releasing you go back into normal text entry mode.

Oh, and I just figured out you can also capitalize any key using the same trick: hold the capitalization key (up arrow), drag over to the letter you want to capitalize, and release.:

** You can also enter caps lock mode by double-tapping the shift key.

– [David Pogue credits someone named Andrew with the punctuation discovery. Thank you, Andrew]

So I’ve had my iPhone since launch and like many others I’ve been somewhat worried about battery performance. The first day I only made it to around 5pm before my charge was gone (starting at 8am). The second day I made it to around 10pm.

But now — several charges later — my battery life just keeps improving. Two days ago I went a full 18 hours with moderate to heavy use of all features. It seems to be a matter of optimizing your settings and conditioning your battery.

[UPDATE]: My usage stats currently show 3 Hours, 36 Minutes of use and 1 Day, 1 Hour of standby. My Lifetime reads 6 Hours, 22 Minutes. That’s over 24 hours of moderate use, and I still have roughly 40% of my charge remaining.

Here’s what I suggest to get the most out of your battery:

1. Reduce your brightness as much as you can tolerate. I personally find that about 30-40% of max is plenty for me, and that difference in output is significant.
2. Consider keeping WiFi disabled by default. You can always enable it when you find a hotspot and want to use it.
3. Use a bluetooth headset that turns off when not in use. The folding Motorola brands as well as the new Apple headset have this ability.
4. Try and run your device until it completely dies before charging, and use the AC adapter rather than a computer to charge up.
5. The battery charges faster when the radios are off. Rather than disable them manually, consider using the Airplane Mode feature, which will disable all three radios in one motion. If you need to receive calls while charging, just disable WiFi and Bluetooth.
6. If you haven’t done a full drain-to-maximum charge cycle yet, power down the phone and reset the usage statistics before you put it on the AC adapter. This seems to be helping zero out stats and allow the OS to display the fully charged icon.

The bottom line is that the battery is seeming to live up to Apple’s promises, but you have to condition it and give it some time before you start seeing true performance.

Comments welcome.:

I’ve had my iPhone since launch and days one and two were very worrisome for me in terms of battery performance. The first day I only made it to around 5pm before my charge was gone (starting at 8am). The second day I made it to around 10pm.

But now — a few charges later — my battery life just keeps improving. Today I went a full 18 hours with moderate to heavy use of all features. I think the key is both how you have your phone configured during the day, as well as the quality of the charging process. Here’s what I suggest:

1. Reduce your brightness as much as you can tolerate. I personally find that about 30-40% of max is plenty for me, and that difference in output is significant.
2. Consider keeping WiFi disabled by default. You can always enable it when you find a hotspot and want to use it.
3. Use a bluetooth headset that turns off when not in use. The folding Motorola brands as well as the new Apple headset have this ability.
4. Try and run your device until it completely dies before charging, and use the AC adapter rather than a computer to charge up.
5. The battery charges faster when the radios are off. Rather than disable them manually, consider using the Airplane Mode feature, which will disable all three radios in one motion. If you need to receive calls while charging, just disable WiFi and Bluetooth.
6. If you haven’t done a full drain-to-maximum charge cycle yet, power down the phone and reset the usage statistics before you put it on the AC adapter. This seems to be helping zero out stats and allow the OS to display the fully charged icon.

These tips are definitely working for me, as I’ve gone from roughly 9 hours of combined use to over 18. Time will tell whether or not I’ve reached my maximum, but my suspicion is that I have not.

Comments welcome.:

I don’t think we’re going to just see minor updates to the iPhone in coming months; I think they’re going to be major. The reason I think this is I don’t think they were done.

I think they made a decision on what to cut and what to keep for the initial launch, and they are going to now start adding all those things they cut via software updates. The current rumor is that the first of these will include a file browser.

I can only imagine how many other things they are going to fix and/or add as well. Bottom line: I expect it to be a matter of iPhone completion rather than iPhone updates.

Ok, there are two basic arguments here. I’ll summarize them below:

1. Features Rule Everything (Anti-iPhone) Look, it doesn’t matter how cool people think the graphics or effects look on the iPhone. The fact is that there are phones that do everything the iPhone does, plus a lot more, and don’t cost nearly as much. As much as Apple zealots want to believe it’s all about the “look and feel”, people are simply not going to buy a phone that doesn’t offer as much as existing, cheaper competition. To believe that they will is just fanboy fantasy.
2. It’s Not The Features, It’s The Experience (Pro-iPhone) Actually, it’s not just about what all a device does — it’s about how it does those things. Apple’s gamble was to go the opposite way of everyone one else out there. Previous attempts at the market have tried to pack as much functionality into a kludgy interface as possible. That’s compelling, but only when compared to other kludgy interfaces. The gamble here is very simple — do fewer things, but do them far better than anyone else.

So that’s it. It comes down to a question of taste. People arguing for point 1 generally don’t care how things look; they’re all about what something can do for them. People arguing for point 2 care greatly about not just whether something is done or not, but how it is done. Guess what? Nobody’s right or wrong.

Trying to prove who’s “right” about this is just as stupid as arguing which movie star is more attractive, or which food tastes better than another. It’s a preference issue — a matter of taste. And as such, there’s only one way to solve the iPhone debate — we let the consumer decide.

Quite simply, if the iPhone fizzles out and they don’t meet their 10M unit number for 2008, well then we know the features argument won out. And if the iPhone sells virally despite its flaws and it meets or exceeds the goal of 1% of the market, then Apple (and the UI camp) were right about user experience being more important than features in the current market.

So in the meantime, let’s remember that to claim that something truly is revolutionary (or utter crap) is a personal statement. It’s your opinion. Anyone wishing to extend that out to a general statement of “truth” has to be backed by some data. And in this case the data in question are sales numbers for the iPhone.: