I've now had an iPhone for close to three months and I'm still adding and deleting apps. I expect to be doing this for the rest of my life or until the iPhone becomes hopelessly obsolete and I pitch it and get something better. I'm guessing this will occur by May.
So what do I like in the meantime? Well, for one thing, the way Mobile ME enables me to sync my home computer's contact list and calendar with the ones on my iPhone. I haven't lost my iPhone yet but I'm bound to…so it's great that you can use Mobile ME to track its whereabouts down via GPS. And hey, if I were still writing detective stories, I bet I could use that in a plot. The hero hides his iPhone on the criminal and then uses Mobile ME to track the crook's travels. Don't anyone steal that idea before I have a chance to use it.
In the "app" department: I gave up on Reqall, which is a program that combines a "to do" list with voice recognition software. It works but, I decided, not as well as a parlay of the Toodledo "to do" list app and the Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition program. In fact, Dragon is a must-have because you can turn speech to text rapidly and with pretty decent accuracy, and you can use that text in any other program. And Toodledo has been great in helping me organize my tasks and things I must get done. You can access it on your iPhone but also on the web from home. I put a little icon on my desktop and when I think of something I have to do (or, less often, when I've actually done one of them), I pop open ToodleDo and add or check off the duty. At last…a "to do" list that works for me…and it and Dragon are both free.
OpenTable has proven to be another useful free app. OpenTable enables you to make reservations at zillions of restaurants around the country. Better still, it allows you to change those reservations when everyone's running late. I also like using Yowp and the Yellow Pages apps to find restaurants and other businesses near my current location…wherever that is at the moment. Neither is perfect but they're better than nothing.
I've tried using i.TV for remote programming of my TiVo. It'll do in an emergency but it's clunky and slow. TiVo is rumored to be about to introduce a new generation of their DVRs — TiVo Series 4, although they may call it something else. Speculation among TiVo owners seems high that they haven't introduced a good programming app for the iPhone because they're waiting to roll out the upgrade and they'll have an app that will work with that. Okay, fine. But in the meantime, what about those of us who have Series 3 and may have it for some time?
I enjoy using Pandora, which is an Internet radio juke box. You pick out an artist or song or style you like and it crafts a "station" that plays that kind of music (not necessarily the artist or song you specify) through your iPhone. They claim to be drawing from a library of half a million songs but somehow, every time I "tune in" any station that features Classic Rock, I get Elton John singing "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road" or Frankie Valli unable to take his eyes off of me. Still, it's handy and between it and TuneIn Radio, which brings in actual stations, I may never use conventional radio again, not even in my car.
My biggest problem seems to be battery life and I'm starting to think I may have a faulty iPhone in that regard. It seems to leap from 100% charged to about 80% in two blinks, even when I'm barely using it. I've been playing with one of these, which is a chargeable external battery that's supposed to recharge your iPhone — and it does but it takes a while and only goes so far towards keeping me energized. I'm trying to decide if I should take my iPhone back to the store and see if they have any way of testing it, or if I need to compile some sort of usage/time stats first. If anyone has any experience in this area, I'd appreciate an e-mail.
Otherwise, very happy. No desire whatsoever to roll back to my old BlackBerry — and I liked my old BlackBerry. I just like my iPhone more.