Mike Cohen

I’ve downloaded a lot of free applications for my iPhone from the App Store, in fact I have 4 screens almost filled. Unfortunately many of them are worth exactly what they cost.

My worst experience so far has been Go Figure Lite, a simple calculator with built-in unit conversions. Instead of a keypad, it uses sliders to enter values, which are nearly impossible to set accurately (one of the reviews in the app store points out that double-tapping will bring up a keypad). Aside from that, the first conversion I tried was wrong. I entered the current temperature, 68F, which it correctly converted to 20C. However, when I went the other way, it converted 20C to 99F.

I also found that many of the location-based applications such as Yelp & Where don’t work here in Vancouver, since they seem to have US locations only in their database.

My flight left Fort Lauderdale an hour late because of the heavy rain & thunderstorms, causing me to miss my connecting flight in Houston. Luckily they got me on a later flight, which leaves here at 8:55PM and gets me into Vancouver at 11:30PM.

I kept checking the flight delay with the Travelocity iPhone application. I even helped another passenger find out about her flight, which she also missed, with my iPhone.

I find that 3G really eats up the battery fast. After less than an hour my battery was down to 20%. The iPhone also gets very hot during heavy use. I finally switched off 3G to save battery life.

I also found that location services don’t work in an airport. When I tried whrrl, it had no idea where I was. Same with Vicinity and even the built-in Map application.

Just a quick tip before I leave: Since iPhone 3G cases are still in short supply, I did a little experiment and found that my old Jam Jacket fits very nicely on the iPhone 3G. I suspect many other soft cases should also fit.

Some mainstream news sources are going as far as calling the iPhone 3G a bad apple because of yesterday’s activation problems. Last year’s activation problems were much worse – many people didn’t have their iPhone activated for 24 hours or later. Yesterday, the servers seem to be back up before noon EDT. I doubt if many people had to wait more than an hour for activation. Once the stores realized the server was down, most of them sent people home to activate their iPhones instead of attempting it in store.

3G vs. Old iPhone, originally uploaded by mike3k.

The iPhone 3G is actually slightly thicker than the old iPhone, but the rounded shape makes it seem more sleek.