Well, I finally got an iPhone for myself and my wife.  I know iPhones have been covered like crazy everywhere on the web, and it seems like everyone has one, but I plan on talking about how I use (or want to use) it for living better – so it fits my blog theme.

Purchase Experience

It was a Tuesday night and all the AT&T stores in Austin were sold out of the 3GS, so we headed to one of our Apple stores.  I first did the pre-approval process online, but we would have had plenty of time to do it in the store while waiting.  There was a good line even at 6:00 at night so we ended up waiting about 45 minutes before getting called.  We both got the 16G black 3GS phones and our helper Nick was awesome.  I really get why Apple is popular.  They make really nice solid products with software that is excellent and treat the customers really well.  He was wearing a blue shirt, which I’m sure has some funky designation in apple-land.  Anyway, after talking with him for almost another hour, we left with our new iPhones.

Initial Thoughts

The iPhone certainly isn’t the panacea that it had built up to in my mind, but I am really enjoying it.  The interface is great once you figure things out.  The figuring out does take some doing, though.

Last night our biggest issue was setting up email.  We both use Yahoo email and this process was incredibly frustrating!  I ended up spending 45 minutes on the phone with Apple support before we got Yahoo mail connected and working.  The short story is that the built-in Yahoo email uses imap and apparently Yahoo doesn’t do this well at all.  We had to set up the Yahoo accounts under “other” and use POP3 mail instead of imap.  Since this was the main feature my wife wanted, I had to work on that instead of playing around with everything else 🙁  Anyway, now that is working and I’ve had some time to play around with it and I really like it.

Plans Going Forward

One of the main things I want to utilize is the ability to look up activities and restaurants while we are out.  Too many times we will be out on the weekends and not really want to go home, but not know where else to go.  Being able to look up activities on the go is my primary motivator for finally getting these.

I also plan on heavily using the camera for pictures and video.  This will enhance my blog with the ability to easily add images to my posts.  Having the Apple hardware and software all through this process should make it streamlined and easy once I get a system down

Conclusion

After being totally out of the iPhone craze for so long, I’m finally happy to have my hands on one.  I am excited about putting this thing through it’s paces and trying to figure out how to improve my life and my family’s lives with it.  Now I just need to not get too caught up in in that I spend all my time playing with the iPhone instead of being with my family!