iPhone

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Shouldn't, me and Bob, your gadget loving My Chem guys have them?!?! If only you could see their smug faces in the pictures, those little bastards...

Our unending search for the latest cool tech has ended with the Palm Pre. This thing looks sick. After countless Sidekicks, Dashes, HTC Touch models, 9234's, 7890's 8966's, G1's and Curves, we finally found what we're looking for. It looks to be a perfect meld of Blackberry functionality with iPhone flash. Where the Storm tried and failed, (can anybody successfully type on this thing?) the Palm Pre looks poised to succeed.

My unending love/hate relationship with the iPhone has been well documented, and damn't I'm ready to commit wholesale to a phone. I've jailbroken the thing to get some more functionality out of it (PDANet is the shit!!!!) I've also suffered the harsh realities of running background apps on this thing. No battery life, and iPhone slowed to a crawl.

I've treaded dangerous, shark-filled waters paying the tech-world equivalent of a back-alley abortion clinic 15 bones to access a broken iPhone 3.0 beta software that almost turned my phone into a $599 paperweight, all in the hopes of getting this phone to do what I need it to.

Copy/paste is great to have, but a little unwieldy to use. And wait till you move your phone a millimeter and the "Nothing To Undo" dialog box pops up. The landscape everything i think might be the worst feature, because after almost 2 years using the thing, does anyone even want this anymore? Now the screen goes into extreme fits of non-stop spinning, like a drugged up raver, completely going against what you've taught yourself. Individual program toggle please????

There is also the issue of speed. The iPhone has gotten progressively slower with each new update. What once were cool transitions between programs is now revealed to be what they truly were from the start...LOADING SCREENS. Its not a stretch to say that sometimes its hard to get things done on this phone. The new iPhone hardware needs to speed up dramatically, and I hope somehow the transitions can be disabled.

I know I'm being a little harsh here, especially with a beta software, but from what I've seen so far it doesn't compete with the OS Palm has been working on. Maybe with kick-ass fast hardware, Apple will step up. I guess we'll have to wait till June when they announce what they've been conjuring up.

Until then, Palm Pre, come home to Daddy.

Bob, I feel your iPhone pain. Ever since my iPhone threw itself into the toilet, it hasn't been the same. Missed calls, no service, crap battery life, the list of muck-ups goes on.

I've been wanting to go to the Apple store to try and exchange my suicidal phone, but knew i'd be greeted by the same smugness and uppity attitude you dealt with. Every time I step foot in that store, I feel like they're doing me a favor selling me their plain aluminum products and their white earbuds. I think I bought a pair of earbuds, and inside the package was an extra pair of them crap buds.

Angry at the lack of basic functions on the iPhone, and wanted to stick it back to the man, so I did the only thing a sane man would do...I jailbroke the thing.

For those who don't know what this is, basically you're "freeing" your phone from Jobs' shackles. Now I can copy and paste, personalize the theme on my phone, record movies, answer texts without constantly having to switch programs, search my emails, run programs in the background, send pictures in texts, quickly change settings without going through a million menus, play NES games, save Youtube videos, the list goes on. The crowning jewel is when I used my cell connection on the phone to download an e-book before a flight.

This shit is fun, and now I feel the iPhone lives up to it's pricetag. Do a search for quickpwn to get started, install winterboard, backgrounder, pdanet, sbssettings, and whatever else catches your eye. Most of all, enjoy your new found freedom.

Whether you're a Blackberry man or iPhone (wo)man, you gotta admit the App store is pretty rad. I've been using the iPhone for a good while now, and have come to rely on a few apps that make my daily life easier, keep me busy while driving (yeah I know its illegal, sue me), and suck up any remaining free time I might have left in a day.
Here's a short list of stuff you should check out if you're so inclined...

1. Pocketmoney ($9.99)
Not only does the app's icon make me think of delicious pork bacon, it also helps to keep your money straight. You can set up checking and savings account, and keep a running ledger of your spending so you don't have any more of those all-too familiar, embarrassing moments where you're trying to buy a bag of cheetos and a Quik but don't have any loot left on your card. Yeah, I know what you're probably thinking right now. "I have a perfectly good paper register the bank gave me when I signed up for my checking account, and that shit cost me $0.00." To that I say, "But your register doesn't have a sick ass pig icon!"

2. NetNewsWire (The world is going to end soon FREE as fuck!)
This program is great! You know when you're having an important conversation with your wife about what you're making for dinner that week, and she's trying to write out a shopping list, and all you can think about is the latest post on Gizmodo detailing what GHZ the new intel iCore7 processor tops out at after overclocking with Nitroglycerin? Yeah, that happens to me too...Well now instead of just thinking about it, you can take out your iPhone in mid-conversation, pissing off your wife in the process, and read all the latest RSS feeds that you can stand. It even works for our site too! Huzzah!

3. Super Monkey Ball (I paid $9.99 for this??? I'm a sucker)
Ok, I bought this because it was the #1 app for weeks straight. It had to be good right??? RIGHT? Well its not. I mean it has good graphics, but the controls suck. They really, really suck. Driving your dad's Nova after ingesting 10 beers at the college kegger, trying to balance a tall glass of Sunny D on your head while headbanging to Stone Cold Crazy is exponentially easier than controlling this mess. After maybe 5 tries playing the game proper, I decided it'd be much more fun to send Baby and Gongon repeatedly and utterly to their death. I hate this game. But it sure is a great time waster...

And there you have it. Three essential iPhone apps! Have fun, be safe, and Happy Thanksgiving!