Mission: iPhone, The Sequel

When the original iPhone was released, I was the first person in all of Issaquah to get my hands on one. This was thanks in large part to my father who volunteered to hold a place in line for me at the AT&T store at seven until I relieved him at nine (seems fitting since I get my obsessive tendencies from him).

Now the iPhone 3G is coming July 11th, and of course I want one. The question is, should I get in line like I did last year, or should I wait?

It wasn't all that inconvenient to spend the day in line because I had a chair, my laptop, and a WiFi signal from the Starbucks across the street (allowing me to work that day), though a number of people I know were able to pick up the original iPhone at an Apple Store after only spending a couple hours in line because those stores had a larger inventory of them and an army of workers with handheld credit card readers to move the line quickly. However this time around it sounds like an in-store activation will be required so that AT&T can insure that its subsidy doesn't benefit unlockers, which will slow the line considerably.

Perhaps it isn't worth it this time around because the new iPhone isn't head and shoulders above the current iPhone, the main benefits are 3G data speeds and GPS. The original iPhone was light years ahead of any phone I'd used before, which justified the excitement. The most significant upgrade is the iPhone 2.0 software (third party apps, push Exchange support), which will be available to the current generation iPhone as well.

Regardless, I know that my patience will dwindle as the big day arrives. Right now I'm formulating a strategy to be at the Bellevue Apple Store when it opens Saturday, July 12th. Because of the in store activations, I bet there will still be stock the next day, the wait will be more tolerable, and I won't have to worry about getting work done. As more details about launch day are revealed, I'll continue to develop my plan.

Clearly my interest in this piece of consumer electronics is excessive. With my father it was about cars, with me it's computers and other devices, at least my interests are cheaper.

MobileBrett

Along with the iPhone hardware and software updates, Apple announced that .Mac was going to be replaced with a new service called MobileMe, which brings push features for mail, calendar, and contacts as well as rich Web apps to access them.  The technology is very impressive and I'm very excited to use it.  The disappointing part is that I'm going to change email services again.

I've written about going from Gmail to .Mac for my email, and back to Gmail again.  In order to enjoy MobileMe's push email (where the server notifies the client when a new email has been received, as opposed to the client periodically polling) and new Web apps, which appear to be superior to Gmail's, I need to receive all of my email through it.

Even though I can just forward my Gmail address to MobileMe (which also gives me the benefit of Gmail's awesome spam filter), switching still sucks because I won't have my email history from the past three years in one place.  However I had the same consequences moving from Yahoo to Gmail and I don't remember it being a big deal (how often does one really need to dig up old email?).

The nice thing is that whenever I update a contact or calendar event on my computer it will be pushed to my iPhone immediately (and vice versa).  Plus MobileMe is a little cleaner to use Mail.app with than Gmail.

Should it make me nervous that I am continually growing more and more dependent on Apple's products?  They all integrate very well, which makes the single vendor dependence worthwhile, but if Apple closed up shop tomorrow I would be stuck migrating to different applications and services for much of my digital life.