When I restarted the iPhone, MobileMe push went back to working fine.  I then reproduced the error and the fix three times, which is scientifically sufficient for a blog nobody reads anyway.

But there’s another reason not to use them:  they’re going to get your ass robbed.

Shitty or not, white headphones are iconic.  They have been for years, ever since the iPod really started getting popular.  If somebody sees you wearing them on the subway or something, they know you’ve got an iPod.

And if they’ve got an acute eye and a mind to roll your dumb ass, they’ll recognize the iPhone headphones too.

Now, the iPod headphones no longer raise your RMF (Rob Me Factor) they way they used to.  Everybody and their mother has an iPod these days, and now that the iPod range includes the $79 shuffle, it’s less of a big fat target for thieves.

But iPhones are hot right now.  Unlocked iPhones are selling for over $1000 on eBay.  Most people that want one of these things want them badly enough that they’re not looking too closely at how they get them.  And potential muggers know this.

So quit being such a show-off and get yourself a pair of normal-looking headphones.  Preferably black and as nondescript as possible.  I bought these and like them very much, but they’re pricey.  You can get them cheaper, and you can also get converters that let you use regular headphones with a mic attached.

I know, I know.  The idea of paying $99 more a year for MobileMe is irritating when you’ve already dropped $199 – $299 on your iPhone.  They should at least offer a free year’s subscription with the purchase of an iPhone.  But they’re not going to, and there’s no point in being an ass about it, even if it is borderline profiteering.

But let’s face it: iPhone simply works better with MobileMe (unless, as I mentioned before, you use Exchange, which I know nothing about).  OTA (Over-The-Air) contact syncing, calendar syncing, bookmark syncing, photo uploading, and push email make using the iPhone so much easier.  There’s half the damned appeal of the iPhone right there.

No, you don’t have to suffer the embarrassment of having a me.com address (not that using a Mac email address is bad, but me.com is in my opinion a stupid domain name, and you probably want to use whatever email address you were using before).  I’ve written an easy tutorial on how to exploit MobileMe‘s push email (and, to boot, Gmail‘s spam reduction) features while still having mail sent to and from your current address.  You don’t even have to use MobileMe‘s photo galleries, with dozens of freely-downloadable apps to post your pictures anywhere you want.  You can seem completely MobileMe-independent while still being totally and disgustingly dependent on it.

I know, MobileMe has had some problems out of the gate.  But they’ll get it straight soon enough, and when they do the service is going to be completely indispensable for iPhone owners (though nearly useless for everybody else).

So sign up for a free 60-day MobileMe trial, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Then they released Firefox 3.0, and that all changed.  Now it’s prettier than Safari, it’s fast, and I get all the advantages of Firefox‘s add-ons, etc.  Now I use it exclusively.

So how does this relate to the iPhone?  Well, here’s another reason to use it over Safari:  Safari bookmark syncing.

MobileMe keeps your desktop Safari bookmarks synced to your iPhone.  Great, right?  Not if you use it as a daily browser, it’s not.  Your bookmarks can get really bloated really fast with a daily browser, and that makes finding the bookmark you want on your iPhone pretty damned difficult.  Endless flicking, selecting folders, sub-folders, etc. can get to be a chore when all you really need on your iPhone is a small set of commonly-used bookmarks.

So I use my desktop Safari as basically a bookmark manager for my iPhone.  I use Firefox regularly, and open Safari just to sort bookmarks or browse for pages I know I’m going to want later on my iPhone.  This lets me keep a small, dedicated bookmark folder synced between my iPhone and Safari – a manageable list of favorites that I can actually navigate on the 3.5″ iPhone screen.

The advantage of this may not be immediately obvious.  It’s not a service that (in my opinion) is meant to replace your browser bookmarks.  I use my browser bookmarks for sites I visit on a regular basis, such as Gmail, my online banking accounts, Facebook, etc.  I use Del.icio.us for pages I wish to remember, and maybe access at some point in the future, but don’t need regularly enough to clutter up my browser with them.

If I find a watch I really like on Amazon and may want to eventually buy, I’ll tag it on Del.icio.us.  If I find a tutorial I need to try the next time I have a free moment, I’ll tag that too.  This way, I access Del.icio.us only for sites that are of some use to me but don’t really belong in my daily workflow.  Then I can store as many as I like without worrying about clutter.  And since Del.icio.us offers searching and nested tagging, it’s easy to find and/or browse these pages later.

Del.icio.us offers a bookmarklet – a quick javascript that is stored as a bookmark in your browser.  When you’re on a page, you click the bookmarklet and your browser will automatically load up a form that lets you quickly post it to your Del.icio.us account with no cutting or pasting of addresses.

Which brings me to the good news – your Del.icio.us bookmarklet works on your iPhone.  The easiest way to get it there is to put the bookmarklet in your Safari bookmarks, which are then synced to your iPhone with MobileMe.

That way, if you’ve found a site on the iPhone you’d like to tag, you just open up your bookmarks and select the bookmarklet.  It’ll let you post that site to your Del.icio.us account (you might want to add “iphone” to the list of tags so you can tell which sites you’ve marked on your phone, especially if it’s an iPhone-formatted site) easily, and you can then access that later on your browser or even from your iPhone (bookmark Del.icio.us as well).

It’s not about bragging.  The email replies you send from your iPhone are bound to be terse and economical.  If your contacts don’t know that the reason for this is that you’re typing with your thumbs, these emails might come off as terse or even surly.

Including this information in your signature simultaneously lets your contacts know that you’re being short in reply for a reason and that you’re out of the office.  My guess is they’ll be grateful that you’ve taken the time to reply to them in this fashion, rather than being annoyed at how short a response they got.

First off, let me say that I am still not convinced the iPhone will ever rival the BlackBerry in terms of sheer productivity. The lack of a physical, wide-layout QWERTY keyboard gives it a natural disadvantage in this department – no matter how clever a touch keyboard is designed, it simply cannot match the tactile response of physical keys.

However, I will say this. On day one I found typing to be a slow and arduous process, preferable only to, say, masturbating with sandpaper. Now, a week later, I’m up to about twenty words a minute. I’m writing this post on the iPhone, and have gotten to the point where I may actually choose it to write short emails with if it’s more convenient to hand than my laptop.

Certainly it’s gotten much easier, and I seem to be improving daily (a three-hour argument by text message didn’t hurt my progress – don’t ask), so maybe there’s something to that whole “try it for a week” thing.

The inclusion of a popular, centralized, third-party application store makes a huge difference in overall phone functionality. All I have to do is open up iTunes to find a wide variety of apps that expand greatly upon the phone’s functionality. Granted, about 90% of the programs on athe App Store are crap, but it only took a few gems to reach the point where I pull my phone out for just about everything. Which may or may not be a good thing.

All things considered, I can now count myself a fan of the iPhone, which is a pretty significant turnaround for me.

This change in attitude was mostly due to… well, a change in attitude.  Once I stopped trying to force my iPhone to behave like a BlackBerry (something it’s never going to be able to do), I started to adjust the way I used my phone.  And that has made all the difference.

For instance, while I no longer use AIM nearly as much (this will hopefully change in September if apps get push notifications), I use SMS a lot more.  I showed my hardcore AIM contacts how to send me SMS messages by AIMing my phone number, so I still keep in touch with them just fine.  In fact, all things considered, using SMS is a lot better experience than using AIM on the whole.  I pay a few more a month for unlimited SMS messages, and I’m good to go.

I no longer write lengthy email responses since I’m still not up to speed on the keyboard, but I make much better use of the fully-synced IMAP capabilities of the iPhone.  I used to have to organize my messages when I got back to the office (my BlackBerry couldn’t send messages to folders like I can on the iPhone).  Now I have a little extra time to send lengthier email follow ups to my shorter iPhone-composed replies, if necessary.

I’ve ranted about battery life, but I’ve adjusted thusly: since I no longer have to carry a separate phone and iPod in my briefcase, I’ve got an extra slot in my bag to stick one of these backup batteries for the iPhone.  If my iPhone battery gets low, I snap it on and toss it back in my bag, and it charges while I’m not using it.  I don’t actually have to leave that thing on there while I talk, because it charges the iPhone while it’s on, so once my battery is charged up enough, I can take it back off and go about my day.  It’s no more expensive than carrying an extra BB battery around, and I don’t have to take off the backing or restart my phone to use it.

I don’t use Google Maps as much as I used to – the Google Maps application on the BlackBerry offered more information about business hours, etc than the iPhone does – but I do use Yelp and Urbanspoon to find that stuff instead.

All things considered, I honestly do think I get more functionality out of my iPhone, despite my gripes.  I cannot stress enough, however, that this is due to the way I use my mobile – if you’re the kind of user who wants to be able to type out lengthy emails, or do a lot of networking via BlackBerry Messenger, you may want to stick with your BB.  The new Bold is destined to solve a lot of the gripes people had about BB screen quality, media applications, etc.

I still hold to my conviction, however, that the iPhone is seriously lacking in some features, and in a way that boggles the mind.  The lack of MMS (on a camera phone, no less), video capability, copy & paste, etc. is unforgiveable.  There are rumors, of course, that some of this stuff is to be fixed, but several of those rumors have been around since the first iPhone was released, too, and since they haven’t added these capabilities with the release of the 3G I have my doubts about their intentions to.

It’s actually really, really good at this.  Because of it, I can type with some confidence, making constant typing mistakes (I have small fingers, but damn those letters are easy to hit wrong), and still have my text come out pretty well as I intended.

Additionally, the iPhone learns new words for its custom dictionary from your typing.  And according to Apple, those words even age – if you don’t use a particular custom word for a while, the iPhone will automatically remove it from the dictionary.

All very cool.  But – and this is one of those things with the iPhone that just blows my f*cking mind – there’s no function to allow you to directly edit your custom dictionary.

Oooh… this kind of shit just makes me so MAD.  If the phone just sucked, it’d be fine, but the iPhone excels in so many advanced areas, only to suck in some pretty basic ones.  Apple spent all that time developing a learning predictive text program, only to leave out the one feature that would have made it really rock.  Arghhh.  They do this all over the place with this phone.

The only way to add custom words to the dictionary is to let a “mistake” stand.  When the iPhone offers you its little pop-up suggestion, finish typing your word and then take the time to deny the suggestion (by tapping it instead of hitting space).  But make sure the word is spelled right before you do that, or the WRONG spelling will be added to the custom dictionary.

If you make a real mess of your custom dictionary, the only way to fix it (since you can’t add or remove words at will) is to completely reset the dictionary (Settings > General > Reset > Reset Keyboard Dictionary), which will remove all of the custom words that have been entered.

Oh, Apple people who are not reading this blog at all, please let us add words directly.  I’d love to have my last name tossed in there so it could predictively spell that, but the dictionary doesn’t offer me any suggestions when I type it.  And there’s a lot of lingo in my line of work I’d like to add, please.

So hopefully we will soon have yet another way to drain this crap battery. w00t!

It simply never occurrd to me that a phone this advanced and grounded in consumer-level telefuckery would lack even the basic ability to get a picture message.

Epic lame.

What’s more is, when somebody tries, you get a text directing you to log in with a randomly generated username and password. And since iPhone has no cut and paste, and Safari quits when you switch over to the text message app, you’re stuck having to remember not one but two strings that look something like hg5sd1z.

Which is fine when my buddies are trying to send me pictures of their balls, less so at other times.