BrockLi Soup

Phone Fumble ‘08 is turning into a real kick in the crotch. More glass has fallen out of the screen, but it still works OK. I had hoped that prices of used iPhones would drop on Craigslist, but if anything, they’ve gone up - the cheapest ones have gone from $200ish to about $350, and there are still a ton of want ads on there. That may be the worst part - I could have turned a profit on the damn thing if I could have kept it off the sidewalk.

It would cost me $200 to cancel my iPhone plan contract and go back to a boring regular phone, and at that price, I may as well just get a new one. Then I find out that 3G is sold out pretty much everywhere, and then I walked home in the rain.

Add all that to the carnival of incompetence on display in the DC bureaucracy throughout the course of changing my name, and some other unpleasantness, and it’s been a crappy week. At this point, I’m really just looking forward to getting out of town for a few days for the Doherty/Friedlander union next weekend.

I fumbled my iPhone good today.

Erin and I were waiting for the bus to go kayaking. I had just put on sunscreen, so my hands were all slippery when I went to text Aubri, and it just spilled out and landed face-down on the sidewalk. We both kind of looked at it for a second, not daring to pick it up and see the damage.

My first thought was, “Well, I guess I’m upgrading after all.” I had no intentions of getting the 3G version any time soon - what little money I have is much needed elsewhere. But then I realized that thousands of OTHER people are upgrading - and selling of their old ones in the process. I could just get a used one and drop in my SIM card.

Unfortunately, used first-gen iPhones are running about $250 on Craigslist here, and my search for “iPhone” returned a lot more want ads than sale ads, so it’s safe to say that demand is high enough to keep prices higher than I want to pay. Or I could pay $200 to get a brand-new 3G, at an extra $10/month for the data plan - an extra $70 over the course of the next year.

Either way, it sucks. I really don’t want to spend money on a phone right now. I suppose I could just get a super-cheap regular phone, but after having an iPhone for 10 months, could I ever go back? On the other hand, I’ll bet I would be able to receive MMS.

The screen is hard to read, but it still works, so I think I’m going to give it a week. I’m just hoping that prices on used phones will fall a bit, which might be a little too optimistic, but we’ll see what happens.

I discovered this by accident this afternoon when I was wiping off my screen.

With the screen of your iPhone off, hit the Home button twice. iPod controls come up on-screen.

I usually use the clicker on the headphone wire when I’m using my phone as an iPod, but you can’t just plug in the headphones and click the button to start playing. It also seems to “forget” you were listening to music if you pause it and do anything else on the phone. Until now, I thought you had to tap the iPod icon and navigate back to what you had been listening to. This little shortcut is pretty handy, methinks.

Earlier this week, I had to walk away from my computer while I was in the middle of a conversation on Google Talk. I didn’t make it back to my desk for a while, and while I was gone I wanted to use my iPhone to see if the other person had been responding.

I thought came up with a solution later on, but I should start by saying that it doesn’t actually work for some reason.

All Google Talk conversations are available in GMail, and I’ve got GMail setup on my iPhone through IMAP. I figured I could just add a filter to add a My Chats label to all chat records, and see them in that IMAP folder on my iPhone. Here’s what I did:

1. In the web version of GMail, click on the Create Filter link to the right of the search box at the top of the page.
2. On the Create A Filter screen, put “Chat with” in the Subject box, and click the Test Search button to make sure it finds your chat logs. If that’s OK, click the Next Step button.
3. On the Choose Action screen, check the box next to “Apply the label:” If you haven’t already created a label for chats, select the “New Label…” option and enter a label. It won’t let you use Chats, so I called it My Chats.
4. If you want to apply the label to existing chat logs, in addition to any new ones that come in, check the box next to “Also apply filter to xxx conversations below.”
5. Click the Create Filter button.

If I click on the My Chats label in the web version of GMail, I see hundreds of chat logs. In both my iPhone and Mail.app (also setup to use GMail over IMAP), only eight items appear in that folder. It’s not even the most recent eight - I get eight seemingly random items going back to April. I guess that GMail doesn’t handle chat logs over IMAP very well, but I don’t know why.

It’s not a big deal, I just thought it would be handy. If anyone else has figured this out, leave a comment here with details.

Has anyone figured out how to download pics from viewmymessage.com? I really want to keep some of these pictures people have sent me, but I can’t figure out any way to get them out besides taking a screen shot of the thumbnail they show there.

Also, what are the chances that MMS support will be added with an iPhone software or firmware update? That seems like the kind of thing that could be added without needing new hardware, and something a lot of people would appreciate.