ASYLUM

* So far...

Well, I've been using it for a few days now, and it's working great. Although I can't comment on the actual, you know, telephony as I have yet to make a single phone call on it (at least in part because my phone number won't get ported until next week). On the other hand, for mobile email, internet access and personal organiser tasks, it rocks.

It's mostly the device I've been waiting a decade for.

I used to have a Palm Pilot. Two, actually, over the years. I used to really like that thing. I liked its philosophy — simplicity and pragmatism. No faffing around managing applications or poking through deeply nested UI for basic tasks: You just tapped Calendar, or Notes or whatever, and got on with it. Done? Just tap onto your next task. No saving or quitting necessary.

But Palm stalled. Languished. They never really brought the OS forward. The digitiser on my second Pilot was notoriously unreliable. And there was no real connectivity. For a while, I drooled after the Treo, but it took forever to be released in the UK, was hideously expensive (much more than the iPhone is now), suffered from 'awkward convergence device' syndrome, and there was no decent internet-access plan available over here — paying big money for tiny bandwidth? No thanks.

iPhone is, in most respects, as good an organiser as my Palm Pilot was. Just tap straight through to whatever you need. No faff. It's hard to make a direct judgement on entering text, but it feels quicker and more reliable than the Palm: I suspect screen size and sheer processing speed have a lot to do with this, and the large-format custom controls. There was a real tendency towards stylus hunt-and-peck on the Palm's dinky screen.

As a result, I feel happier with the touch-keyboard than I did with the Palm (either "Graffiti" or on-screen keyboard). If, as widely anticipated, Apple add features to synchronise notes and to-do entries with those in Leopard Mail, it'll be pure gold.

On top of that, it has the best mobile email I've used and, most importantly, always-on unlimited internet access FTW. Now, I haven't used Blackberry email. A lot of people say Blackberry's mobile mail is better than that on the iPhone. Possibly, it is, but noone's articulated to me how or why, yet. I see people with Blackberries on the train and can't imagine using something with such a poor screen and awkward-looking controlls for serious reading and replying, and Apple Mail mostly meets my requirements (it needs a "don't load images" option, and better replying/quoting options, but nothing devastating).

And it doesn't require you to install Blackberry server stuff — those things are only suitable for corporations, whereas my iPhone logs directly into my home computer, keeping everything in sync with my regular mail. This is what I like most about how my email works: Apple Mail on my desktop or laptop Macs, pine over ssh, and iPhone Mail, all play nicely together — flagged-important, read and replied message marks keep in sync; I can even start typing up a reply on one, postpone it, and continue it later on any of the others. None of this "Oh, I sent that on the phone so I don't have a record of it" nonsense or "I read that already on the laptop but it's showing up unread on the phone". Nope. It works.

Downsides, to be fair: Although the browser is "tabbed", it seems to "pause" a tab when you switch to another, so you can't load documents in the background. There's no copy-paste. I already mentioned the weak reply/quote. And the notes/todo syncing isn't in place yet.

* Fire Walk With Me

So, yesterday lunchtime, I got The Black Lodge activated. It turns out to have been a nice fun combination-of-three-organisations snafu: My hypersensitive bank had panicked (bug #1) and tagged my credit card with a fraud alert, which just needed me to ring up their fraud dept to clear it. But they rang my work number and left voicemail. Late on friday night — always a great time to get through to an office worker (bug #2) :P But I rang their customer services on Sunday and they had no idea anything was wrong! Again: Left hand, meet right (bug #3).

So, my payment was being bounced until I got into work on monday morning, got the voicemails and got it straightened out. But in the meantime, iTunes' registration system didn't actually tell me that's why it couldn't proceed (bug #4). No error messages (thus my sardonic screenshot below) or information. Not only that, O2 had no idea either (bug #5), and claimed their "engineers are working on it" and that the faults department would get back to me "within 24 hours". Sure — 24 hours after I fixed it myself, about 60 hours after it first went wrong (bug #6).

So in conclusion, it all works great as long as nothing goes wrong, at which point all hell breaks loose because none of the organisations involved seem to know what happens or who to ask.

Enough whingeing. Some reflections on other iPhone-related matters...

On The Retail Experience

Wow, that was frightening.

I didn't think they'd try and pull the whole whooping-and-clapping routine in the UK stores. It isn't really in our DNA (at least, for things that don't involve superstars). And, my old phone has been getting increasingly dysfunctional as I held on for the iPhone, because I knew that's what I wanted to upgrade to, and didn't want to replace the old one twice. But with the controls gradually seizing up, it was getting tricky.

So I wanted to get the iPhone up and running right away (ah, the irony), to replace the failing one, and to that end I went to the launch at the Regents Street Apple Store.

The queue was hugely long, but actually very fast-moving, and well-managed by the friendly event staff. The only difficulty was spotting where to go, because the path was obscured by hundreds of non-purchasing rubberneckers blocking the way as they performed the now-traditional British ritual of holding their own cameraphones aloft to take grainy snaps of things they can't actually see themselves through the forest of heads and waving cameraphones.

So the queue went round several corners and streets to the bank on Cavendish Square. But once inside the store, it diverged into multiple queues split across floors. Snaking around, then up the stairs, then round a complete circuit of the top deck of the store before being directed to a makeshift checkout where the Genius Bar used to be. Swipey-card, tappy-pin, grabby-phone, and flee, flee! Because the place was insane!

See, I never put much credence in The Cult Of Mac — sure, there are plenty of MacHuggers, but I tend to put that down to less-computer-literate people being affectionate for a device that gives them the tools they need without being frightening or obstreperous. It's sort of like good-cop bad-cop.

But with rows of Apple employees whooping it up, doing "iPhone! iPhone! iPhone!" chants, cheering and clapping customers on entry and exit, I couldn't help thinking of cults.

On ringtones

My old phone allowed me to put any mp3 onto it and use that as a ringtone, something I made gleeful use of with deeply obscure audio I put together myself. There has been some controversy over the iPhone ringtone situation, but it seems to have been fixed in the latest firmware: I just made an m4a file, renamed it to m4r and dropped it into the Ringtones section, and it works great.

John Gruber is perplexed by this situation, but I think it may be as simple as this: The 1.1.2 firmware is not officially released in the States. But my phone, and presumably all UK (and maybe German?) iPhones were released with 1.1.2 installed. That's about as official as it gets.

Maybe this is a region-locking thing? A concession Apple had to make with AT&T in the States, while in Europe — where, though the ringtone market is huge, being able to use your own free custom ones has also been a standard for a long time — you're free to use what you want? (The dubious looks the EU has been giving Apple over tie-in practices with the iTunes Music Store may also be related).

On the device itself

It's bloody marvellous, of course. I don't really need to reiterate that, there've been plenty of reviews already. One day all phones will be like this. Not that there isn't room for improvement, but right now it is light-years ahead of anything else.

You can willy-wave features around if you like, but it won't make a dent in the simple fact that this is an OS X computer with wireless connectivity that slips into a pocket — and a pretty good phone. Everything else is either just a phone (if it's a "feature phone"), or a lousy phone trying to play at being a computer (if it's a "smart phone"). It's not 1979 any more, technology needn't behave like it.

More later, after I've had more time with it.