One Year with the iPhone 3G

I want to share a fond memory from this past year that I’ve had an iPhone.

On July 11th, 2008, I nervously waited in line at the Village Pointe Apple Store in Omaha, NE. Home was about an hour away in Lincoln, NE. I was waiting to get my hands on an iPhone 3G. I was nervous because my wife was pregnant and due any day. Thankfully, our son waited until July 15th to enter the world.

I could have waited a week or so (yeah right!) to make sure our son was born before galavanting off to Apple Land to get an iPhone. But hey, I had plans! And they worked gloriously. See, I wanted to tell the world about my baby as soon as technologically possible. I had a first generation iPod touch at the time, but I had already scoped out the hospital to see if they had wireless. They didn’t.

Shortly after getting my iPhone, activating it, loading it up and putting some third-party apps on it, it was time to get down to business. I had also gotten a MobileMe account so I could wirelessly sync my contacts, calendar, bookmarks and push my email. Well, on my Mac, I composed an email announcing the birth of our son, leaving blanks for length, weight, date and time of birth, etc. I also created a MobileMe gallery with a placeholder image from my the unltrasound, and added that link into the email. Then I added everyone I wanted to receive the email into the BCC field, and saved it as a draft.

Sure enough, after my boy was born a few days later, I snapped a photo of him (after he was cleaned off), sent it up to Mobile Me, filled in the placeholders I left in the email, and hit send. All from my iPhone. I called a bunch of family. Then, a little while later, the phone calls from friends started rolling in.

That’s how the iPhone played an important role in the birth of my child. I’m sure someday, if/when we have another baby, an iPhone will play a role in that.

So that is one of my fond memories of the iPhone this past year. Do you have any special memories from using the iPhone? Leave them in the comments.

Besides the iPhone playing a role in informing loved ones about the birth of my son, other things have happened with the iPhone in the past year. However, I don’t find any of them to be particularly as endearing as the story I just told.

For starters, the iPhone, in my experience, wasn’t the best experience until the OS 2.1 release in September 2008. Before that it was a drag to sync the iPhone because of the excruciating length of time it took to run the routine backup. And there were other various bugs and issues, but I’m having trouble remembering the specifics.

And then in March 2009, the iPhone community started getting excited again with the announcement of added features in OS 3.0, which was released in June. OS 3.0 brought a lot of nice features. Nothing earth shattering, mind you. But it also brought its share of bugs. Most notably, there are a lot of stutters in graphical transitions and my battery life is worse than ever. Not to mention that I used to be able to connect to my home wifi without issue in my bedroom, and now I can’t at all. Granted, I’ve rarely felt the need to turn on the wifi on my iPhone since Lincoln was blessed with 3G last fall.

It sounds like many of these issues will be fixed in OS 3.1, which is now in beta testing. Maybe next year I’ll mention 3.1 in my Year Two post (if I remember to do one). Maybe with iPhone OS 4.0 (just guessing. Seeing a trend, folks) I’ll hold off until 4.1, which seems to be the trend for a truly stable OS.