At Last….. And About Time

iPhone App Sync

iPhone App Sync

Before you read this post, click on this YouTube link and just let the song play in another tab or window. It’s a romantic song, and lyrically not particularly appropriate to this post about the iPhone, but it is a great song that captures the feeling of finally getting something you have desired for a long time, and this version of the was a wonderful discovery for me when I first heard it. So while we can’t compare iPhone features to true love, let that be the soundtrack for this post.
Because I am thrilled to discover that Apple and AT&T are finally bringing to my iPhone two things that I’ve wanted since I got the phone and started playing with all those “apps.” Don’t you just love the apps? They are incredibly useful, or incredibly addictive, I’m not sure which. But almost immediately I ended up with screen after screen of them on my phone.
And the apps just kept coming. It seemed like there was a specific app for everything. And so many of them were so brilliant. I had to have them on my phone. Who knew when I might need the First Aid app. If friends visited or I ever got around to taking that walking tour, the Boston GPS tour would be useful to have. Of course Shazam is a necessity. How else am I supposed to identify that song I hear? Ask someone? That might lead to a conversation and I can’t have that. Then there’s my banking app, my foreign language vocabulary builders, Doodle Buddy, the guide to AAA Discounts, and the Roadside Assistance app. I could go on, but you get the point. If I want to do it, there’s an app for it and I want to do a lot. You get the point. Some apps on my phone I would be very grateful to have even if I used them only once in an emergency, others I use often, but a lot of them never got used beyond the brief period of initial fascination.
I didn’t mind having screen after screen, but I wanted to organize them, and it was a pain to do so. I had to select the icon, hold it and drag it from screen to screen. Inevitably I would drag it to far. It displaced the icon in the bottom right if the page was full, so you had to make sure that was an undesirable app. Why oh why can’t I just reorder the icons in iTunes, I wondered. It seemed so logical.
Well with iTunes 9 you can. You can reorder icons on a page, move icons between pages and even move pages around. So now you can put your most commonly used icons on the first pages, the less frequently used ones on later pages. Or maybe you want to organize apps by function: games, time management, communications, etc. Maybe you just want to order them by the color of the icons, so that all the ones that are mostly blue, your favorite color, are on the first page. And if your friends notice that and ridicule you, it is now very easy to reorder everything!

Of course making all this easier means that AT&T and Apple are enabling my iPhone app addiction. But I am pretty sure that is their plan.
The second great thing takes us iPhone users just a little bit out of our own special networks and lets us connect more with the rest of humanity. Starting this Friday, the 25th, we will be able to send MMS messages to other people. MMS simply means multimedia messaging service and it refers to messages containing video, images, sound or even formatted text. iPhone users in the US haven’t been able to do that and have had to content themselves with improvised solutions using email or other workarounds. So unless our friends and family had a mobile device that had the ability to access email, we generally couldn’t send them those on the spot pictures when they were out and about. Now we will be able to, starting this Friday. That also means our friends can send them to us. Yeah! It’s about time.
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One of the really useful features of the iPhone 3GS is that it finally allows tethering. To quote the Apple site

Now you can share the fast 3G connection on your iPhone with your Mac or PC and connect to the Internet from just about anywhere — no Wi-Fi required.

Then, in much smaller print,

Tethering is not currently offered in the U.S. and some other countries. See your carrier for availability.

It had been rumored this would also be available in the fall. Perhaps it will, but it will not be part of the 9/25 roll out. Apparently it is a bandwidth issue. The AT&T network just isn’t up to it.
When that does become available, all will be well in the world. Well, when they do that and improve their network coverage. Then all will be right. Ok, maybe not all, but at least with my mobile phone service.