As well as my work in the Web Development team at Dennis Publishing, I've started writing reviews of iPhone applications for their "Know Your Mobile" site.

So far I've reviewed Trails and AutoStitch.

More to follow soon.

I stood waiting for a bus last night. I knew it was a number 4; I knew it was suposed to arrive at 10:01pm, and that it should take about 14 minutes to get me to Waterloo, where I could catch a train home.

What I didn't know was when, or whether, it would actually turn up. There was no "countdown" display on the bus-shelter, so the information available was entirely based on paper, ink, and "should".

This struck me, in an age where the capabilties of our daily, hand-held technologies are developing at an ever-increasing rate, as frankly somewhat poor, even disappointing. Someone wasn't trying hard enough.

I own an iPhone. It's an incredibly polarising device; excessively loved by some, unnecessarily maligned by others. It does, however, have one point very much in its favour:

What it claims to do, it does. Well, and with excellent stability. In Apple parlance, It Just Works.

There are of course things it won't do. Copy and paste functionality is the classic example of what it lacks, much lambasted for the omission of such a simple, widely-supported feature. It's a bit of a riddle until you then ask yourself "but what is the standard, accepted way of supporting copy and paste on a multi-touch, gesture-driven device?" Of course there isn't one, and Apple's perfectionist attitude was that they'd rather not do it if they couldn't do it well. We'll see how well their implementation works in the mass market in a few months.

iPhones, after all, evolve. The device I bought on the launch day of the 1st gen phone was a very different machine when I sold it to get the 3G (mainly for the memory). The rule on "iPhone 1.0" was "This is a totally closed system; we give you maps, calendars, and the other standard PDA/smartphone basics, and if you want to do something clever, you go to the web". When I sold it of course it supported third-party apps, and had mapping capabilities vastly greater than when I bought it, among numerous bug-fixes & small enhancements. That process means that on those rare occasions when you do find a fault in the system, you don't feel you bought a dud device, just that you may have to wait for it to improve.

For copy and paste, of course, that wait was rather longer than we expected. But I digress.

The point I made above was that the iPhone does what it claims to do. I've been using smartphones and PDAs, generally from the Palm/Handspring stable for years. Their basic features all worked, but they were self-enclosed (trying to get them to talk to a PC or Mac was always hit-or-miss) and frankly clunky. Third party apps were of course supported, but generally pretty darn poor. Different versions of the Palm platform confused apps which frequently fell into disrepair, or just didn't work in the first place. Of course, the iPhone platform changes too, but with apps sold on a subscription model, they tend to evolve and be fixed in just the same way that the phone itself does.

My point, though, is not to write a paean to the iPhone; there's plenty of those around already. The focus is this: there now exists a stable, high-res, high-power, widely adopted portable platform with decent autonomy, and capabilities that until 5 years ago or less were science fiction, or at best divided into dedicated (and generally fairly dumb) gadgets.

The best example (and the best described, in terms of human impact) of these integrated Sci-Fi gadgets, by the way, are Kim Stanley Robinson's wrist computers from his Mars trilogy. The iPhone is, pretty much, that device. To use a phrase that's very popular these days, it is a "game-changer". And with the v3 OS coming out soon, it'll knock the game up to another level.

Fortunately, other companies are also trying to join the new game, but whether they're succeeding, or even outdoing the iPhone, is irrelevant to this post. The point is:

The platform exists, be it in one or many devices. What are we going to do with it?

And why did I start out waffling about busses and trains, and what does it have to do with the iPhone?

The latter question is the easier one to answer. On my iPhone, I can (simplifying only very slightly) click "Trains -> Next train home from where I'm standing" and it'll give me the answer, quickly and accurately. There's a few things it needs to know to do that:

1) Where I am.
2) What the nearest station to that location is.
3) How I define "home".
4) What trains are scheduled to run from 2) to 3), directly or indirectly.
5) Whether they're running to time

It uses quite a range of technologies to achieve this:

1) it solves by consulting the iPhone's "Core Location" service. This combines GPS location (gathered from a range of satellites thousands of miles away, of course) with ambient electronic clues in the form of WiFi hotspot idents, correlates them via consultation with a remote system, and returns the data to the app. Quite a trick in and of itself, but much more useful when it's an input to a system.

2) it solves by asking a remote database the question "Where's the nearest station to this location?" This requires network communications, a remote server infrastructure, and a geographically tagged list of every rail station in the UK. That's a fairly large database, although the proximity maths is reasonably basic trigonometry. In other words, it's consulting an expert third party.

3) Well, it asked me. If it was feeling really clever, it might have been able to look in my address book and find the entry marked "me" and work out a station from there, but frankly, people find that spooky. And interacting with the user, particularly when you give them a large amount of "usefulness" in return for minimal data, is still a pretty good idea.

4), like 2), is a remote database lookup, coupled with a routing algorithm that's probably quite complex.

5) again is a remote lookup, but with the crucial difference that's live data. It's not something I could find out in a paper timetable, rather it's a representation of the current state of the world, specifically of a really pretty complex railway system, that's updated every minute or so. That in itself is quite a trick of data transfer and management.

So, by use of massively complex national, international, and even orbital systems, I save a few minutes' time, or gain access to information that would have been unfeasibly complex to get by trying to follow the steps manually. Which it is depends on where I am, and how much I already know about the local area and services. Even if I know nothing, it can find me a route.

So, why the heck can't it find a bus?

Well, obviously busses don't run on rails or have to be scheduled through stations. But most of them do now report their locations to central systems, and there are databases and routing systems that can report on their intended locations and capabilities.

Basically, it can't find a bus because no-one's joined together all the systems that it needs to use to find a bus. The main step missing is a public interface to the "Countdown" data that's displayed on some bus stops, but it could also quite practically report on traffic and weather conditions along the route.

But there are a couple of other issues. There may be resistance to the public knowing exactly where all busses are at all times - people on those busses may feel uneasy, and I'm sure someone in Whitehall or TfL would consider it a terrorism risk. There are social aversions to this sort of sharing of data.

The company that's been most on the receiving end of those aversions recently is Google - both for their Latitude and Street View applications. The tabloid outcry (and you can classify most of the media in that category these days) has been somewhere between hilarious and utterly depressing. Classifying Latitude as "Google's spy in your pocket" has been one of the most impressive displays of hyperbolic, point-missing technophobia of modern times. Yes, it's technologically (if not actually) possible to create a system that will track people without their knowledge, but Latitude is categorically not that system; and if you claim "but Google are just saying that", you might as well believe that the spy's already in your phone, at the OS level. Latitude changes nothing at the technical level.

What it changes is the capacity for sharing that information - in scope, in precision, and in audience.

I know people all over the UK. All over the world, in fact, and they tend (and I) tend to travel. I can only guess how many times I've walked 2 streets away from a friend who lives in another country, and never met, and still not met them because I didn't know they were there. This might seem a slightly tenuous example of trying to force serendipity, but on occasion I've managed to do so, and enjoyed the results. Not by automated location sharing, but via Twitter and Facebook status - I, like millions of others worldwide, am manually pushing data out there to increase my friends' "ambient awareness" of me in the hope that it may lead to a meeting, or a laugh, or useful information. In extremis, it can lead to a new job, career, or lifesaving information.

I actually want quite a lot of people to know quite a lot about me.

Of course, there is also some information I don't want widely known, and possibly even some people I'd rather knew very little. Most people would generally prefer, for example, that their employers didn't know every pub and club they'd been into recently. And we've already heard too many cases where uptight employers have seen things on facebook that they've deemed dismissible offences, often such heinous crimes as "I wish they'd give me something more interesting to do", or "pissed again".

Of course in the latter case, the crime's not getting pissed. It's getting caught. After all, chances are the employer's doing exactly the same thing. It's hypocrisy, and it's not a technical problem, it's a social one. And it stinks. If we're going to make even comparatively innocuous data risky or guilty, we're going to have one hell of a problem with real ambient awareness, and geo-aware assistive tools.

Of course, it's not all just curtain-twitching; there are some real reasons why certain people don't want their location to be widely known - one friend of mine has a stalker who's life they'd rather not make easier. But, unfortunately, even without actively broadcasting ambience (that may be an oxymoron) no-one's location, or at least their dwelling, is an impenetrable secret. Ambience just makes it easier.

I don't claim to have a solution to that one, and we'll need one at some point, but, prudish attitudes aside, it's not a problem that needs to apply to most people. Frankly, the entity that most people mistrust with their location and ambience isn't other individuals, or their employers, but the government. And with good reason; their abilities to contain and manage data are on a par with an igloo's ability to contain a blast furnace. Even beyond that, there's too much evidence that they don't always act in our best interests - the number of people arrested or investigated under terrorist legislation for anything from peaceful protest to putting their bins out too soon attests to that.

If we could just fix the government, and people's attitudes, it'd all be so simple.

Well OK, that's obviously far from trivial; but it's worth recognising that:

1) Ambient awareness, and location-aware services, have the potential to be a massive benefit to us.
2) The problems with these systems tend to be more of attitude than of significant social or technical issues, and
3) That if we can't solve 2, we're massively limiting the use and usefulness of 1)
4) At the moment most of our apparent privacy and secrecy (and sometimes security) is a shared myth that it's doing us very few favours to perpetuate.

It's difficult to discuss these topics and maintain a fully consistent attitude with regards to personal privacy (although Emerson's comments that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" may be applied; the world itself may not be consistent). We really have to ask what privacy we need, and why, and how we can maintain our freedoms and abilities if we shift that balance around for technical benefit.

That's *not* a topic I'm going to try to cover in depth right now, though.

I mentioned Street View above, too. Many people are, apparently, outraged that they've been caught in the act of walking in a street at an undisclosed date and time (although frankly, given the fuzzing, most people can only identify themselves, and that very rarely). Or they're energetically objecting to the fact that people can see their houses (from here). It's often widely forgotten that such ancient technologies as feet and eyes have had provided this capability for more than a few years. And there's probably more sensitive data in the phone book.

Again, though, there are edge cases where it matters more - if you're pissed and throwing up in the street you have little of my sympathy for your self-inflicted plight, but rather more for your colleagues' or employer's subsequent self-righteousness. If you're being treated by Paramedics, then I think it's fair that Google swap out that content when notified. But if you're upset about the deer being knocked over, please go watch Bambi and get a grip.

We might need to tidy the data up. But let's not just trash it on knee-jerk technophobia or future shock.

And you'd better get used to future shock too, because the future's accelerating. No, we don't have flying cars yet (thankfully), but we may still be at the first hints of the Accelerando.

At this point it's incumbent on me to mention Charlie Stross, not merely an excellent and humorous author, but quite possibly the UK's best futurologist. His Cthuloid spy stories and world-walking tales may not prove entirely predictive, but his near-future vision in Halting State is spot on (too much so sometimes, having seen two Halting State incidents in Eve Online recently). Equally, his canonical "Accelerando" is possibly the best tale of human reaction to future technological change, and even his far-future and whimsical Eschaton novels are excellent studies of humanity in technological extremis.

I don't want my flying car. I want my phone to tap my ear and put up a subtle glyph in my glasses if the Northern Line's packed up when I leave the office, or I'm looking at museums to visit online and the Overland's shut for maintenance. I want it to update my list of local eateries when that new Japanese place opens, and make me aware that Porcupine Tree are releasing a new album. I'd like to know that Jacques, who I worked with in Paris, just moved to Kensington. I want it to make my life subtly simpler, and help me connect with friends and old acquaintances.

Give or take the pretty poor state of eyeglass projectors at the moment, it's all entirely possible - and not merely possible in the Tomorrow's World, Martlesham Heath sense that "given enough boffins, we can make a proof of concept", but rather in the sense that 90% of it's already on the shelves and in people's pockets.

The future's very close. At some point, your phone may realise this.

A quick review roundup on some of the useful apps on my iPhone at the moment (hiding in 6 screenfulls now), and some of their "quirks"...

Twittelator Pro is currently my portable Twitter app of choice, mainly on the "it just works" principle - although it needs some work on failing gracefully when it can't send a tweet - it tends to forget about it instead of saving it for later. One particularly nice feature is its ability to track conversations in a single view, and the search looks impressive.

Spend, which I've mentioned previously, is an extremely useful budgeting app, which is proving extremely useful in both controlling my expenditure and feel confident in spending saved money on a holiday.

The Google Mobile App is currently at the stage where it promises much more than it delivers. Voice searching is slow and unreliable, and the "super-ajax" search hinting just isn't fast enough to be useful. Perhaps with some work it might provide useful voice dialing.

A trio of apps help me get around: Tube London City, London A-Z and MyRail Lite. The Tube app is useful both to provide a map and route plans, and also to give realtime tube status. MyRail Lite (I've not seen a "heavy" version) is an interface to realtime departure boards and service schedules for pretty much every station and surface train in the UK - frankly, a lot quicker to use than the public departure boards at Waterloo at the moment (as the direct access to platforms is currently closed and you have to go via the concourse, which tends to mean walking away from the platform you need to see the board).

But why the A-Z? Isn't Google maps enough? Well, one problem is that you need a network connection to use it; not great for planning ahead underground. And, as has been mentioned elsewhere, google maps have a nasty habit of being under-detailed and out of date. The A-Z is *the* map for London, and having it on hand is invaluable. The app's not perfect, but the joy of iPhone apps is that you tend to get free improvements.

Shazam wins for Cool Points - an extremely accurate (and free) music recognition app (so long as you don't get *too* obscure. I've already bought a couple of albums of music identified this way.

NeoReader is a 2Dcode / QRcode reader, but feels like a problem waiting for a solution. QRcodes aren't widely used yet, and the iPhone's camera doesn't read them very smoothly. That said, it does work.

Tiny Violin is just amusing - for those moment when you really do need to pull out, and play, the world's smallest violin.

Microsoft's first iPhone app, Seadragon Mobile, is extremely impressive; it's essentially an image viewer, but it's designed for vast images, even of gigapixel size - it's a similar technology to Google Earth, and indeed includes various images of the whole Earth, Moon and Mars, alongside access to the online Seadragon and Photosynth archives.

FileMagnet is one of a class of apps that lets you store files - particularly PDFs on the iPhone. This is great for storing things like full tube maps, and the study guides for my rapidly increasing selection of audiobook language guides.

That brings me to one irritation about the iPod app on the phone - getting to audiobooks, particularly multipart audible audiobooks, is clumsy:

Go to 'iPod'
Click 'Back' out of whatever's playing at moment
Click 'More'
Click 'Audiobooks'
Click 'Audible'
Look through a list of things called 'A History of Britain, Vo...'
Try and guess which one is Volume 3, Part 1
Realise the only way you can be sure is to start one of them, and turn the phone sideways to rotate to coverflow view which will give you the full title.

I mean, c'mon guys, you're supposed to be usability experts!

The iTunes store has a few issues that bug me, too, and they're just clumsy.

Trying to find the URI that links to an iPhone app in the store is absurdly difficult; you can either hack around the web or "send to a friend" to yourself. It almost seems that they don't want people to discuss or recommend apps. And the ratings system may as well be designed to draw in harsh reviews. The only time you're encouraged to rate an app is when you're deleting in - probably not the way to get representative reviews from people who actually like the app. For those reviews that are left, there's no way of telling when a review was left - how old it is or which version of the app it relates to - so, as the store gets older, more and more of the reviews are outdated, and the scores unrepresentative of the current version. This is both unfair on the developer, and unhelpful to the user.

While you're reading this, if you own an iPhone, go download the app and keep it on your phone until it's needed. It's free, and it's tiny.

And it's potentially extremely useful.

We live in an age of rapid information flow, but sometimes it seems that some organisations, particularly in local or national government, haven't quite got that memo yet - as my recent travails with the Post Office showed. MySociety is an organisation that exists to counter those delays, and help information flow freely to and from both local and national government. They, as volunteers, do a stunning job.

One of their sites (and they now have many) is "Fix My Street" site, designed as a convenient way to report minor (or major) problems with our roads. I'm sure we've all seen potholes, missing signs, broken streetlamps, and would have been quite happy to report them and get them fixed if we had the faintest clue how. The Fix My Street website is a good start, but you still have to remember the problem and get round to locating and reporting it when you get home.

Or, if you've got their new iPhone App on your phone ready, you can do it in-situ, have the phone's location services place you precisely, and take a picture of the problem while you're at it.

Reporting the problem is a two-step process; you provide basic information (enough to record the problem) in the application, and then receive an email with a confirmation link which takes you to a page where you can complete the process, adding a category and further detail. (Personally I'm not hugely keen on the two-step data entry, and I've given my feedback so we'll see whether any changes arise). The email confirmation step is common to pretty much all of MySociety's sites, as to be useful they *must* be kept nuisance-free.

Your report is then mailed to the right department of the right council (and that's the really useful bit!) to allow action to be taken. You can then see any other local issues reported and give feedback as to whether your own has been fixed. It's effectively crowdsourced bug reporting for towns and cities. And it's an excellent, if minor use of communications technology and mobile platforms.

Like I said; download it, install it, and forget it. It's tiny (0.1MB) and it'll sit on your phone and wait until it can help fix your town.

One of my projects at the moment is creating a small web app that interfaces to the Spend iPhone Application by Adamcode. The app's a 59p bargain which simply lets you assign expenses to budgets while on the move, and so keep an eye on how fast it's flowing out. I'm using it to try and improve the amount of money I can pay into my holiday and savings funds.

The app itself is nicely designed; the key thing is that it's simple, usable and uncluttered. In which vein, a picture paints a thousand words, so here's the interface:



To assign an expense to a budget, you simply tap the budget and add an amount and description. The main interface then shows the amount you've spent or have left; budgets within range are green, those overspent are red. Budgets can refresh at various frequencies and optionally roll over.

This is great; it gives a great "at a glance" view, but not much more. It doesn't give me historical data, trends, charts, or summaries of how well I generally adhere to my budgets.

And, frankly, I really don't want it to. It'd clutter up the app, and would most likely be hard pressed to display enough controls or data to be useful within the confines of the iPhone interface. What Spend does, it does well.

What it doesn't do, I can do on my desktop.

The iPhone's data export abilities are incredibly limited, but Spend lets you drop CSV data to an email and send that to yourself. The core aim is that you can then copy that into a .csv file and load that into a spreadsheet. It's a good solution to the iPhone's limitations, but trying to manage sequential updates this way is bound to get trying; it's slow and too manual, and stitching together sequential and overlapping data and deletions is awkward.

So, what's a web software engineer to do? Well, write a website obviously. When the only tool you have is a hammer...

Seriously, though, the web solution's a good one. Sites can easily accept data input by email, and PHP's great for the data management. Add SVG charts and we have all we need.

So, the plan (version 1) is:

- Mail data to a robot address
- Create user accounts for any new source email addresses.
- Notify users by email.
- Stick data in a database
- Analyse data in various formats
- Spend less money
- Profit!

Since it's almost as easy to write a web app for everyone as for one person (if you code securely and sanely), I figured I'd plan for wide usage. It's an interesting challenge and also a chance to do something useful.

The format of the incoming mail though provides some challenges:

- Only expenses are exported, not the budgets they're accrued against.
- There's a slight data bug with regards to commas in text not being properly escaped in CSV.
- Dates are exported according (as far as I can tell) to the individual iPhone's locale settings, and there's no way of telling whether 6/7/2008 is an American iPhone sending data from June 7th, or a UK one sending it from July 6th. Assume the wrong one and your data's a mess.

There are various approaches that can be used to deal with these:
- Manual budget entry into the web app (budgets change slowly, expenses are several-per-day)
- Potentially merge any fields displaying too many commas
- Code for UK dates first and worry later
- Hope for import periods of at least 2 weeks, which would guarantee at least one date that'd be invalid if days and months were reversed.
- Do other heuristics on import data to check order.

It's worth noting that I'm coding this test-driven, so I'll have strong regression tests, a modular design, and the ability to improve and optimise as I go. However, I'd still rather not working on code that guesses what it's doing.

So, to keep it simple, I'm handling UK dates for now, but I also got in touch with the developer of the app to raise the actual bugs, suggest Budget export and let him know my plans. Adam was polite and responsive, and took the suggestion on board even before I started coding.

This week I've got some time off work and have started coding. The first part needed was the input mail parser, which:

- Reads in the whole email as text.
- Identifies the sender.
- Identifies the time range covered.
- Collects up and parses the CSV rows

It doesn't try and store this data, or catch the incoming emails; instead it provides the parsing function that another module can use to do so. That encapsulation makes testing easier and also works well with the brief periods of time I have available to code.

It also lets me test my assumptions as I code, because every class and function I code can be run almost immediately.

Some of these early assumptions included:

- Users will send emails of various expenditures at various times.
- These emails will overlap in the time they cover.
- Users may correct or delete items they've already sent.

This means I need to be able to uniquely identify transactions that may change name, amount and budget. The logical solution is therefore to use the timestamp (per user) as the UID - after all, you can't create two transactions at the same moment.

Well, early development points out that you actually can. Timestamps are only granular to the minute, and if you go to three shops and then update Spend after lunch, the very slick interface means you can enter at least two of them within the same minute.

Oops. No UID. And since the email export's main purpose is human usability, and I'm only one user of many, it doesn't seem very sensible (or polite) to ask Adam to recode the export (although a generic "spreadsheet optimised" output may have its uses, I'd rather not need it if I can avoid it). That said, the iPhone's update mechanism does mean that users can generally get the latest version of the app pretty easily.

But does it matter if we don't have an exact, causal UID? Possibly not. If we get two synchronous transactions we can increment one by a second. The update mechanism means we get all transactions for a minute or none of them, so we can handle time scoping and updates even if we shuffle which means which - so long as we're not trying to attach unique data such as comments. For that, we'll need a guaranteed UID.

The mechanism for handling incoming emails is then as follows:

- Identify the time range a new import covers
- Identify the sender of a new import
- We need to store all transactions which don't already exist for this time/account pair
- Delete any between this start and end date that don't exist in this import
- Update any already in the DB

So far, that all works. The main problem so far is the lack of specificity in dates; for that, export metadata may be needed, or a transition to YYYY/MM/DD format, which is unambiguous.

The iPhone's location function return data in the form "59.12345,-0.122344". Unfortunately if you pass this data to the iPhone maps application, it drops you in the sea somewhere off Ghana.

The solution? Well, while we wait for Apple (or Google?) to fix their parser, there's a trivial one. Rewrite the location string in the format "59.12345N,0.12234W" and you'll be perfectly positioned.

That took all of 5 minutes to work out, so it's a great pity that the developers of apps such as Cardinal and Geohash didn't take the time for proper on-device testing.

Inspired by Apple and O2, but applicable to a range of occasions...

I must not hype
Hype is the product-killer
Hype is the hubris that brings total disappointment
I shall face the hype
I will permit it to pass over and through the internets
And when it has gone past the inner cynic shall point and laugh
When the hype is gone, only the reviews will remain

While Apple got a lot of things about Friday's launch of the 3G iPhone wrong, they also got a lot of things right with the version 2 firmware they released at the same time.

It might be argued, though, that releasing the firmware at the same time as all the new iPhones were accessing the validation servers was one of the wrong things. The firmware was release, by my reckoning, at about 8:10 am EST – pretty much the very moment at which the first US 3G iPhones would have been hitting the iTunes store servers for authentication. This was also many hours after 3G iPhones had been on sale around half the rest of the world, including after the UK Apple stores had been left unable to sell by the failure of O2's primary sales network. (Apparently O2 and Carphone Warehouse both switched over to use O2's back-up network, but no-one had thought to give Apple access to that).

As a result, the auth servers jammed solid for an hour or so, leaving any iPhone that had installed the firmware but not yet validated able only to make emergency calls.

So, yeah maximised failure by maximising peak/immediate load. Not smart, technically speaking. Same mistake O2 made earlier in the week that took their direct sales website offline.

So, net result for me; saved about £180, didn't get a 3G iPhone and got a firmware upgrade (I managed to download the v2 package just before they pulled it and had a brick for about an hour but it's working fine now).

Anyway, I was going to talk about what Apple did right. The first generation iPhone was a good start, but had some issues; no GPS, no third-party apps, and a very tricky onscreen keyboard that was a particular nightmare to type hidden passwords on.

GPS was addressed to some extent in the wireless location update a few months ago; network mapping is generally pretty good in cities although it's obviously not true GPS. Third-party apps are now allowed uniquely via the iTunes store, and seem to have no way of synching via the standard iPhone / iTunes sync (which is now much slower). However the fact that all apps and their updates can be found via a central location, and can be installed directly from the store to the phone, is a definite plus.

So far the most useful app I've found is probably the free “remote” one, which lets an iPhone or iPod Touch control (with due authorisation) any copy of iTunes on the network, including browsing the whole library. It's one of those “just works” things that Apple usually do so well.

On the flipside, the Shazam music-identifying app is pretty smart too. Plus, now that SplashID's ported to the iPhone, I can finally keep my passwords in it again. Most of the ther useful apps are links to Twitter, Pownce and so on, and look like a good step in making these microblogging / location-sensitive apps far more usable. As an aside, it's slightly bemusing how many little apps “want to use your location”, according to the dialogue box.

To address my final point above, the keyboard hasn't actually changed, but the hidden password fields now have the sensible feature of displaying the last typed character while active, which makes password entry far more reliable.

So yeah; the iPhone; it works, whether original or 3G. On this basis, I really can't recommend people pay to upgrade to the new one unless GPS, 3G or more storage is utterly critical. But I'm impressed so far with the firmware upgrade and very pleased that Apple made it available to older phones. I strongly suspect it'll change the way I use the phone.

1) If you want to transfer your number, ordering your PAC a week in advance would be a good idea. Apparently they last for 30 days anyway. Conversely, if you can't get the PAC before buying, you should be able to transfer your number up to 15 days after starting a new contract (I am told this but am not yet able to prove it).

2) You *can* pay cash for the iPhone, or at least they were allowing it last night.

3) You still have to go through a credit check for O2, which happens after you've bought the phone and while you're activating it via iTunes (for which you'll need address and bank info). What happens if you fail, I don't know.

4) The O2 data package is apparently *genuinely* unlimited, in that it does not have "fair use" limits. These were removed a couple of days before launch.

5) The bluetooth headset is not included. Apparently you can't use bluetooth keyboards with the phone either?

6) The audio jack socket is a standard 4-way (Left,Right, Microphone, Earth) 3.5 phono jack, but there's a thin collar / tube around the socket so you'll need an adaptor to use it with normal ear/headphones. There's an in-store choice of a 7quid Griffin adaptor that doesn't include a handsfree mic, or a 30-something quid one fron Shure that does. Or you can get isolating headphones with a built-in mic from v-moda, which seem decent. Oh, and the button on mic on this last apparently acts to pause music playback in *some* circumstances. There are volume control buttons on the phone itself.

7) Typing passwords (eg mail, WPA) into the device is a nuisance. The keyboard is tricky at first, has no caps-lock, and all passwords are typed in obscured, so you have to *really* concentrate.

8) Safari can crash (and it'll sync a crash report to your desktop to send to Apple), but is generally extremely stable and astoundingly usable.

9) The phone comes with a basic cloth-bag case; first thing I bought, besides the above mentioned headphones (my old isolator pair having fallen apart the day before) was a side-loading belt case and a screen guard. There are plenty of options for accessories at the Apple store.

10) EDGE data transfer really doesn't seem too bad, but then I'm used to an old GPRS? Treo.

11) I don't think you can use an iPhone as a datamodem for a laptop; I'm unlikely to need to try.

12) The email client is pretty good, and can read HTML emails and attached PDFs very smoothly. Mail on OSX however, with which it's supposed to sync, sucks compared to Thunderbird.