Life with an iPhone: Week 3

 

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By Ian Wrigley

Posted on 16 Jul 2007 at 12:19

Ian Wrigley rushed out and bought an Apple iPhone on the opening weekend. Over the next few weeks, he'll be sharing the reality of life with Apple's swish new phone.

In this installment, he reveals how he's stopped his screen getting scratched and the wonder of iVoicemail. Check back each Monday for updates. Ian is a contributing editor to PC Pro, writing the Open Source column in our Real World Computing section.

Week 3: Remember, stay protected
This week, my iPhone has been feeling much more coddled thanks to a plastic screen protector from shieldzone.com. As I mentioned in the last piece, after one week the screen was already scratched. That, of course, resulted in comments on this site along the lines of "incompetence is not something to be proud of".

So just to clarify: I'm not proud of the fact that the screen is scratched (and nor am I incompetent). Because I have a modicum of self-respect, I don't carry around my cellphone clipped to a holster on my belt. Instead, I put it my pocket, along with whatever else is in there - keys usually. My Motorola SLVR lasted a year with that sort of treatment and showed no marks on the screen at all, so the fact that the iPhone lasted less than a week before it was scratched rather irritated me.

Anyway, the protective plastic sheet is now in place, and seems to be an excellent product - it's well worth the $15 it cost, and would have been even more worthwhile if I'd bought it two weeks ago.

And talking of excellence, this week I was in meetings for much of the time, resulting in several voicemail messages - so I got to experience the wonder that is visual voicemail. It's hard to overstate just how great this is. You can skip around in a message in the same way you would skip around a music track, just by tapping and dragging, and you can play only the messages you want, in any order you want. Simply being able to repeat parts of a message without listening to an irritating recorded voice is a joy.

Let me know if there are any other aspects of the iPhone that you'd like me to explore by commenting on this story.

Click here to read part 2 of Life with an iPhone

Click here to read part 3 of Life with an HTC Touch

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