Sandy, Jen L and I took most of the staff of our Midwest Regional Office to lunch at their favorite Mexican Restaurant, Hay Caramba!, as thanks for hosting one of our co-workers, Jen C, in their offices for the last 2 1/2 years. Jen C didn't get rehired in our recent reorganization, so she has scored a new job elsewhere in Chicago. Tomorrow is her last day.

Boss Hopp, along with Josie, Linda, Cindy, Deb, Tom and others who work in this office, were in good spirits despite deep sadness about their friend Jen C's moving on. They will help box up Jen's company gear after tomorrow. I'll know I'll miss Jen's unwavering cheerful serenity.

I'm so looking forward to getting out of the business of team disassembly and back into team building.

- mike lee -

On the SuperShuttle to Reagan National to catch a flight to Chicago...

This will be a quick in-and-out to see off a departing colleague and close out her desk.

- mike lee - washington, dc

My neighbor Jeff has been blogging about his obsession with the iPhone. Today he came over to see mine and we ended up driving to the nearest Apple Store so he could buy one. Jeff is pictured here showing his iPhone Lust-O-Meter to the Apple sales associate. I haven't heard from him since he activated it, so he must certainly be busy exploring all the phone's features. I'm sure he'll be working up a new post about pegging the Lust-O-Meter.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

My neighbor Jeff is agonizing over buying an iPhone. He's post an iPhone Lust-O-Meter on his blog. He should enter the iPhone giveaway that my wife has running on her organization's web site.

Here are some other random notes:

• I've spent most of my time in Safari. Browsing web pages is a joy using the zooming and panning. Too bad there's no Flash support. But Javascript, DHTML and AJAX work pretty well. AJAX heavy sites like Flickr work great.
• The virtual keyboard takes A LOT of patience and practice, but is usable.
• Hiptop Nation often crashes Mobile Safari because of all the photos. The browser goes black and drops you back out to the start page of icons.
• Everything about the phone functions--except Visual Voicemail--is mediocre. The speakerphone volume is surprisingly weak given that you can drive the speaker pretty loud when playing music or videos.
• Mail app is bare bones. I discovered it doesn't import attached Vcards. If my company supports connecting to Exchange Server, I'll wonder if I can do stuff like manage Outlook appointments.
• The built-in camera captures good quality images, and performs surprisingly well in low light. I'm still mystified as to why there isn't a decent flash and self-portrait mirror built in.
• The included photo gallery app only displays photos at screen resolution, even though they are captured much higher. The demos that show the finger pinch zooming in are bogus in that the zoom only magnifies the screen rez photo--you can see it get pixely very quickly. Also, the system only attaches the screen rez image when sending a photo as a email attachment. This means there is no way to email the 2mp native images into sites like Flickr. You have to sync with iTunes and post from the desktop.
• The YouTube app was fun for a while, but I found that even at 10,000 videos, I got tired of what was there after an hour or two. You can NOT search full YouTube or see your own YouTube vids.
• It's really nice having a built-in mono speaker for listening to podcasts.
• In the iPod mode, I couldn't find a way to random access an audio track while it was playing. You can do this with videos tho.
• Like many others have said, it's annoying that you need an adapter to use third-party headphones. I have noise cancelling headphones for which I'll need to pack yet another adapter.
• The iPhone hardware build quality is outstanding. Though the screen does accumulate finger grease quickly, being made of glass will keep it scratch free for a long time to come. The steel rim of the screen and metal back bezel are solid and scuff resistent too. I already dropped my iPhone once onto the floor at a bar. Fortunately, the floor was wooden, so no harm at all. I'm currently using a leather folio belt case made by Incase.
• The backlight for the screen is set at "half" brightness at the factory. It looked fine at that setting, much brighter than the Sidekick screen at max. You can pump it up to blindingly bright, presumably for better visibility in bright sunlight.
  
  

One of the best iPhone reviews I've seen to date is on Engadget.

- mike lee - happy 4th - wheaton, md

I got over 10,000 hits to my Flickr stream in the last 24 hours because Make Blog and Boing Boing linked to my close-up photo experiments with the iPhone camera and Radio Shack 3-lens magnifier. This is the same technique I documented here back in January 2005. I'm going to continue to post iPhone related photos in a set on Flickr.

My neighbor Jeff is agonizing over buying an iPhone. He's post an iPhone Lust-O-Meter on his blog. He should enter the leather folio belt case made by Incase.

The backlight for the screen is set at "half" brightness at the factory. It looked fine at that setting, much brighter than the Sidekick screen at max. You can pump it up to blindingly bright, presumably for better visibility in bright sunlight.



One of the best iPhone reviews I've seen to date is on Engadget.

- mike lee - happy 4th - wheaton, md

This was one of the first photos I took. It's attached as is. You can see what it does in crappy light. It's passable and better than SK3 output.

- Sent from my iPhone

The Apple Stores around us, including the one at Montgomery Mall, have plenty of iPhones as of mid-day today (note all the green "available" dots on the Apple's list of Maryland stores). So I didn't need to wait nine hours yesterday. But I'm still glad I did.

I actually bought two iPhones yesterday because my wife's boss wanted the second one to raffle off on their web site. Then last night, my wife got iPhone fever after playing with mine, so we just bought hers at the mall. It was between the iPhone and Helio Ocean until last night.

Let's hope our toddler Cici doesn't start to ask for one! She was already having fun last night with the touch screen moving photos around with the swipe of her finger.

- mike lee - north bethesda, md

My first few hours with the iPhone were a magic carpet ride flying past buttery smooth OS X screens. All the good things that have been said about the iPhone are true (see the exhaustive coverage on Engadget), most anything related to missing features in the software will likely be addressed in upcoming updates. What's not in the hardware, like camera flash, faster phone network, more memory and keyboard will have to come in the next couple years in a future iPhone. I see the vast opportunities this breakthrough phone opens up, so I'll likely be retiring my Sidekick on its 5th anniversary this October to stay on this black and silver magic carpet.

I'm going to continue to collect thoughts about the iPhone as I go on about my weekend. More soon...

- mike lee - wheaton, md

She's taking a while to sync. I'm pushing 7 gigs worth of stuff on.

- mike lee