Sero sed Serio

Yup, it’s been a while since I had a phone I actually like, during which I’ve just about survived with 3’s SkypePhone v1, which is equal parts tolerable and absolute nightmare. But more on that another time.

Instead, I’m currently toting my cousin’s first-gen iPhone, which is in great condition, and barring a bit of teething (because of course the infamous infinite startup bug hit me while I was a few hundred miles from my home mac ‘pon which it was backed up) it’s pretty damn kickin’.

So, being an übergeek, I thought I’d wax technical now and again, and share some tips. Nothing has quite the nerdtastic satisfaction of blogging something that hordes of iPhone forum users haven’t worked out yet!

Also, since my loverly iPhone is my first bit of decent tech which can take photos and sustain a perpetual data connection, I fully intend to spend one day a month (if possible) photoblogging. And I’m not talking about 20 shots of ambient skyline and shots of what I ate that day, I’m thinking more like one photo every 5 minutes for 24 hours. Think it’ll be a horrible endurance marathon? Think it’ll be too much of a peek into my life? Think it’ll be hideously tedious? Think it’s an excuse to get USB gizmos to keep the battery juiced? Sure, it’ll be all of those things. But since I’m an artface, and since life can be pretty interesting sometimes, it might be a groovy little experiment. Keep an eye on mah Twitter, y’all!

Now that firmware 2.0 is out, and everyone’s blogging their faces off about the new features of and/or failure to acquire their new 3G iPhones, I noticed a little nugget that’ll please iPod Touch owners that nobody else seems to have noticed yet:

Everyone with Maps on their pod will have noticed that it can sometimes find your position when you’re connected to a wi-fi network, but most of the time, there’s no point in leaving wi-fi on when you’re on the move, so this has gone relatively unnoticed:

The “locate me” button in Maps  can now be toggled… and if you leave it lit  blue, and you’re walking or driving through a reasonably urban or residential area with wi-fi on, Maps will pick up your location using networks you don’t have a password for. In the car this week, in a journey of just 4 streets, the iPod picked up about 8 networks on the way home, tracking us fairly accurately, if only every hundred feet or so.

It’s not quite GPS, and you wouldn’t want to drive using it, but if you’ve got enough map tiles loaded for your town/city, you can pretty much entirely fail to get lost ever again.