Today it finally happened: on my way out of the house this morning, I realized that I’d just finished the last book I was reading, and it was therefore time to pop the next one off the to-read stack.  The next one being a luscious-looking hardcover volume.  I looked at it, looked at my backpack, felt my shoulders a bit, took a deep breath…

…and pulled out my iPhone and ordered the same book from the Kindle Store, so I could read it on the phone.  A book I’d already bought: a mistake I won’t make twice.

Dear publishing industry: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.  Amazon is in the process of doing to you what Apple spent the last decade doing to the music industry.  It’s not going to be pretty, and a lot of you basically deserve it.  But I’d really like to see my local awesome specialty bookstore not go out of business as a result of your general incompetence. 

So maybe, just maybe, act a bit less dumb than the record labels?  (You allegedly do less coke than them, so this shouldn’t be that hard, right?)  The music companies insisted on getting as close to pay-per-listen as the law (which they often had a hand in writing) would allow them, and their reward was a generation of no-longer-really-customers who think that downloading albums off bittorrent is just fine.  Those that do pay money do so into walled (or at least strongly fenced) gardens (Apple, Amazon, Rhapsody) where johnny-come-lately tech companies skim off huge profits in return for decimating your physical media sales.  All of their attempts at creating their own supply chain for electronic delivery were crashing failures: they couldn’t compete with Apple on convenience, and they sure as hell couldn’t compete with bittorrent on price.

What I’m saying here is: I just happily handed someone $30 for a bound pile of wood pulp.  Of that $30, you got the lion’s share.  I’m the sort of person who does this regularly.  Want to convince me to do it again, despite the drawbacks of print media?  Stick a mini-CD into the dustflap with a PDF copy I can read when I’m not on my couch.  The pirates will continue jacking your e-books whether you do this or not, but at least this way your local customers won’t all be fleeing directly into Jeff Bezos’ hungry arms.

The (more or less) complete list of things that constantly annoy me about my iPhone that are apparently not going to be fixed in version 4.0:

• Ugly, modal, history-less, illegible alert dialogs. 
  • In fact, with “local alerts” subbing in for any sort of actual IPC, this is going to get much, much worse.
• No custom SMS/calendar/voicemail alert sounds.  (Seriously.  In 2010.) 
  • This is a double failure: you can’t add any alert sounds to the built-in ten (nearly all of which are awful), and you can’t assign alert sounds per user/calendar.
• No Google Voice support, nor apparently will there ever be.
• No third-party email apps.  (Which means no proper Gmail support except via the slow-as-hell webapp, but also means that whatever feature you might want, if Apple doesn’t think it’s worth putting into Mobile Mail.app, it’s never going to happen.)
• No OTA sync, no wifi sync.
• No way to customize the lock or home screen contents.

Dealbreakers?  Maybe.  God it’s a pity that Palm appears to be in a death-spiral right now: their OS is nice, but the hardware is half-baked and overdue for a major revision.  Android is crawling toward usability, but the Nexus One’s softbuttons are the devil’s work.  Pity nobody in the US seems to be selling the HTC Desire except on the grey market yet…

And while I’m snarking about Fortune 500 companies unable to pull their style out of 1997, allow me to quickly demonstrate that Amazon hasn’t paid anyone to look at IMDB in many, many years:

“Daddy, what’s a newsgroup?”  “Well son, it’s better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t done.  And if you see your mom…”

Long story short here:

If you own an iPhone, Apple’s warranty will often be very liberally applied by Genius Bar employees if you’re nice to them…

…unless the submersion sensor has been tripped.

“What submersion sensor, Nathan?”

Well, funny you should ask.  There are actually two submersion sensors inside an iPhone: one just inside the iphone jack port (the wide narrow thing on the bottom that you plug the USB cable into), and one inside the headphone jack.  To see them, you need a magnifying glass and a flashlight, much like your doctor uses to look into your ear canal.  The sensors are just little strips of moisture-sensitive paper: if they get wet they turn bright red.  (Pictures here.)

Here’s the catch: you don’t need to drop your iphone into a toilet bowl (or fishtank, or river) in order to trip the sensor.  In fact, you don’t need to submerse it at all.  Just a few drops of water that creep in at an unlucky angle are enough to do it.  If that happens, your warranty is null and void, and no amount of sweet-talking will change it: Apple will refuse the return of the phone, and they will charge you two hundred dollars for a refurbished replacement.

You can buy a little silicone insert for the iphone jack for $6 from various websites.  You may wish to consider doing so.

Why yes, I do speak from highly annoyed experience here, why do you ask?

 
9:10am — get an SMS message on my Treo, explaining that there is a new Critical Firmware Update for my model Treo on Verizon Wireless, and that I must install it immediately in order for billing to continue to function directly. Oh god. The last time I tried to do an firmware update on my Treo, it took most of a day. Fuck this noise: I already knew I was going to get an iPhone, may as well bite the bullet.

Arrive Apple Store Palo Alto 11:10am. Get in line. A few minutes later, a perky young woman in an orange t-shirt comes up, asks me what model iPhone I want, hands me a ticket for that model, and explains that I can wait in line (estimated 45 to 90 minutes) or come back later. I ask if I’ll still have to wait in line if I come back later: in fact I will. Fine, I will wait: I’ve got a zipcar until 1:30pm, and I’m parked in a 2-hour space.

11:55am — arrive at the head of the line. Not bad, not bad. A chipper young man takes my ticket, leads me into the store and starts asking me about what kind of plan I want and do I already have an AT&T account? I’ve got my Verizon account info in hand and know exactly which plan I’m signing up for: he’s happy, this is going to go quickly.

12:30pm — four different attempts to port my old cell phone number have failed. Each attempt requires starting the entire process over from scratch, including running my credit card through for a credit check and having me manually input my SSN into the chipper young man’s handheld. Each attempt to run my credit card through the handheld takes 5 minutes of frantically swiping in hopes that this time it will actually read the magnetic strip. Finally after the fourth try, the now less-chipper young man suggests that maybe we can set up my account with a new number, and then I can walk into an AT&T store and have them do the port there. He says he’s sorry about this, and that usually he recommend as little contact with AT&T as possible. I assent.

12:40pm — the now strongly aggravated young man goes in search of a new handheld unit, as his one is no longer even pretending to be willing to read any of my credit cards.

12:50pm — the first attempt to register the account with a new number has failed. He calls AT&T, tells them the magic words, and they tell him that it’s because he entered my billing address as “Box 12345” instead of “P.O. Box 12345” and that the system doesn’t support this. He relates this information to me with an expression of incredulity. A few moments later, he gets cut off from AT&T and has to re-dial them. As he is attempting to re-establish contact with someone with a clue at AT&T support the session on his handheld expires and the unit resets.

1:05pm — I am starting to get a little nervous about my borrowed car and its parking space

1:20pm — After two more tries, with an AT&T rep on the phone with him, he succeeds in activating a number! I’m done, right?

1:21pm — No, apparently the phone has to be connected to a computer running iTunes, right now, in the store, and activated. I call zipcar and let them know that I’ll be returning the car late.

1:31pm — I leave the store, clutching my new phone and a receipt.

1:45pm — at work, at my desk, I realize that they gave me someone else’s receipt, unless my name has recently changed to “Matthias Vaska” without my knowledge. Call Apple Store.

1:55pm — finally make my way through the voicemail tree and hold queue. Am informed by a different chipper young man that they can’t email me my receipt, but if I come back to the store any time in the next few days they can reprint it. Great.

2:00pm — Figuring that I may as well get all of my time-wastage done at once, call AT&T, am transferred to the porting department.

2:25pm — Am told the following:

1. In order to port my old 718 (New York City) area-code number, I will need to have the operating area of the phone temporarily changed back to new york city.
2. To do this, they will need a NYC address to associate with the account, even if it’s never used for billing.
3. Then they will need to issue a new SIM card with a temporary NYC number and install it into the phone.
4. Once the new SIM card is installed, THEN they can port my Verizon number.
5. …and since this requires physically changing SIM cards, the only way to do this is to personally walk the phone into an AT&T corporate store.

Best retail experience EVAR!

I’m sure more hilarity will ensue once I actually make it to an AT&T store. Stay tuned!