Living with the iPhone

Being an attorney with an iPhone, I've wondered about the privacy of my SMS-text messages and whether they can be withheld from prying eyes. I don't mean that dinner date across from you, but in a larger sense. Think about what we've all begun to say via text messages: Carrie Underwood got dumped this way and Detroit's mayor was brought down by his text messages, for example. Like it or not, texting has become a communication medium that is here to stay, meaning that the contents of those messages are also susceptible to legal discovery, i.e., you have may have to fork it over in a lawsuit. The iPhone itself is purported of being capable of storing about 75,000 SMS-text messages. That is almost too much data in your hands! You could probably write a small novel with that amount of text messages. If you're like most people, you gripe about life and work inevitably. But, what if your employer pays for your SMS plan, can they have a peek? Especially if you go over a plan's limit? What if you're sending (gasp) personal SMS-messages on work phones?

Well, according to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the answer is "no." An employer needs a sender's or receiver's consent before examining those messages. In a decision issued Wednesday, ( Quon v. Arch Wireless) the court (the highest federal court in the West short of the U.S. Supreme Court) said that the Fourth Amendment provides a reasonable expectation of privacy that extends into the world of SMS-text messages.

In the case, a city police department provided text-paging services for its officers, but had no clear text-use policy. Instead, the city relied on a general employee Internet/computer usage policy and tried to say that the SMS-texts were akin to e-mail messages. During an internal affairs investigation for excessive text-messaging charges, no less, the police department wanted to see if service-charge "overages" were work-related necessitating a better SMS-plan. After the messages were not on the PDA (d-for delete, anyone?), the city ended up getting the messages from the SMS-service provider itself. The appeals court determined the SMS-provider was subject to the provisions of the Stored Communications Act. Under that act, a "electronic communication service", like a SMS-provider, will need to get your OK before releasing the contents of these communications (which are akin to a sealed letter) because you have a legitimate expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. So, for now at least, your SMS-text messages are safe from your bosses prying eyes. Is that a collective "whew" I hear?

With iPhone 2.0 coming soon, a question I've heard many a current iPhone owner wanting to get the next iPhone ask: what do I do with my old one? This emerging question highlights the early-adopter's plight against the law of diminishing returns. It's doubtful that a current iPhone will fetch more than $100 on eBay. But you never know. This presupposes that people will dump their old iPhones for a new one, but the incentives are there this time around especially with the lowered price, and given our disposable cell phone culture, it's more than likely that people will replace. (This leads to other questions: if you plan to get a new iPhone anyway, why would you buy Apple Care when a new iPhone comes out each year? And, now, with an even lower price, why bother?)

For those who haven't replaced with iPhones and bought them near to day 1 last year when the 1.0 iPhone came out, the clock is ticking to replace them. I've seen these original 1.0 iPhones with batteries that are deteriorating and many 1.0 iPhone screens and cases that are scratched, rendering them even less valuable once iPhone 2.0 comes out.

In my case, I've been a bit luckier as this is my third iPhone which means it's still relatively 'new' (if not refurbished). There hasn't been noticeable battery deterioration (yet) nor is the iPhone scratched especially after I encased it in plastic - sounds like a good eBay tag, doens't it?

Given Apple's previous willingness to swap out iPhones over this past year, will Apple see a sudden surge of iPhones returned this month before the 1-year warranty window runs out? Will this willingness to accept returns for 1.0 carry over to 2.0 and be as generous? After all, when they replaced my dropped iPhone they said it was for research purposes, presumably for the 2.0 iPhone, but if this carries over to 2.0 iPhones is not clear. With mandatory in-store activation and a lowered price point, it doesn't seem like 1.0's goodwill will carry over into 2.0.

A newly negotiated deal with Apple could hurt exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier AT&T in the short term, but the cell phone carrier sees a big upside for the future.

Following the much-anticipated launch of the iPhone 3G at an Apple event in San Francisco on Monday, AT&T announced that it had struck a new deal with Apple. The new arrangement between AT&T and Apple is similar to other contracts AT&T has negotiated with other smartphone manufacturers such as Research In Motion and Samsung.

(Credit: Apple)

Since the first iPhone was launched last summer, AT&T and Apple have shared ongoing revenue from iPhone users. But now AT&T will pay the upfront cost for the iPhone 3G and subsidize the total cost of the phone by making customers agree to a two-year service contract.

The arrangement will benefit consumers by allowing the new iPhone to be sold at a much lower price point. The 8GB version will cost only $199 and the 16GB version will sell for $299 with AT&T's subsidy. This puts the iPhone on par with other smartphones such as RIM's BlackBerry and Samsung's BlackJack.

But the new deal comes at a price. AT&T executives said on a conference call with analysts and investors on Monday that the arrangement will put pressure on the company's profit margins and dilute earnings for the next year and a half. That said, the company believes that the new price point and improved Web surfing experience of the iPhone on AT&T's 3G wireless network will drive sales of the iPhone and get more customers using its data services.

"Less than 20 percent of our customers have integrated devices," Ralph de la Vega, the head of AT&T's mobile business, said during the conference call. "And at the $199 price point we could have mass adoption and put the iPhone in the hands of people who have never surfed the Web on a phone."

What's more, AT&T sees iPhone users as highly valuable customers. Executives said that they are willing to make upfront sacrifices to get these customers on their network.

Specifically, iPhone users typically generate more revenue than basic AT&T cellular customers because they use more data services, de la Vega said. And with the new 3G capability and more applications coming to the phone, executives expect that to increase. iPhone users are also more willing to recommend the device to friends and family. And the churn or rate at which they drop the iPhone and the AT&T service is very low compared with customers using other devices.

"The 2G iPhone experience helped us understand what the customer characteristics are likely to be," Rick Lindner, CFO of AT&T, said during the conference call. "These are high value customers."

As a result of the new arrangement, iPhone users will subscribe to the same kind of voice data plans already offered to other AT&T smartphone customers. This means that as part of the two-year contract commitment, customers will be required to have at least a $39.99 voice plan. And they will choose from one of two data packages. Consumers will get the full smartphone data package for an additional $30 extra a month. Business users who want corporate e-mail can select a data plan for an additional $45 a month.

Update 3:59 p.m. PDT: The new AT&T iPhone 3G data pricing means that consumers will now pay $10 more a month for data service. The original iPhone data plan, launched a year ago, costs $20 a month. An iPhone 3G must be activated in either an AT&T or Apple store, and customers must agree to the two-year service contract with AT&T, de la Vega said.

This year many riders in the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the LA Gay and Lesbian Center's annual 7-day AIDS LifeCycle bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles were toting iPhones - tucked away in their spandex or in their Bento boxes on their bikes.

The iPhone was the mose commonly spotted PDA, but man riders had Blackberry devices too. In any case, having a PDA was a great way to keep up with news and to send out updates about our trek's progress. Each day the Ride featured 2500+ riders cycling more than 70-100-plus mile routes. And, at the end of the day, a massive tent city would be set up in such exotic locales as Lompoc, California, which were no more than large grassy fields or state parks. Power sources were very, very scarce if even available. So, in addition to complaints about sore backs, sit ones and tight quad muscles, many iPhone-laden riders noted the battery life was pretty dismal. When there was an errant plug-in found at the park it was immediately swamped with chargers and extension cords to get some precious electricity.

Not being able to plug-in, many ALC riders tried using solar chargers, others like me, only turned it on sporadically during the day, but even after 7 days of doing that my "low battery" warning light popped up by Day 5 of the Ride. For those using solar chargers mounted on helmets, backpacks or tents, a full charge wasn't too common, but a 1/3d to 1/2 charge was possible, enough to get by with conservative use of the iPhone. I preferred not being plugged-in as the Ride itself gave me enough to think about: what was that, another mountain to climb?

But, once again, having a camera phone that can email was great. In addition to being able to keep loved ones and supporters updated via SMS/twitter updates, this year Riders could send pictures of the stunning views from the various mountains we climbed, of the coast and of each other that we were afforded. Also, the quasi-GPS (slated to be replaced soon by iPhone-the-second) still gave us a sense that we were in the middle of no where on some days of the Ride. All in all a great device to have on the Ride, which in itself was an incredible experience.

Already looking to next year's Ride, a rider from a Bay Area solar panel and power company promised to have a service truck vehicle topped off with solar panels to soak up the sun and to offer riders a charge station for their cell phones, camera batteries and PDAs. He was already beta testing it this year with other iPhone Riders and it looked to have worked just as well as commercially available solar chargers. But within a year, he promised the technology to be improved. And, knowing how a year can change everything, ALC 8 may become even more plugged-in.

My friend Zach sends an image on the AIDS Ride somewhere in the middle of the California coast on his iPhone

From just outside of Ventura, the iPhone's camera allowed ALC 7 Riders to send updates to their supporters

The new iPhone is looming, right? Current iPhone models are not being restocked or are 'sold out', buzz is being generated. It's a different kind of buzz than last time around though. There aren't 'leaked' pictures, there aren't many purported leaks, or any increased amount of feverish patent-trolling to see what's coming. It seems that there won't be a ground-breaking paradigm shifting this time around, right?

On the larger vein of waiting, though, I'm a pretty impatient type. A bit ADHD too. But you know the type of person I'm talking about: people who are ready, willing and able to wait for something for a finite amount of time. Not talking about waiting for iPhone 2.0 but more about waiting in a line, for a table, for a movie to start, at the DMV, etc. Moving to California from the Midwest a few years ago taught me how Californians are supposedly so laid-back. In realty, we all have just gotten used to dealing with the large amounts of people who live here and that things take longer here than they do in other parts of the country. Here, you have to learn to wait in line for everything, parking, coffee, food, etc., it's part of the deal.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to alleviate waiting, cell phone calls, reading a magazine/newspaper, staring off into space. So instead of wasting time in the waiting line (ala Zero7), having the internet on the iPhone (or similar devices), especially in Starbucks with their free Wi-Fi now makes the wait, for me at least, seem much shorter. For me, a wait evaporates with a quick check of the NYTimes, Facebook or of email. If the internet connection or if EDGE is slow, however, the wait seems even more interminable. While I distract myself from the wait with web-safaris ala Safari, there are others who isolate themselves off from the rest of the world with their iPods or and others who subject the rest of the world to a potentially inane and ceaseless cellphone call. Whatever the poison, passing the time away in a waiting line may no longer be a time where you can meet new people or see new things if we're distracted by our own PDAs. Is that even more of a waste of time?

Let's face it, the iPhone can do a whole bunch of things, some necessary (like talking, texting and emailing) and others not-so-necessary (like the rolling-a-make-believe-ball-into-a-peg-fame) pretty well. But, you would hope that one of the more basic features like the weather function would work better than it does. Sure, the icons are pretty and easy to understand. One of my favorites is the ambiguous sun-with-raindrops icon, so you know that it's supposed to rain and be sunny, right.... The forecasts are not detailed, and have questionable accuracy at best. I've been noticing this trend for months now, but this should't be the case as weather forecasting and even simple reporting is going to get more relevant as weather (i.e., global warming) becomes a greater and more pernicious factor in our lives (think about it: tornadoes in the midwest that have record wind speeds, snow in the Dakotas in late April, hurricanes that wipe out countries).

As such, because the interface is simple and only provides basic forecasts and conditions, you would hope that the iPhone weather feature would be at least accurate. Think again. I've seen it almost everywhere I travel. Today, for example, for San Francisco it says it's cloudy, when it's sunny. It said it was 61 degrees when it was 51 degrees (earlier it said it was sunny when it was cloudy). In Australia, I remember the forecast being sun and rain on alternating days. In reality, it was exactly the opposite. Same was true for Hawaii. Same for Iowa. So, as Apple's engineers work on the next 3G iPhone (or would-be SDK iPhone app folks toil away for current iPhones) I can only hope they can improve upon the weather feature.

Sure, it's not new that people get interrupted at dinner by a cell phone call. In the past, it must have been a pager, or maybe in olden days, a courier pigeon. But with the increasing number of people getting iPhones (I have to admit that a scion of my friends are over it and are eagerly awaiting the next iPhone) what's happening is now I know what types of messages are interrupting that long-planned catch-up dinner with that over-scheduled friend sitting across the table from me. Whereas before you knew there was a message, now (thanks to the limited number to iPhone tones available) you can have a pretty good idea that Johnnie Q. Public is being texted, has a new e-mail, maybe missing an iCal appointment, or has new voicemail. Even if your iPhone is on silent you can hear the vibration, persistent buzzing (a call), short buzz (everything else).

Of course, this brings up a new set of disclosures, expectations, and etiquette that I'm sure Emily Post would reject out of hand: don't answer; switch off your phone, stupid. OK, maybe not the "stupid" part, but I'm sure she'd lean toward giving your dinner date your full attention. But we all can't be Emily Posts, nor should we. But what are the guidelines? Do you tell the person or persons you're eating with who texted/called/e-mailed you? I kind of want to know who interrupted my dinner. Who would dare?

When I get called, I try not to break eye contact with the person I'm dining with--let me emphasize try. I would expect the same behavior in kind, but I'm sure this would be fantasy in today's world. For example, I taught an ex how to check work e-mail on their iPhone and never saw their eyes again while dining. They are now an ex. Or, what's worse, someone across the table gets a text message that makes them smile more than you can. Ouch!

So, what's the balance? There have been complaints about life getting less personal and communicative, so why spoil a personal face-to-face interaction with acknowledging absent person/communication? That said, anytime there's a gentle e-mail buzz, a jarring ringtone, or a subtle vibrate notification, you and your dinner date know someone, somewhere is trying to make some form of personal contact too. Shouldn't that be acknowledged too? Incidentally, because the iPhone (like many other PDAs/phones these days) has a large screen that definitely lets you see that John Doe is calling or texting in a font just large enough for Johnnie Q. Public to see and read. Oh, the interesting situations this can get you in.

Anyway, the trend my friends and I have been working out to strike a balance between giving your attention to your dinner date and making sure the calls during dinner weren't more important (or from someone more important) is the pre-dessert text break. Purely optional, of course. It was unspoken at first, but now it's explicit. So, during dinner, phones away. After about an hour into dinner, after the plates are cleared but before the post-dinner coffee/dessert gorge fest, phones out: we now all have a short break to check on the very, very urgent messages we may have missed over the salad and seared halibut course, but clearly pressing enough to check before the lava cake comes out.

Oftentimes though, it's disappointing: e-fare e-mails, a news alert via e-mail, an American Idol text, junkmail about a new diet. How fitting.

There comes a point where every early adopter realizes they are no longer really adopting anything unique any more. This happens when a product becomes saturated, more available and more universal. For me, as I've seen over the past few days, that point has come to pass - at least in San Francisco.

Walking around, eating out, and driving around San Francisco, all I see are iPhones. But it's not only the young yupppie/guppie types any more. Rather, there are kids, young professionals, middle-aged folks (not so many older folks though), men, women, white, Black, Latino, Asian, you name it and they are touting an iPhone. Have prices fallen drastically? No. Has that SDK come out yet? Not in an appreciable way yet. But nonetheless, visual evidence indicates that Apple and AT&T are on their way to selling millions of units this year, even if it's not 10 million.

This would explain, perhaps, why it was so easy for me to get another replacement iPhone when I thought I'd have to buy a new one. Unlike my last iPhone which had a portion of the touch-screen die (cell death is what the Apple rep temred it), this time I dropped my iPhone during a 20-mile training ride for the AIDS LifeCycle. It was my fault, plain and simple. The iPhone still 'worked' in a sense as it powered up and displayed its main menu. After all, it's tough enough to have been rolled over by a semi truck - but it was odd to me that a simple drop would disable it to such a great extent. But nonetheless, to fix this problem, or replace my iPhnne, I thought I'd be out a few hundred bucks. I thought wrong.

Because my iPhone impacted on that single spot, it kept switching off and on, and off, and on with a consistent "No Service" message with an occasional sign of hope from AT&T saying service was found. I toyed around with the idea of being to live with a bi-polar iPhone, but dismissed it.

So, I made an appointment at the nearest Apple Store at Stonestown in San Francisco later that day, and came up with all the possible rationales for them to swap my iPhone out. "It was like this way already. Version 1.1.4 messed up my iPhone. My iPhone was possessed." But all these excuses couldn't hide the fact there was a big 'ol dent and scratch on my iPhone that was clearly my fault. Turns out that was all unnecessary as the clerk took a look, noted the issue and muttered something about the iPhone being useful for "research."

With that, I wasn't going to ask any more questions nor say anything And, in less than 10 minutes, I had a 'new' refurbished iPhone in hand. This time I bought a plastic cover for it and promised it that I wouldn't drop it. I walked out wondering what the terms of the warranty were. Would I have really been forced to buy a new iPhone? Luckily, I didn't have to answer those questions.

Next time, the trauma of finally migrating all my music, contacts and ringtones to an iMac from a PC-based iPhone account.

Recent iPhone ads have touted the utility of having the iPhone on a trip. Vacationing with the iPhone is a great convenience, but also makes it harder to vacation.

Using the quasi-GPS and Google Maps, being able to make dinner reservations, forsaking tour guidebooks and printed itineraries it great. On a recent long weekend to Hawaii, my friends and I discovered and confirmed the utility of the iPhone features on the road. So much so, we didn't even bring our laptops, which is a big deal for some of us. Really, it is. The only physical complaint I had about the iPhone was getting sunscreen and sand on it. The only user-interface issue: dragging and dropping the "pin" in Google Maps as it sometimes got tripped up and I wished for some "reset" function to clear out all the locales we looked up.

In a larger sense though, at one point, I kind of wanted to throw my iPhone into a pineapple patch or a volcano (there were road closures do to hot lava flows). But while the iPhone is touted to merge phone, camera, iPod and PDA. Doing so, however, makes it hard to truly disconnect and unplug - spam emails follow you, work emails come too. Sure, this is true with any phone or mobile device. But doing so is both liberating and daunting as it takes me a particular amount of will power to switch off my phone and to keep it off for an extended period of time. Imagine a knight without their sword, a politician without their teleprompter (or morning talk show hosts on SNL for that matter).

Switching off the iPhone, I think requires oo much effort to think about it on vacation by my book. But there are times for serenity and calm, however. the horror!

Anyway, I say this all as we still await the SDK package, meaning we may get Exchange server emails and endless applications that make us even more reliant on the iPhone.

A Sequoia voting machine rebooting, and rebooting...

(Credit: Kevin Ho)

With all things touch-screen in an increasingly touch-screen centric world, I was given the "plastic or paper" option for casting my vote in the California primary on this most super of Super Tuesdays. So, not liking the marker fumes and being used to touching everything on the iPhone anyway, I opted to vote "plastic."

The polling place had 10 conventional optical-scan voting stations with real paper ballots, but only 1 digital voting machine. San Francisco uses the Sequoia voting machine and, well, here's my story:

The clerk handed me a plastic card to insert into the machine. The idea is that you insert the card to activate the ballot and machine. Easy, right? Umm, no, not so in my case. Instead of the black screen of death, Sequoia's red screen of death (irony that the Communists would laugh at) popped up when I inserted my card into the machine's slot. Nothing moved--neither touching nor talking to the machine worked. What's worse, the card was now stuck in the machine as there was no eject button or function. The clerk who handed me the card was confounded. I was having flashbacks to that movie, Man of the Year, with Robin Williams being elected on a computer glitch. I had a thought that I'd have to cast a dreaded "provisional ballot"--at least my name isn't Chad and I'm not pregnant.

Not to be deterred, however, another clerk came over and explained something about hitting "yes" to the other clerk who handled the plastic cards that had been processed on another machine. The clerk then proceeded to lift the back of my voting machine up, slapping it hard so that it must have told it to reboot itself. (What is it about me and having to reboot things? Voting machines, airline seats, iPhones?)

After the two-minute reboot, voting was simple. After a language choice, you were presented with various screens containing all the would-be presidents, ballot measures, and attempts to turn Alcatraz into a Global Peace Park. (I voted no on that bright idea.)

The font was large and not as elegant as the voter guide, nor was it sexy like any Apple-based user interface, but it was functional. I clicked my choices (maybe you can see who I voted for on the pictures I took on my iPhone to document the event) and, at the end, was asked to review my choices. What's best, is that the screen then directed me to look at the paper (yes, paper) receipt that scrolled up on the left of the machine, providing the reassuring paper record of my vote. And it was, indeed, accurate.

So in the end, it's an anachronistic notion that in a plastic world, paper is still the default method that gives us reassurance that our vote still counts. What's more interesting is that while my plastic voting method was expected to be faster, it wasn't, as some of the paper people in line behind me moved past.

Casting my vote on Sequoia: A vote for me and a vote for you.

(Credit: Kevin Ho)

Receipt with you or in the bag? Sequoia's paper receipt.

(Credit: Kevin Ho)