From K810i to iPhone

ramblings

[Image of iPhone was not archived]

A few days ago, my girlfriend Frankie bought me an iPhone. I thought I’d mention the few things I did to get my new toy up and running.

Applications

After unwrapping it, marveling at the packaging for a few minutes, and activating it I set about installing a few basic applications:

  • Facebook - A standard really, we all live by Facebook these days.
  • Last.fm - I’ve been using iScrobbler and Last.fm for years now, the iPhone version is a great way to get some new music when I’m walking about.
  • NetNewsWire - I use the desktop version to read RSS on my mac and having both applications sync with Newsgator means that my latest news will always be with me. I usually spend about half an hour a day reading news but I’m hoping that now it’s in my pocket, I’ll be able to fit that in while I’m waiting around for a bus or a lecture.
  • Remote - Now I can control iTunes from downstairs.
  • VNC Lite - I don’t often use VNC but as the application’s so small I thought I’d install it just in case. There are times when I’ve dearly wanted remote access to my mac while out and about. I also updated the VNC Server on my mac (OSXVnc ).

Although I’m trying not to buy many applications, I did splash out on two.

  • Pennies - A simple but useful money tracking and budgeting app. I’ve often recorded my expenses on an index card and totted them up at the end of the week, it strikes me that doing it on my phone will save me both time and effort, and for the sake of the pound or so that it cost I think it’s well worth it.
  • AirShare - This is great. Essentially, it turns your iPhone into a WiFi hard drive, enabling me to drop files onto it from my mac while it sits in my pocket. I can effortlessly pull files off in the same way when I’m at a friends machine or at cadets. The killer feature for me is the ability to view PDF, source code and iWork files with it. It allows me to read eBooks and lecture notes while on the go. I’ve got an alias to the iPhone in my home directory for easy access.

After configuring the phone’s apps, I set up access to my Gmail account and synchronization with iTunes. I’ve currently got the phone syncing with an iPhone playlist and an iPhone images folder, as well as my latest podcasts.

Contacts

It was a bit of a hassle moving my contacts across from my Sony Ericsson K810i - it took me about an hour in total. Here’s what I did:

  1. Synced the contacts from my K810i to Address Book using the methods described here . Note that I had to remove the K810i from the iSync list, disable iPhoto from opening automatically and then re-add it to iSync before I could Sync.
  2. Synced my Address Book with the iPhone and Gmail (using iTunes) to get my gmail contacts into Address Book.
  3. Worked through the address book renaming people, editing email addresses, merging contacts and deleting millions of random numbers. At the end of this I used Address Book’s ‘Find Duplicates’ function to make sure I was done.
  4. Added the contacts to various groups and distribution lists.
  5. Used the wonderful AddressBookSync to match up my facebook friends to my contacts. This imports their birthday and profile picture if it’s available. The automatic matching is pretty good (it matched Gaz to Gareth) but it’s worth looking through the unmatched list because unless you’re perfect at spelling it will miss some.
  6. Synced the iPhone with Address Book using iTunes.

I’ve now got my contacts and email synced across my Mac, Gmail and my iPhone and I’ve got everyone’s birthdays and photos in the phone. The birthdays also show up in iCal, which makes my life even easier!

I hope this was useful to someone!

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