Day two with the iPhone...

I went to a movie this evening to get out of my cave. I saw the new Die Hard flick. It was entertaining I suppose, but that's not the point of this post. While out and about I checked out a few more features of the iPhone.

First, I wanted to see how YouTube would perform on AT&T's EDGE network. So I checked out some of the same Muse videos that I was watching the other day. Interestingly, when the phone is on the EDGE network, it downloads heavily compressed versions of the YouTube videos. It makes sense, but damn it looks horrible. I guess horrible is all relative... it is YouTube after all.

While standing in line to buy some popcorn and a drink, I pulled out the phone to check some baseball scores. I opened Safari and went to espn.com. While the page was opening, a pop-up message appeared telling me it found a new wifi network and asked if I wanted to join. I did and proceeded to surf on espn.com. One thing that would be helpful is if it would tell you the signal strength of the wifi connection before you join. In my case, the movie theater's (or mall's food court, not sure who owned it) wifi signal was very weak and it was actually slower than the EDGE connection.

UPDATE 7/3: I stand corrected. It does show the signal strength when the phone finds new wifi networks. In fact it becomes flat-out annoying when you decline to join and seemingly everytime you wake up the phone it asks you to join one of the networks. Guess I must have been excited and overwhelmed that a movie theater had an open wifi network?

After the movie, which clocked in around 2.5 hours, I was hungry. But it was 10:00pm and anyone who knows anything about Sarasota it's that after 9:00pm it is damn near impossible to find an open restaurant other than McDonald's or Taco Bell. But one of my co-workers and I were talking about that same subject the other day and he mentioned that Buffalo Wild Wings is open really late everyday.

So I pulled out iPhone, clicked on Google Maps and did a search for "Sarasota fl wings"—I was driving (I know, I know) but typing was pretty easy to do. A few red pins plopped down on the map and after clicking on two of them, I found the restaurant. With a single click I was calling them to see if they were open. They were and now I won't starve to death. iPhone saved my life.

Back on the keyboard, one thing I miss is arrow keys to move the cursor around. I know I could place the cursor with my finger and I know about the magnifying glass thing, but sometimes you just want to back up a couple letters with a quick tap on an arrow key.

I'm still enjoying the phone. It's not perfect yet, but way better than any phone I've ever owned.