The iPhone turns on right out of the box, in fact, Apple ‘Pre-activates’ the Phone when you buy it from them in the US, they transfer your number from your old phone (usually) and you walk out the door bumping into people and trees as you gaze at the gorgeous screen full of colorful icons.
But the first real step to claiming the phone is connecting it to iTunes on your Mac or PC, when you do this, you’ll personalize your settings, most likely the default settings will be good, but you can go through the menu’s and tabs that show up in iTunes and select exactly which and how much music, video and podcasts are synched with your iPhone.
You can also turn on Contact, Calendar and email synching, which is really great, though, if you are a MobileMe (formerly called .Mac) user, then a far superior way to sync this information is through the “Cloud”, essentially through the Air or Internet, where no physical connection has to happen between your iPhone and computer. When using MobileMe to sync data, contacts and events you enter while on the road will be sent straight to the “Cloud”(technically speaking, an apple server on the internet) and then down to your various Macs, the data is in fact accessible through http://me.com, meaning you can always fetch your contacts phone numbers through a website that’s available 24 hours a day from any computer around the world.
If you have your own email server, say ‘billdavies@auburncom.com’, then you’ll be able to configure your iPhone to connect to this email account very easily, you’ll need to ensure that you are taking advantage of IMAP on your mail server though, IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) replaced POP(Post Office Protocol) about five years ago but is still rarely implemented on many web hosting plans, ask your service provider about it, or call us at AuburnCon for a meeting to evaluate your needs., IMAP allows your mails to be delivered to multiple devices and keep those multiple devices in Sync, this is so very essential when you have more than one device for checking email, receiving mail in two places and having those two places both know when a message has been Read, Flagged, Deleted or Replied To is both wonderful and absolutely essential, Read more about IMAP on www.imap.org/
Okay, now that the configuration and hard work is done, it’s time to have fun and get some great Applications from the App Store, here’s what we at AuburnCom like so Far:
Monkey Ball (entertains a child for ever!)
Enigmo (Entertains anyone for ever)
OmniFocus (Serious location based List making)
Things (Cool easy list making)
Shazam (Identify any song you hear playing around you!!!)
Midomi (Sing a song into the Mic to identify it!)
Texas Hold ‘Em (Apple Made Poker Game, enough said)
Inspired’s Karmic Cookie (Fun and Funny Fortune Cookie game)
NetNewsWire (Great News Reader)
Hanoi (the famous Hanoi Tower Puzzle, 64 discs is really hard)
Pandora (Wow)
Remote (Wow!)
Scrabble (Great)
YouNote (Good)
iWant (Good)
And that’s a good start with the iPhone, if you’ve comments about your own iPhone experience, leave a comment or email me.
Again, AuburnCom provides expert consultations at our spacious and very internet connected offices at 660 Alabama Street, 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94110, Call us on 415-871-9683 to make an appointment.