Charlie Griefer

My wife and I are both Google Calendar users. We like the convenience of having access to our calendars anyplace we have web access, and we like being able to see each other's events on our own calendars.

A few weeks back, I spent the better part of a weekend trying to get my iPhone set up to sync email, contacts, and calendar. For contacts, I'm not quite sold on Google Contacts at this point, so I'm sticking with Outlook. Google Mail syncs easily enough with the iPhone via IMAP. But the calendar... the calendar was a source of great frustration.

After picking up my new iPhone a few weeks back, one of the first things I did was purchase a case. I wanted something to protect it from accidental drops, as well as something to protect the screen from scratches. I'm not a big belt-clip fan, so whatever I chose also needed to be fairly unobtrusive so that I could keep the phone in my front pocket.

The first purchase I made was the iSkin Solo. The Solo offered both a protective case as well as a screen protector. I ordered it online, so didn't have the opportunity to get a good feel for it beforehand other than reading reviews (which were mostly positive). As noted, this was the "first purchase", and not the solution that I ultimately went with.

Following up on my mini-review of the iPhone, I thought I'd post a list of the apps that I've installed over the past week, and quick thoughts on each. IMO, it's really the apps that set the device apart from other phones. Sure, the touch screen is nice and the accelerometer is cool, but it's the apps that really make the iPhone unique.

In no particular order...

A couple of days after X-mas, with the blessing and well-wishes of my lovely wife, I headed down to the local AT&T store to pick up my X-mas present. A shiny new 8GB iPhone 3G.

I hadn't really been big on wanting one in the past. I've had Windows Mobile based smart phones, which I liked a lot... it felt like I was carrying around a mini-me version of my computer. My assumption had been that the iPhone was the same type of "toy", but for Mac users. Being a PC person (not to start the inevitable flame war... nothing at all against Mac, I've just always used a PC, I'm used to it, and haven't had the issues myself that have driven others to make the switch), I didn't really think a little portable Mac (as was my perception) fit well with my desktop PC.