iPhone Impression & Notes

<title>iPhone Impression &amp; Notes</title>
<h1>iPhone Impression &amp; Notes</h1>

I just picked up a newly discounted 4GB iPhone.  I haven't filled my 6GB
PhatBox with MP3s, and I don't have any online videos to watch, so the $100
in my pocket was worth more than 4GB.  I'm very pleased with my experience
with the actual iPhone.  There were a few stumbling blocks on the PC side.

<h2>Switch from old phone</h2>

<h3>AT&amp;T Account</h3>

After several failed attempts to connect with a recently updated iTunes to
activate my phone, I restarted iTunes, then got through right away, entered
all my information (already an AT&amp;T customer), and everything looks like
it went OK.  Though, five hours later, the iPhone doesn't have signal and my
old phone still works fine (so the number hasn't switched over).  The iPhone
will get onto my 802.11 network, so I can do everything that doesn't involve
the cell network.  24 hours later, my old phone stopped working, and the
iPhone can make/recieve calls after 2 reboots.

<h3>Contacts</h3>

All my phone numbers are stored on the SIM card in my old phone, which I
have no way of syncing onto the computer.  I found out that you can bring it
into an AT&amp;T store, and they'll copy it onto a USB flash drive for you. 
I brought a flash drive with me, but they'll only do it on a new drive that
they sell you.  After a pretty quick process, I had a new 512M flash drive
with all my contacts on it for $15.  Not too bad, this drive is physically
much smaller than my other one, so I may actually keep it on my keychain.

<p>

Next I need to get those contacts onto my phone.  They're stored as
Backup_DATE_.pbb on the USB drive.  I found 

<a href="http://www.wireless.att.com/support/knowledgeBase.do?content=KB81228.html">this link</a>

to AT&amp;T's support site, pointing to another program to download to
import the contacts.  After downloading the program, then finding out I need
to download the .NET 2.0 runtime (which takes a _long_ time to install, I
could have written a perl script to extract the info into vcards faster than
the download/install), I open the program, the .pbb file, then export it to
Outlook Express (I don't have Outlook).  It exports the names just fine, but
not the numbers.  These names sync to the iPhone just fine.

<p>

I ended up writing a program to extract the ASCII strings from the pbb file,
massaged it a little into a csv, then imported that into Outlook Express,
which worked great.  I now have all my old contacts on my iPhone.
This program is online <a href="/pbbreader/">here</a>.

<h3>Ring Tones</h3>

With my old phone, I put small mp3 files on my website, downloaded them to
the phone, and used them as ringtones.  With the iPhone, not so much.  I
knew I'd have to jump through more hoops to get this done, and I'll update
when I've got it.

<p>

Update - iBrickr does it.  After a jailbreak with Installer.app, I can just
scp ringtones into place.  mp3s work fine.

<h2>Email</h2>

Setting the iPhone to use my IMAP/SSL server went pretty well, and worked
great, with the exception that the settings dialog would crash when I try to
change the "Sent Messages" and "Deleted Messages" folders to "Sent" and
"Trash", like every other IMAP client I have.  This is likely due to the
large number of IMAP folders and subfolders I have.  Mail.app downloads the
whole list.  My base folder list isn't so bad, but the subfolder list is. 
There's no way to filter these out, so it chokes on them.  I bet I could
work around this by making a separate iphone folder, pointing the phone to
use that, and symlinking the folders I want in there... er, maybe not. 
Still crashes.  The Inbox works great, and the overall email experience is
great.  I really like how it works as a normal IMAP/SSL client.

<h2>Syncing Content</h2>

I want to put pictures and mp3s on the iPhone.  Unfortunately, I can't just
drag and drop them from my hard drive (or better, networked drive since
they're on my server) to the phone.  I certainly don't want to auto-sync
everything on my Windows laptop.  For Pictures, I created an iPhone folder
in My Pictures (the only place it seems to want to get them), and put
individual pictures there.  For mp3s, I created an iPhone playlist, and can
drag/drop songs into there.  It doesn't pick up the album art of CD's I've
ripped into mp3 (not with iTunes).

<h2>Transcoding Video</h2>

Using ffmpeg, I've <i>almost</i> got video transcoding working.  These
options work well with width at 480, height calculated for correct aspect
ratio, but with a small band of garbage on the right side of the screen.

<pre>
ffmpeg -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -maxrate 1000 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -async 48000 \
       -bufsize 4096 -g 300 -acodec aac -i "$infile" \
       -s ${width}x${height} -ab 128 -b 400 "$outfile"
</pre>