Five things to do with your iPhone in your car
May 19th, 2008 by Black
I have been using my iPhone for quite a while now and got used to it. I didn’t had any big issues with it so far. I even got used to do some particular things on the way back home from work, while sitting and waiting in traffic. What can you do with your iPhone while waiting to move your car meter by meter?
Here are five important things you can do in your car, besides regular phone calls, ipod, music and videos:
1. You can read your RSS feeds. I’m using SmartRSS, but you can find several other rss readers out there. Nice graphics, well implemented into iPhone look and feel, works great. Too bad not all rss items have a longer description so you can read most of it while in your reader, without the need to view the full html page.
2. You can check your twitter messages. What are you doing? I’m stuck in traffic! It’s a good moment to express your feelings about this, blame someone and send recommendations about the streets you should avoid. I’m using twinkle, a twitter client for iPhone that has two special things: location (you can actually see who’s twitting near you) and pictures (you can take a picture with your camera and attach it to your twit). The location is a nice feature if you’re not following that many people and the picture works great if you want to express more than 140 characters (1000 words perhaps?)
3. You can check your email! If you have a yahoo or gmail account and using it actively, you’re all set. Even if you have a regular pop3 or imap account, that’s the way to read your email in the car. If you’re using MS Exchange, then tough luck, you’re stuck with yahoo and your day by day spam messages. The built-in email client seems to work ok, too bad it loads images by default when you’re viewing the full message.
4. You can chat in your regular instant messenger network. The ONLY truly client I have found is Fring, an instant messenger integrator with everything in it: yahoo, msn, icq, skype. It can even act as a sip phone or can connect to twitter. I’ve been using Fring on my Windows Mobile PDA, so I quite knew the application. It looks different on the iPhone, its development is in alpha stage but hey, compared with the web browser clients I’ve seen so far, it rocks! Like I said, I haven’t found a real application for iPhone that integrates at least three of the networks above. They’re all web applications, specially designed for the phone, but that’s it.
5. You can browse the Internet using Safari. That’s the last thing on my list and also on my car “can-do” list. With its gprs connection, you have to wait infinitely for a page to load. But do you have anything else to do while waiting and waiting in your car? I guess not, so browse away!
That’s about it. These are the things I’ve discovered you can do each day in your car. Of course, there are other tasks you can do from time to time, like updating your software or playing a game or testing new applications, but you can’t do all these things on a day by day basis. All the things above require an Internet connection, so your monthly bill might go up. It’s already up with the fuel price reaching new limits and you being stuck with the engine running, polluting the planet and not-wanting to use the subway! Get a bike and use just your ipod!
Two weeks ago I’ve bought an iPhone. Although I do not use AT&T as my mobile carrier (I do not live in US), I knew that the phone software can be hacked. Of course, you can buy already hacked phones via eBay but I took my chances and purchased a new one directly from an Apple Store in San Francisco. The information here is my early experience with the phone, the buying experience, hacking and using the phone day by day.
Last weekend I’ve been to Moscow for the Autumn session of Isdef conference. It was my 4th time in Moscow for ISDEF, representing
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