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!

The phone in US, directly in a shop is quite cheap (especially if you come from Europe). I paid only USD 399 plus taxes, so a total around USD 430 which means around 300 Euros (for the 8GB version – there is another version with 16GB of memory and it costs USD 499). Once you want to use the phone you need to get an AT&T monthly plan or to transfer your current plan to your new phone. Since this is only possible for US, Google is your only friend. Once you start searching for a solution to your problem, tons of websites start appearing, each one offering advices, hacks, tools. You start finding worldwide communities of iPhone users, all of them depending on periodic hacks to Mac OSX for iPhone. You can also find a lot of paid services that can unlock your phone or software that you have to pay for. Ain’t that cute?

It took me around 2 hours to find the right solution, the only one I’ve tried to unlock my phone and the only one that seemed stupid proof enough: ZiPhone GUI. My iPhone firmware: 1.1.3. Just two clicks, two waiting minutes and you’re done! You can get in and start using your phone. Note: once you modify the phone firmware, you loose your warranty (I haven’t read that anywhere, is what the guys in the shop told me).

After almost two weeks of using the phone, I can make the following comments (I will talk mostly about the bad parts, all good parts are obvious: slick phone, quality processor inside – especially the graphical one, everything seems well thought and calculated to be in the right place at the right time):

- one thing you notice instantly if your using your phone in roaming is that it only recognizes a number if it’s a perfect match between the phone in your address book and the calling one. This means that if you have the number 555-1234-123 in your address book and you receive a phone call from +1 555-1234-123, the software doesn’t know that the first part is only the country prefix and you already have the number in your address book. I can live with that, it’s not such a big issue.

- another thing you notice (probably this should be the first one) is that the phone doesn’t read any of your current contact information from your SIM card. It can only syncronize with your Outlook contacts (or other address books) and use the information from that address book, or you can build your own new contact database from scratch, directly on your iPhone. This is good and bad: good if you already maintain an Address Book, bad that you are used to have some phone contacts in your phone (or at least I’m talking about me). There is software available that can read your SIM card and export that information to your address book. One example is iSIM from Makayama Software, which happens to work with Avangate for their online sales.

- if you’re sending an SMS message, the application doesn’t know of any characters limits for the SMS body, so you might end up sending multiple messages and being charged more that you’re expecting.

- a basic feature is missing (probably intentionally): you cannot change your ringing tones with new ones. You can only use the predefined ones or buy other ringtones from iTunes Store.

- as a device without a physical keyboard, I’m missing my speed-dial feature from my old phone

- size: the phone is big enough not to be carried directly in your pocket without being scratched. Compared with my old Nokia 6230i, that’s a problem.

- battery: probably if you’re using the iPhone only for its phone features, without browsing the Internet and accessing applications, the battery will last for one week. Once you start using it, the battery will go down instantly and you will notice that. It’s very similar with my PDA, which as long as you don’t use the screen, you can have it on stand by for days, but once you start doing something requiring the display, you start losing battery.

- I like the fact that while with your phone near your ear the display will shut down automatically. It has some kind of sensor near the ear speaker. Speaking of sound quality, at first I though the quality was way to poor to have a conversation (and I have found lots of forums posts confirming that), but then I realized that the screen has some kind of plastic protector on it to be protected and once you remove that from your speaker, you have good sound quality, you can hear loud and clear anyone on the phone.

- on my old phone I was using the Wallet application, a place where you can store sensitive information, passwords, cards etc. This application is missing from this phone, however you can find several other independent applications that can fill the gap. I have installed and used Lockbox.

- there are no installed games by default, you have to look for them elsewhere. But the good thing is that you don’t have to go too far to search for an application, the phone has some kind of software repository maintained from some online feeds. It’s under an icon called Installer. I don’t know if this application comes by default with the phone or it was installed by my patching application, but it’s a good thing that such module is available.

That’s about it for now, I will make later edits if new problems or issues might occur with my iPhone. I have to admit that I was impressed by the large number of applications for this phone, the phone seems to be reliable enough to be used as a phone (my primary use) so probably it’s just a matter of time to get used to some things not being available by default. The other cool things that this phone has can easily balance the situation and you can get over features that you might need and don’t have.