It’s been exactly a month today since I first got my 16GB iPhone (after waiting for a week to get my preferred color - white), and I thought to do a small review on that.

First up, iPhone is NOT entirely meant for mobile addicts. Instead, as apple’s main business strategy, the focus always has remained on a particular segment of users who are tech-savvy, web-people just in love with this beauty. So, please no hard feelings if I contradict some of the popular notions about iPhone doing the rounds in the Indian blogosphere since it’s launch in August (or rather since it’s price launch).

• The iPhone is Sturdy - Believe it or not, the gadget only looks fragile and weak, but in reality it is pretty robust, and as in my case, it easily stands out falling on a very hard surface. I just happened to drop it on the floor, and literally stopped breathing for the time since it slipped out of my hand till I picked it up and noticed that it didn’t even have a scratch (forget the point of breaking the delicate beauty). I can say the same for any Nokia phone, but when it comes to Sony Ericsson, I am not too sure. I have had a similar experience with a Sony phone that I held previously, and boy-oh-boy it was a nightmare after that.
• No Bluetooth ?? - Not exactly. The iPhone supports bluetooth, but it does not support communicating with other similar devices apart from bluetooth headset, and maybe some other apple product. It is a definite problem, but in any case I have never used bluetooth too much for sharing and transferring data with my friends previously also. So, it really doesn’t make any difference to me, but it might (will) make a difference to a lot of people. Though the good news is that the bluetooth sharing can be easily achieved using software updates. So watch out for all the firmware updates from apple; we might soon have bluetooth in iphone, as like other phones.
• No custom ringtones too?? - Not exactly again. I have the starting guitar seconds of the song “pichle saat dino mein” as my ringtone. Although, it is a little tricky to set your custom ringtone. Either you have to buy a song from the apple store and then convert it into a ringtone (which will effectively cost you $1.98 for that!!) or you can have a software like “iPhoneRingtoneMaker” to do all the dirty little stuff for stuff while you sit back and just select your favorite song. But again, iPhoneRingtoneMaker will set you back by $8 one time. One can get the pirated software from anywhere on the internet for free. I actually did the same :)
• Battery Life is superb - Yes indeed. One full recharge will probably last for a maximum of day and a half if you are using the iPod a lot (as I do), playing games, browsing etc. Using it only as a phone, the battery lasts for an average 2 days.
• App Store ?? - A lot of apps. A lot of good apps (the point of my next article). And a lot of good apps for free
• iPod - Too good. The earphones just blast off with quality sound. All the music management is done by iTunes and synced to the iphone. A new update to iTunes is addition of a feature called “GENIUS”, which is basically a smart music suggestion system. You choose a song, and it helps build a list of similar songs that you may find interesting to listen to at that moment.
• Camera - The camera in the iPhone is just a mere 2mp camera, but effectively, the camera is equivalent to any 3.2mp camera in terms of picture quality. The iphone also lacks video capture, which is one of the biggest negatives for people who use the camera a lot to shoot videos (I do :) )
• The touch screen - It’s big ! It’s clear ! And it just moves on your fingers ! :) . In terms of the user interface and the design, nobody can actually beat apple right now (not even google with the G-Phone). The interface is just too intuitive to not to love it :)

Although the list is exhaustive, I just chose to write a few points that I felt were more important than a lot of others. So far, my experience with the iphone has been excellent (although if you plan to buy the iphone, then buy an LCD cover immediately, or the scratch marks will ruin the fun), and as a friend of mine asked me - “Do you recommend buying the iPhone ??” - my answer would be “Yes, if you are a connoisseur of beauty and design, or else just wait for six months and buy the phone for 25k”.

But really, whatever be the case, I do not expect the iPhone to be available for 16k. Those of you, who expect this, and are writing all s**t since it’s actual price was revealed, my only suggestion would be - do not try to judge beauty when you don’t know how to value it.

Oh yo people, it’s spring time again, and the weather is super-fun. It’s awkward, but I feel the same way on the web too. The colors are vivid, the energy is high, and when you’re on flock, everything is kewl.

After a very long time, I made the toughest decision to give Flock a try (my desktop, which runs windows XP is actually in no mood to take any further load, given the fact that it already makes a noise similar to the one that a jet plane makes during take-off, whenever I run photoshop), and somehow it has gone down pretty fine till now

If you are a Firefox user, or have been one earlier, then you will find a stark similarity between Flock and Firefox (apart from the “F” word that they share in common). I came to a conclusion from viewing the first webpage, that they share the same default styles or something. The point is that if you test your design for firefox, it is assumed to be tested for Flock as well. Happy !

Certain good things about Flock are definitely the Feeds Sidebar and the People Sidebar. Actually I have just tried out these two, else I think the Webmail Sidebar and others must also be equivalently good.
The People Sidebar simply lets you log onto any of the services like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, et all, and then just follow your friends from the comfort of your sidebar. All the updates and everything else, are simply shown in the sidebar itself. Okay, the facebook app-a-holics will probably miss the fun of playing around with strange looking applications, but if you are not one of them, then the sidebar is one piece of joy. Here’s a screen shot of my facebook people sidebar.

Also, the other thing that I was talking about was the Feeds Sidebar. What I did was grabbed my own feeds at bishtblogs and then tried playing around with the functionalities that Flock provides. Simply put, you can view the feeds as Headlines, Excerpts, Full or even in one single-column or two-columns. Simple things you say. What’s great in that you say. I say why didn’t anybody do that earlier, the simple things that could have been earlier. It’s actually the same thing that Google follows - Beauty in simplicity - you just have to make simplicity stand out. Anyways, here’s my feeds page with a two column full article feed.

Hope you all enjoy Flock as much as I am. Anyone else writing about Flock, then do let me also know on that