I’ve had a bit more time to play around with the iPhone, and I have both positive and negative impressions to report. Overall, the impressions are positive, because I very much like this little machine–even though I am still in the process of getting set up and used to stuff. I just need more time to enjoy it fully, is all. I’d start taking the train as a way of having time to watch videos and stuff, except that where I’m located, the train trip wouldn’t take long enough! It’s also a temptation to use it more often, to make calls and get calls.

The negatives: missing features. Why haven’t they implemented copy and paste? That makes no sense. Another huge time-saver would be to implement (or allow a third-party hack for) auto text replacement–like “AutoCorrect” in MS Word, you type in a code and is automatically swaps it with a longer text string. I know I would use that quite a bit. You could, essentially, create your own shorthand and type stuff a lot faster and easier.

And when I come to think of it, where’s the universal landscape keyboard that everybody has been clamoring for since the iPhone first came out? There are universal keyboards in some apps (Safari being the most commonly used), but most other places, you have to deal with the narrow keys.

The Email app is perhaps the most troublesome in terms of missing features. You cannot mark multiple emails or all email in a mailbox as “read”; instead, you have to view each message before it will disappear from the number count. As mentioned before, the lack of a spam filter is pretty huge, and not being able to turn off inline images is downright reckless. Not being able to selectively disable incoming/outgoing mail is a bit disappointing as well.

For another setting: what use is the wallpaper if you only see if for two seconds as the phone starts up?

Also frustrating is what Apple has done with its site: they have shot down the Search feature in the discussion area, which renders the site mostly useless, instead of being a gold mine for solutions. What the hell are they thinking?

Okay, so it’s building to a fair list of annoyances–but they are mostly minor stuff, or stuff I can learn to live with okay. Nothing’s gonna be perfect, especially at version 2.0.

In the “good stuff” category: in the Settings “control panel” area, there are some useful settings to know about. The “Fetch New Data” setting allows you to switch the phone from getting your email only when you enter an account in the Mail app, to checking your email every 15, 30, or 60 minutes, in case you’d rather see alerts for new messages pop up on their own. You can set a Fetch time but still set individual accounts to manual, all in the name of saving battery life.

Under “Sounds,” you can set ringtones and alerts for various situations. Try turning the Brightness up all the way–it’s pretty impressive. Well, indoors, at least. Under “General,” you can track usage–how many minutes of calls, how many data packets and MB transmitted–important if you don’t have unlimited plans; you can change Network settings to disable 3G and data downloads (if you’re overseas).

Features you may not have known about: double-clicking the Home button can take you to Phone Favorites or the iPod controls (you can set that under Settings/General/Home Button). Holding down the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button at the same time will take a screen shot of your iPhone and save it to your Photos area. When typing, double-tapping the space bar will type a period and a space.

You can force-quit a program by holding the Home button down for six seconds, or reset the whole iPhone (if it completely freezes) by holding down the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons for eight seconds. I found the force-quit useful this morning, as my Mail app seemed to be stuck checking mail–the progress ring just kept rotating and wouldn’t stop. Force-quit, open it again, and it works. I guess one thing to get used to is that this is a computer OS, and not a rigidly set cell phone directory, so you have to deal with stuff like app hanging from time to time.

A nice hack: you can avoid paying through the nose to use music you’ve already bought as a ringtone. (This hack is for Mac users.)

If you got the music from the iTunes Store, you must burn it to a CD and then rip it back into iTunes to strip the DRM. If it’s not DRM’d (say, ripped from a music CD), then you can use it freely without the burn/rip hack.

Just open Garage Band, create a new project (give it the name you want the RingTone to bear), Command-Delete the default track (usually a Grand Piano), and drop the music file icon into the track area. When you are ready, go to the “Share” menu and choose “Send Ringtone to iTunes.” You will probably be prompted to edit your file at this point; ringtones can only be up to 40 seconds long. When you agree to edit, you’ll notice an orange bar above the sound track. Adjust it so it covers the area you want to have as the ringtone. Then send the ringtone to iTunes again, and this time it should work. The file will appear in iTunes, and the next time you sync ringtones, they will be uploaded and available.

Another thing I discovered: You can set up your SoftBank email account on your computer as well as on the iPhone. Sachi wanted to use her SoftBank account to do most of her communicating with friends (I think more because she’s used to the idea of doing that than an actual preference for the keitai’s email), but she doesn’t like the iPhone’s text input (she won’t trust the corrective typing yet, nor is she used to use the broad part of her thumb to type, so she’s sticking with the old-style keypad input). So I just set up her SoftBank mail account on her MacBook. You have to get the settings right (copy what’s in the iPhone), but when you do, it works like any other email account.