If you remember, I was debating which smart phone to buy, and well, the iPhone won, despite it’s drawbacks (rubbish camera, no MMS etc)

I’ve had it about a week and a half. I tried to buy one from a real bricks and mortar o2 shop, however the four times I tried it was “we don’t have the sim cards” and that was it! No “we’ll take your number, put one buy for you when we get it and give you a call”. Well anyway, in the time taken to faff about with all this it actually went up in price by £10. Who knows why. I still bought one from the online store in the end.

For the record, do not buy their Belkin screen protectors that they have on there for about £8, you get one tiny one that doesn’t cover the whole screen, and that’s it! My other half bought some for the same price (can’t remember what kind, may have got them from a phones4u), you get two, and they cover the whole front of the phone (aside from the button, and the hole at the top, obviously). I still haven’t bought any new ones and have just been surviving with this one. I haven’t purchased any casing for it either, I figured what’s the point of something shiny if you’re going to cover it with something ugly to protect the shiny and in turn never see the shiny! So no covers for me.

I like it, I really do. The actual features you would find on a phone are a bit lacking, assigning songs as ringtones for instance, you can’t just do, you either have to repurchase the song as an iTunes ringtone, or mess about trying to make your own via some jiggery pokery that I’ve not tried yet.

I really like the text messaging “conversations”, I think that’s an awesome idea, but the one thing that annoys me about texts is that it doesn’t tell you when you’ve strayed into two message terratory. I get 300 free messages a month, so it’s not that big a deal, but it’s standard in all phones, so why is it missing? (Or am I missing something?)

MMS, nuff said, though there is an ap for that.

And yes copy and paste would be nice.

I currently have my aps organised by colour and most used. The first page is the most used.

Aps of note include Evernote, Toodledo, HealthCoach, Balance, CountDown and Bejewelled 2.

Evernote, Google it. Everyone uses it, I’ve not used it much because I quite like the little notes thing on the phone, but Evernote takes it to a whole new level.

Toodledo – chose this over Remember the Milk, people over at lifehacker seemed to think it was more feature-rich and cheaper. I really like it, hardly ever use the web interface, just use the ap on the phone. I’ve not explored how it can do reminders though, and I know RtM can remind you when you’re actually near something, so I don’t know. Will have to research further!

HealthCoach is just a bit of fun while I’m trying to healthy myself up – and it is a bit of fun. I’ve found that the quick entry for the food log (choose between balanced, heavy, light and none on meal and snack types) is actually pretty good – I noticed how it matched up with my actual tracking on Calorie Count (which is sorely lacking in an ap!). I like the little challanges too.

Balance – hey it was free, and Mint doesn’t work over here, or isn’t all Englishified. I’m not fussed about it taking stuff directly from my accounts, I just wanted a quick, simple way to track my monies, and this is it! Offers pin protection too.

CountDown – I just like it because I’m so excited about my holiday to Mallorca in April, and pancake day. Does what it says on the tin. Wish you could set one of your countdowns to be the icon though.

Bejewelled 2 – good way to waste a couple of minutes when you’ve got nothing else to do!

I also think you should all know about NuevaSync. I have my Toodledo stuff syncd with my Google Calendar, and also have other stuff in there. I wanted all this in my iPhone calendar, it took me hours of searching to figure out how. NuevaSync uses an exchange to sync your calendar and some other things that the phone can’t just do (with Windows, the only calendar it lets you sync is in Outlook). I was so happy when I found NuevaSync. Works like a charm! No problems whatsoever.

The one thing I would like to see (and haven’t been able to find) is a good tamagotchi-esque style ap. The free ones I tried were naff, and the one good looking pay one got bad reviews.

I’ve also been choosing my wallpapers from the tons of amazing, inspirational ones featured at Abduzeedo

In other news, I’m working on the theme redesign for the Sporum at the moment, my eyes are going cross eyed from staring at bizarre code, but I’ll get there! I also discovered how to use Wordpress as a photo gallery, so when I get chance I’m building it up on my laptop, ready to launch… eventually! I still plan to use flickr and deviantArt as a draw, but I wanted something that was completely mine.

Tags: applications, bejewelled, iphone, itunes, nuevasync, smartphone, sporum, toodledo