iHave become iNfected

Note: this post is old old old, and finally published just for historical curiosity, mostly my own.

Yes, it is strange but true; this Linux jockey has succumbed to the world's most powerful marketing machine and is typing this blentey on the sweet sweet virtual QWERTY keyboard of an iPhone. Worse yet (because the iPhone is not mine--'tis a company plaything), I must confess to buying my wife a MacBook for last Christmas. Disgraceful, I know.

I originally bought the MacBook for the hardware; I was planning to just peek at Mac OS X, then partition most of the drive out for Linux, using a filesystem that both Linux and OS X could use. But tragically, I waited too long, and when I finally got around to trying Boot Camp, it failed to repartion my drive. A real hacker would have booted up a Gentoo LiveCD and fired up GNU parted, but I feared the potential time sink and the wrath of my wife--who had become quite enamoured of OS X--if things did not go according to plan. So I ended up sticking with the Mac OS, but mainly using my old Linux 'top, as I could not live with giving up my Openbox keybindings and virtual workspace config.

So what, you may be wondering, do I think of the iPhone? Well, given that I am typing this on one, feel free to assume that I *love* it. This weekend, I've used it for checking my Gmail (which works, but shame on Google for not detecting the iPhone User Agent and doing something optimised for the iPhone's screen size, like we do), reading through my WWdN:iX backlog (reading blogs may well be one of the iPhone's--and, by extension, the iPod Touch) killer apps; a native RSS/Atom reader might be a good idea), and written this blog entry.

So the iPhone works as advertised, and will work even better once some of the bigger sites out there get their act together and offer an optimised experience.