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Yes, I have succumbed (just before my birthday) and purchased an iPhone. I was already an AT&T customer, and the lure of the shiny was irresistible. The advent of exchange support was the kicker, really.
So now I have a shiny, shiny new toy, that makes calls, plays music and gets my email from all three of my active accounts.
And then there's the applications. My first two were AIM and Pandora. I've played with AIM, but I don't know how much I'll use it, though I'm getting back in the habit of showing up on-chat recently. Pandora doesn't let you play music and do other things on the phone itself, but it's marvelous for exploring new music, something I don't do as much as I'd like.
When I first got the iPhone, I was gratified to see a whole Book category in the App store, but then disappointed when I realized it was all copyright-expired works, which I would then have to pay for! Bah!
This week, however, I got a message from both Baen and Fictionwise, both of which pointed me to the eReader app. Baen's deal is a little funny - there are two eReaders, the free and the paid version, and Baen requires the paid version to work. But then it will allow me to read all of my Baen-purchased content (which by this point is a significant stack of ebooks, and upload ebooks straight to my iPhone from my Mac. But, I'm cheap, and still muddling around in the interface, so I've only installed free apps so far.
The free eReader is brilliant. I have access to all my un-DRMed ebooks on Fictionwise, and the reading interface is great. There's only basic sorting and no descriptions, an issue when you have as many ebooks as I, but the reader is snappy enough that I can bounce back and forth, skimming a few pages to see if a give book is the one I thought it might be. It's a battery hog, but most active apps are, I imagine, and I can get through a book while listening to music before needing to recharge.
The one sour note in the whole deal is that I'd made the choice to buy the MobiPocket version of DRMed books, years ago now, and Mobi has proven themselves to be sticks in the mud. They've dragged their heels for years, refusing to make a Mac reader-app (they have a windows version, of course, in addition to the Palm reader I've used so long) and now they're hemming and hawing over the iPhone. Ignoring, of course, the explosive popularity of the iPhone, and the publicity they could get just by having an App on the store. My opinion of them is not high.
I've emailed Fictionwise, to see if I could get all my Mobi-books changed to eReader books. I'd probably switch over to buying eReader DRM books if I can get my back catalog switched, but I'm reluctant to buy into another DRM schema if in another few years, I lose another large set of ebooks. I'm fairly sanguine about open format books, but with the demise of a couple of music services lately, my faith in any DRM-bound electronic format is, quite frankly, in the shitpile of an outhouse. Baen, to me, is the epitome of what a publisher should be - offering a handful of unlocked, open formats, enabling their readers instead of hobbling and crippling them.
So now I have a shiny, shiny new toy, that makes calls, plays music and gets my email from all three of my active accounts.
And then there's the applications. My first two were AIM and Pandora. I've played with AIM, but I don't know how much I'll use it, though I'm getting back in the habit of showing up on-chat recently. Pandora doesn't let you play music and do other things on the phone itself, but it's marvelous for exploring new music, something I don't do as much as I'd like.
When I first got the iPhone, I was gratified to see a whole Book category in the App store, but then disappointed when I realized it was all copyright-expired works, which I would then have to pay for! Bah!
This week, however, I got a message from both Baen and Fictionwise, both of which pointed me to the eReader app. Baen's deal is a little funny - there are two eReaders, the free and the paid version, and Baen requires the paid version to work. But then it will allow me to read all of my Baen-purchased content (which by this point is a significant stack of ebooks, and upload ebooks straight to my iPhone from my Mac. But, I'm cheap, and still muddling around in the interface, so I've only installed free apps so far.
The free eReader is brilliant. I have access to all my un-DRMed ebooks on Fictionwise, and the reading interface is great. There's only basic sorting and no descriptions, an issue when you have as many ebooks as I, but the reader is snappy enough that I can bounce back and forth, skimming a few pages to see if a give book is the one I thought it might be. It's a battery hog, but most active apps are, I imagine, and I can get through a book while listening to music before needing to recharge.
The one sour note in the whole deal is that I'd made the choice to buy the MobiPocket version of DRMed books, years ago now, and Mobi has proven themselves to be sticks in the mud. They've dragged their heels for years, refusing to make a Mac reader-app (they have a windows version, of course, in addition to the Palm reader I've used so long) and now they're hemming and hawing over the iPhone. Ignoring, of course, the explosive popularity of the iPhone, and the publicity they could get just by having an App on the store. My opinion of them is not high.
I've emailed Fictionwise, to see if I could get all my Mobi-books changed to eReader books. I'd probably switch over to buying eReader DRM books if I can get my back catalog switched, but I'm reluctant to buy into another DRM schema if in another few years, I lose another large set of ebooks. I'm fairly sanguine about open format books, but with the demise of a couple of music services lately, my faith in any DRM-bound electronic format is, quite frankly, in the shitpile of an outhouse. Baen, to me, is the epitome of what a publisher should be - offering a handful of unlocked, open formats, enabling their readers instead of hobbling and crippling them.
