iPhone Dispatch Blog

So I received my first real bill from AT&T. The first month had signup charges and other things. This was a plain monthly bill. I was wondering what the actual cost of my $59.99 plan would be, and it turns out it is $69.93. I was guessing closer to $75, so no too bad.
But your cost will vary. The $9.94 in extra charges included several local charges and sales tax. I hate the fact that people always talk about the base cost of mobile phone bills instead of the actual cost.
Oh, and I used 42 of my 450 minutes. I’m just not a talker. But I did rack up 59,556 KB in net usage.

Brian from Box.net emailed me to tell me about the new iPhone interface for box.net. This free service allows you to store up to 1 GB of files and then view them on your iPhone. So it is a great way to store text, Word or PDF files and them access them on your iPhone. The full PC version allows you to edit, tag, delete and share files. I’d like to see some of that get to the iPhone version too.
I put some PDF documents that I need to read on there, and some reference material. I guess I could have people share documents with me and then access them on my iPhone too. That could come in handy.
Thanks for emailing, Brian. If anyone else has a new app, site, iPhone accessory or something for me to look at an review, just send me an email. I’ll get a proper contact form up at this site soon.

So having an iPhone means we have net access in places where we usually don’t: waiting in line at the bank, stuck in traffic, on the beach, and so on. This means we need quick and entertaining Web sites to bookmark and visit. Top of my list is the mobile version of The Onion. The Onion is a weekly newspaper you can find in most major cities that features fake and funny news. Some of the best satire around. It always makes me laugh. Just remember to laugh quietly if you are on line at the bank.

There are a lot of to-do lists out there, and it is usually cited as one of the missing features in the native iPhone app list. Thought I guess you could use the notepad as a to-do list.
The 3rd-party one I hear the most about is Ta-Da List. However, it seems overly complicated to me. Even the sign-up requires too much. With the way iPhone cookies work in Safari, you should just be able to sign up without entering any info at all. I’d love it the to-do lists worked the same way voicemail or email worked on the iPhone — just a list and not much more. I’m tempted to create my own To-Do list app, but I’m thinking this will be a native feature before too long, so there’s no point.

This iPhone version of Earthcomber is pretty neat. It gives you lists of things geographically close to you, like ATMs, shops, movie theaters, and so on. But what is really interesting is it is using your IP address to determine you location. So far, I haven’t seen too many apps that do anything geographical without first asking you to tell the app where you are at. Even the native Mapping app doesn’t seem to know. So hats off to them for doing this. You can even find nearby free WiFi.