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iPhone #5 - Wednesday 11 June 2008 Wow, eleven months into the warranty period and we're up to five iPhones! This time the home button - the big round button on the bottom front - stopped working reliably. Apple must certainly be making a fat dime on the monies sent from AT&T, because they're certainly fielding a goodly number of phones if I'm any indication. It's not like I'm rough with the phones; they're always in my front right pocket, coddled. Now that the 3G iPhones have been announced - at WWDC '08, which I've been attending - the question arises whether $69 for AppleCare is worthwhile to keep this phone going another year. I'm thinking so. The $199 3G price is for a new phone on a new two-year contract. Hmmmmn. This time it was Cat, in the downtown San Francisco Apple Store, who was so helpful. Thanks. iPhone #4 - Wednesday 20 February 2008 That last phone, the one I got yesterday? Well, it had three problems: The home button didn't always wake the iPhone The power button didn't always wake the iPhone The screen would intermittently blink on and off So I'm back at Apple Stonestown, getting iPhone #4. Jeremy, with whom I dealt yesterday, is a gentlemen. Thanks! iPhone #3 - Tuesday 19 February 2008 After the update to firmware 1.1.3 the speakerphone/ringer volume plunged; it was audible, but only barely, unlike before. Replaced with a smile at the Apple Store Stonestown. Thank you, guys. iPhone #2 - December 2007 All of a sudden the bottom fifth of my iPhone screen went "numb". Replaced without a fuss at the Apple Store Stonestown. Thanks! The iPhone on iDay - Friday 29 June 2007 On iDay, the day the hotly-anticipated Apple iPhone is released, I'm at a party in Piedmont. I suggest to a fellow party-goer that we leave mid-evening and check out the Apple and AT&T stores for stock. He begs off, saying he needs to stay late at work. Well, during the party the house phone rings. It's my friend, in line at an Apple store, getting ready to buy me an iPhone. He doesn't want one until revision two, he says. (I want one badly. Not only because I've been using tablet-based computers since I was at Go Corporation, contemporaneous with the Newton (of which I owned several, but my latest cell phone just stopped properly synchronizing with my PowerBook). So here we are at the party, with our iPhones. Yep, he was seduced by the goings-on and the in-line demonstrations. (He's a long-time Macintosh developer....) Very soon after the iPhone is released the firmware is broken, and we can (1) install third-party applications and (2) use any GSM carrier's SIM card. The former is essential for me; the latter is essential for people outside of the USA, or those who don't want to have any relationship with AT&T. (I understand this; AT&T is about everything wrong with telecommunications - poor service, no innovation, expensive domestically, exhorbinantly expensive internationally, and those are the good points. Meh.