jPhone went walkabout

In February, my 32GB iPhone 3GS and I parted company on a train. I’m not quite sure whether it was stolen or whether I left it on the train – I was on the way back to Edinburgh from an exhausting and emotional trip away and woke up just in time to leap out of the train at Haymarket.

When I got home I realised the iPhone was missing and tried to locate it using find-my-iPhone. There was no response – not really a surprise because the iPhone’s battery was bound to have run out by then.

I tried find-my-iPhone the next morning and it worked – the phone was located on an estate in the south of Edinburgh. I printed the result and took it to the police who advised that they couldn’t take action unless it was handed in. I then used find-my-iPhone several times to have the phone make a loud noise and display ‘please return this phone to Bruce – call him on ‘.

No-one called me, and the iPhone seemed to stay in the same place so I eventually went to the street where the iPhone was and used find-my-iPhone on Hexie to make it noisy so I could locate it. This didn’t help and I certainly wasn’t about to start knocking on doors and accusing strangers of having the phone so I remote-wiped it and gave it up as lost.

I then had a 6-month wait for my contract to end – paying for a service I couldn’t use because a replacement iPhone would have been too expensive. I did buy an ultra-cheap dumb-phone to use with the contract, which I got reduced by a small amount but I was still forced to pay for a data connection I couldn’t use and a talk allowance which was far more than I needed.

My hostess inspires me

At the beginning of September, my hostess finally succumbed to the reality distortion field need for a real smartphone and bought a refurbished 32GB iPhone 4 on contract. A few days later, when my 3GS contract ended and I was allowed, even encouraged, to upgrade, I tried to do the same. It turned out that O2 had run out of 32GB refurbished iPhones. I would have walked from O2 but they had the cheapest phone deals in the UK. I cracked and ordered a brand-new one with a sensible data and voice plan and insurance. This phone, or a replacement provided by insurance, is damn well going to make it through this contract. (You may recall that my original iPhone died in a soup-related incident.)

Also, IOS now permitted tethering, so I no longer needed a separate broadband dongle for Hexie – just as well because the dongle had recently stopped working. I’d been toying with the idea of getting a cheap, second-hand 3G or 3GS for mounting on Vilior’s handlebars for navigation and videoing my travels. So I replaced the dongle’s contract with the cheapest contract I could get for a refurbished 8GB iPhone 3GS.

Results

Both iPhones work just fine – the iPhone 4 stays snugly in a silicone-rubber protector, tucked away in a deep pocket. The 3GS goes in Vilior’s handlebar and keeps me on track and on time. The angle it needs to be at for videoing is counter-productive for navigation, so I’ve temporarily given up on using it for both and just use the 3GS for navigation. If any freelance work comes my way, one of the biggest temptations will be to get another 3GS or iPod touch for videoing. I’m looking forward to setting the videoing device to using time-lapse photography for long cycles, then getting it to upload the frames to my main mac, which can then assemble frames into a movie and maybe even upload the movies to digital evidence – watch this space.

In the meantime, here are some movies of travelling around Edinburgh in my first week at Napier and proof of the huge difference in screen-resolution between the 4 and the 3GS:
Craiglockart to Merchiston
Merchiston to Servants’ Quarters – lots of red traffic lights!
iPhone 3GS screenshot
iPhone 4 screenshot