So I recently picked up an Apple iPhone 3G, and for the most part I really like the phone. It does many things well, but some things it does badly, and some things are downright ugly. For most of the bad and the ugly, there are workarounds.

Complete review after the jump.

The Good
Three things that stand out are the user interface, Google Maps, and syncing with Macintosh applications.

The touchscreen user interface is absolutely fabulous. Apple spent a lot of time getting this right, and it shows. The non-tactile keyboard takes a little bit of getting used to, but once you do it is easy to use. The spelling correction feature works very well and makes typing quite a bit easier. There are also little touches, such as when you are on a screen where you are typing the name of a website, one of the keys on the keyboard is a “.com” key, so you only need one keystroke to enter “.com”.

The ability to move applications around on the screen is nice. I like to organize the screen differently than the default, and it easy to do that. You can add website bookmarks directly to the screen, so you can go to commonly used website without first running Safari.

Google Maps and the gps locator is very cool. The gps locator shows on a map displayed on the screen exactly where you are. Some people find this feature creepy (George Orwell, call your office), but it can be very handy if, say, you are in a strange city and you want to find a specific location. You can type the address of the place you want to go into Google maps and it will show you how to get from you are to where you want to be.

iPhone uses iTunes to sync with a PC or a Mac (I use a Mac). When you connect the iPhone to the Mac, iTunes will run and automatically back up the iPhone to your computer. It will then sync the address book, calendar, mail accounts (if you use them), ringtones, music, photos, podcasts, video and iPhone applications you have stored in iTunes. You have a lot of control over which music, photos, podcasts, video and applications will be synced with the phone.

The phone, text messaging, iPod and other things work very well too.

The Bad
It is not all peaches and sunshine in iPhoneland. It uses AT&T, and their network has issues. I was on Verizon, and I have had more dropped calls since I moved to AT&T. Sometimes there will be brief bursts of static during a conversation. Sometimes, the 3G network (the high-speed internet service) mysteriously disappears, only to reappear a short time later.

It won’t let you uninstall applications that came with the phone. It comes with a stock tracking application which I don’t use. But I can’t delete it, so it just takes up space on the screen. Fortunately, you can move it off the home screen to another one, so I have parked it out of the way. But it would be nice to be able to delete it.

The weather application, which uses Yahoo weather, has the ability to track weather in cities of your choice, which is handy when you are traveling. But the information it gives you is so general as to be almost useless. For example, for tomorrow’s weather in Ann Arbor it shows a cloud with lightning, indicating thunderstorms. But will they last all day? What is the percentage chance of rain? There is no way of knowing since you can’t drill down into any detail. I moved the weather application out of the way and instead put a link on the home screen to Weather Underground, my favorite weather site, which has much more detailed information.

There is no easy to set the clock up for a vibrate-only alarm. It either plays a sound and vibrates even with the ringer switch turned off, or if you specify “no sound”, it only flashes something on the screen. There is a workaround. If you use a Mac, Garageband will send ringtones to iTunes (use the Share menu). I created a new song in Garageband and added a new Real Instrument track. I turned off the internal microphone and clicked the record button for five seconds. This created a silent track. I then shared it with iTunes and added it as a custom ringtone to the iPhone and called it Silence. If I want a vibrate-only alarm, I specify the Silence ringtone as the one to play when the alarm goes off. Since it is silent there is no noise but the phone vibrates.

The Ugly
I am very Googleized - I have several Gmail accounts and Google calendars, and I use Google documents a lot. But trying to sync the iPhone with the different Google services can be difficult.

Apple wants you to use MobileMe, their service which syncs calendars, mail, address books, etc across multiple computers and devices. But it requires you to buy the service ($99/year - Apple never prices in even $10s), use an @me.com email address and their calendars. This is a non-starter for me since I have had my gmail accounts for years.

Using the mail application on the iPhone with gmail is not bad. It is fairly easy to set up, and you can set up multiple accounts. iPhone will check for new email every 15 minutes, not as good as a push service like Blackberry or MobileMe, but good enough for me. When you are composing a new email, the mail app will use the address book on the phone rather than your Google contacts.

Getting the phone to sync with Google calendar proved to be a real pain. Nothing I tried worked, until I ran across Spanning Sync. This application installs on a Mac and will sync iCal calendars on your Mac with any number of Google calendars. When you sync your iPhone with your Mac, the iPhone calendar will sync the Mac’s calendar. So it is a two-step process: sync the iPhone with your Mac, then sync iCal with Google using Spanning Sync. But you can add, edit and delete events either on Google or on your phone and they will sync. I just do this every morning.

If you want to use Spanning Sync, click here to save $5. I get $5 as a referral fee.

For all my trip photos, check out the Photo gallery

I took a short vacation last week to Boston and New York for no other reason other than to get away for a few days. My friends Cheryl and Joe, their daughter Katherine, and another friend of ours, Tess, were taking a car vacation through the northeast and I joined them in Boston for a few days. Another friend of ours, Jim, was to have joined us in Boston, and then Jim and I were going to take the train from Boston to New York where Jim lives. The plan was for me to stay with him in his apartment in Astoria, Queens. However, Jim’s work schedule clobbered that idea and he wound up in Michigan the week I was in Boston and New York. But, Jim graciously gave me the keys to his apartment before I left so I didn’t have to sleep under a bridge or someplace when I got to NYC.

This was the first time I had been to Boston and had some time to properly see it as previous visits were business trips with no time for anything but work. A couple of things stood out. First, it is fairly compact and easy to get around either on foot or by public transit. Second, the city has made a real effort to preserve old buildings and architecture while adapting them for modern uses with things like air conditioning, good lighting, etc. I liked Boston a lot.

I flew in to the city and arrived before the others, so I had time to explore on my own. One rather, um, interesting experience happened when I stopped at the Beantown Pub, across from the Boston Commons, for a beer. I fell into a conversation with someone who looked like a fat aging biker, but he told me that while he once was a biker, he now restores antique Bibles and Christian artifacts from the 16th and 17th centuries and sells them. He is not with a university or anything, he does it a private businessman. He went on to tell me that he stopped being a biker and took up this trade after becoming a born-again Christian. He told me that God was coming soon, but He will come a lot sooner if we elect “that shoeshine Obama”. He threatened to go on that vein, but I suddenly remembered an urgent appointment and made my escape. I have encountered blatant racism many times in my life, but this guy was unique.

The next day Tess, Cheryl, Joe, Katherine and I took the Freedom Trail. This is well worth doing - there is an awful lot of history packed into a small area. The different burial yards, Paul Revere’s house and the USS Constitution were especially interesting.

The next day we went on a whale watch tour. This was a total blast and more than worth the $38 ticket. Each boat has a naturalist narrating what you are seeing. We saw a number of whales and even a pod of porpoises. See the photo gallery for a lot of whale pictures.

Friday I took Amtrak - the Acela Express - from Boston to New York. What a great way to travel compared to the airlines. You get on the train in downtown Boston. No security lines, no removing your shoes, you just get on the train. I had a seat in the “Quiet Car”, in which cell phone conversations, boom boxes, loud conversations, or anything else which would disturb others, was banned. Each seat had an outlet in which one could plug a laptop computer, or one could simply read a book or view the incredibly scenic New England countryside. One arrived in New York three and a half hours later perfectly relaxed, calm, unstressed. Of course, one detrained at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, which is anything but relaxed, calm, unstressed. But it was nice while it lasted.

I stayed in Jim’s apartment in Astoria, in the borough of Queens. It was a really interesting neighborhood. A large Greek immigrant population lives there, so there was a great variety of Greek restaurants, groceries and other kinds of shops. Almost everything you needed was within walking distance, including a terrific fruit and vegetable market, a couple of small grocery stores, several dry cleaners, a bunch of coffee shops, party stores, bars, restaurants and other shops. The subway stop was a couple of blocks away, ready to whisk you to anywhere in New York you wanted to go. On the other hand, Jim’s tiny one bedroom apartment costs him $1,700/month.

The highlight of this part of the trip was The Cloisters, a part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art located in the beautiful Fort Tryon Park in the northern tip of Manhattan. The Cloisters was specially built to display works of medieval art and architecture, and it does it extremely well.

– Update 15 August: Fixed the caption on the photo of the plaque commemorating the Massachusetts 54th Regiment. My sister Laurel wrote:

The plaque was made by the noted sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens. The Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the 1st African American regiment raised in the North, was also memorialized in a poem by Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead.” Amazing poem.

Scenes from the movie were being shot just a block from my office, but the streets were blocked off and it was difficult to see what they were doing much of the time. Mostly it seemed like a lot of people standing around all day. A lot of security was provided by the Ann Arbor police, plus a lot of rent-a-cops. They also completely took over one parking lot and much of another, making parking even more difficult than it normally is.

Yesterday, they burned a travel trailer, causing much excitement for passers-by. The picture at the top is the end of the fire, the picture below is off the Ann Arbor Fire Department mopping up.

(Via Marc Ambinder)

I once visited a client in New Jersey who asked me what I wanted to drink. I told her I wanted a pop, which prompted her to ask me if I was from Kalamazoo. Apparently in her experience only people from Kalamazoo called it “pop”.

(Via Sullivan)

(Via Alex Ross)