Getting Ready for the Apple iPhone
Unfortunately this checklist is mostly good for people outside of Vermont and in AT&T service areas. Hopefully us Vermonters will be able to part-take in the ‘iPhone experience’ soon though.
The most important step to getting ready for the iPhone is getting yourself an iTunes account. If you already have one, great! If you don’t open up iTunes and select the iTunes Store from the sidebar on the left of the window. There will be a little Sign In button located right below the search bar, click on that and choose Create New Account from the little window that pops up. Follow the instructions to create an account.
The iPhone is a phone, iPod and web device all in one so before it comes out there are a few things you can do to get your files (video, audio, etc…), iPhone ready. If you’re already using iTunes to manage your music and movies then you’re off to a good start. You music in iTunes is already iPhone ready, if it’s in iTunes, its ready to go! If you have a large music library it might be best to make a few playlists of several hundred songs.
Your movies might need to be converted to the correct size and format specifications but I have a feeling there might be a small update to iTunes that lets you easily do that. They already have a ‘Convert selection for iPod and Apple TV’, I don’t see why they wouldn’t add iPhone in there.
The next thing you can get ready for your iPhone is your bookmarks. The iPhone will sync with your bookmarks in Safari so for those FireFox, Camino users out there, it might be wise to at least export them from FireFox or whatever browser you’re using and to import them into Safari. I already use Safari so it’s not going to be an issue for me. Something I am interested in is if the iPhone will keep all my bookmarks in the folders I’ve made or if it’s just going to list them in one big list. I sure hope it keeps the folders, I have over 400 bookmarks!
iPhone can also sync your contacts which is great. I read that it will also keep them in the groups you’ve created which can make finding them a lot easier, unfortunately you cannot use the groups when composing emails. I can see that feature being in a software update though cause I use that feature a lot when I need to email a specific group of people. My current mobile phone doesn’t have this ability to every time I get a new phone number for someone I have to input on the mobile device and on my computer, having the ability to sync is going to be great! You can also choose which groups you want to sync, so in my case I may sync all my friends and family but I would not sync the people in my work group.
The next thing you could do to get yourself ready is setup a few albums iPhoto with some of your favorite pictures. The iPhone can carry thousands of photos but if want to be up and running as fast as possible I would choose a couple hundred or so. I can’t wait to try out the two finger resizing!
Email on the iPhone should be very simple for users of the Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL, and .Mac Mail services. If you don’t happen to use any of those services, it’s okay, there’s a great chance that you can still use email. The iPhone supports almost any industry standard POP or IMAP service. So it’s best to know your username, your password and your incoming (POP/IMAP) and outgoing (SMTP) server addresses.
Getting yourself ready for the iPhone is a simple process, especially if you’ve been using Safari, iPhoto, iTunes, Apple Mail and Address Book. The iPhone will seamlessly integrate and sync with all of these applications. I can’t wait to get my hands on an iPhone to try it all out!