Be Excellent To Each Other

You mispelled "Craphone Whorehouse".

As in, you can't polish a turd but you can hone it?

CUS: when you pick up your phone, bonus points if they try to scare you out of unlocking it with incorrect threats.

Triple points if you take a laptop and do it in store.

Right, I've installed Mobile Finder, but can't find Mobile Preview in the apps list.

I'll do it-FTFY!

Good point, although "Crapphone" looks wrong.

My experience in the O2 shop:
Me: "Gimme an iPhone."
Sales dude: "Which model?"
Me: "8Gb"
Sales dude: "OK"
...goes out back, waits...
Sales dude: "Here it is. You need to pay by..."
Me: I silently proffer my card.
Sales dude: "OK, now do you want insur.."
Me: "No thank you."
Sales dude: "When you get home you have to activate..."
Me: "With iTunes, I know."
Sales dude: "Type you PIN in here. There you go sir, thank you."

his is a literal transcript; I was in the shop for less than five minutes.

I was concerned there was going to be oodles of crap, and talking about contracts, and insurance, and accessory upsell. My ideal response to this was to simply get my laptop out and unlock it right there in the shop. It'd be interesting to see their faces.

I'll accept holding the box aloft, cackling maniacally and running from the store.

Shit. I am actually really tempted now to go "AHA! FOOLS!" and run off, when I get it. I'd look a tit, and they'll call me a twat for it, but damnit, the sheer possiblity that one of them might 'get it' and have to stand there trying not to laugh, is worth it.

Record it!
On your iPhone!
(Does it do video?)

Badly, supposedly. My boss at work has just been attempting to take the piss because it's not 3G and has a rubbish camera. I sent a link to my regular camera, and showed him a link to the iPhone's drum machines. He looks really forlorn now

I can beat that. I'd already been in one O₂ store and two Corporeal Warhosen that had sold out that day, and went into the other O₂ store in Nottingham more out of dejected hope than anything else:

Me: Let me guess, you've sold out of iPhones?
Salesman: Nope.
Me: Cool, then I'd like to buy one.
Salesman: Ok then. That's £169.
Me: *hands over card*
Salesman: Are you already with O₂?
Me: Yep.
Salesman: Then you know what to do then.
Me: Yep.

If I'm not using the provided earphones, is there any way of pausing the music when I'm not on the iPod screen?

Pull the earphones out.

Apart from that?

Double-click the home button (while the display is off or at the "slide to unlock" stage), and you get a pop-up with a pause button on it.

Alternatively you'll need to get or make an extension headphone cable with the pause switch on it.

Interesting. I forgot I set the iPod screen to my 'double-click', so I suppose at least that's a shortcut of sorts.

Got my iPhone. Went in, said "I'm here to collect an iPhone", they said "Oh yeah... got a photo ID?", I showed them my passport, they gave me the iPhone, I came home.

Now I've realised my old PAYG SIMM is in a box at my parents' so it won't be tomorrow until I can use it anyway. Gnggh.

Heh

Did you hold it sideways so it looks like super special FBI ID?

No, but I am paranoid and distrustful.

I want to believe.

Has anyone found any sort of tidy deal on a headphone adaptor? Stupid recessed port, what the hell were Apple thinking?

Check the headphones RMD thread. I got one from Radtech. $12 including postage.

That they could sell phones and/or adapters I'd wager.

Oh, they're cheaper than that on Amazon, I saw a range from about £3 but even that looks like an insane price. I could make one using spare parts and a 3.5mm female jack from Maplin for less than that. ebay FTW I guess.

I don't think that can be true, with such a simple adapor any official Apple product is quickly squeezed out of the market as the no-name Taiwanese brands.

Sounds like the kind of thing that Dealextreme would give you money to have.

Recommendations for avi -> iPhone video converters?

Visual Hub. It is payware but very ace and definitely worth the money.

Another question: I just noticed the thing has a TV out! Supposedly.

Can I connect this to my standard telly with a special cable, and actually watch videos that way? That'd be incredibly useful.

If it's anything like the N95 or Zune AV out the tiny resolution looks rubbish.

I'm not after DVD quality. If I can play iPlayer stuff without having to drag my PC through to the living room, I'd be happy with that.

If it's got TV out, I'm not looking at it right.

There's an option in the prefs to choose NTSC or PAL. The connection is on the ipod dock (not the one that comes with it, you need a special one costing 35 quid).
It's just I've not heard of anyone mentioning it or using it before so I thought I'd ask. I will try it.

If you've got a spot of spare cash I'd recommend one of those DVD/DivX players with a USB slot - they are around £20 nowadays and work really well.

Do they do iPlayer?

Gah, didn't spot that bit. Not that I know of.

Gah, lost my update. I must have selected Cancel. Anyway, yes, it does 576i (DVD quality) TV out. I don't know if it works for anything other than the normal video content synced over iTunes though, which would rule iPlayer out.

Cheers anyway. I'll report back when I get around to buying one of those cables.

Richard: A comment on the iPlayer blog sez "I watched "Mad Men" last night on my 22" TV streamed through my iPhone and using the iPhone's TV out. The quality was awesome. "Question Time" was noticeably poorer quality but still very watchable on the larger screen.".

itunes movies and iplayer both run in the same application, I think, so it makes sense that they both work. I guess you can view your photo album like this as well.

I am having a hellish time trying to get it to talking to iTunes. Something apparently went wrong during hardware detection, and now I'm stuck in a limbo state where Google has no answers and I can't start from scratch or see it in iTunes. Sigh.

I had that for a bit because I was using 32bit iTunes on a 64bit OS. Any help?

Connect it to your computer with the home button pressed down before you plug it in. Make sure you have iTunes open beforehand.

What's up exactly? Is the phone stuck in recovery mode or something?

My work PC (XP64) threw a total shit fit. I had to do the iTunes bit (reflashing to 1.1.4) and the iLiberty bit on a colleague's 32bit PC. Annoyingly, Vista x64 works fine, and it's only because of Apple fuxx0ring about with the drivers -- you can rebuild the Vista MSI for WinXP64 and it will all just work.

Tried that - it found and reinstalled the Apple Mobile Device Thingy, but that was all it seemed to do.

The phone is just showing the 'Connect to iTunes' image, and allowing me to make Emergency calls. I can turn it on/off fine. I can charge it.

Windows is showing a 'USB Mass Storage Device' that is installed but not working - I know for certain that this relates to the iPhone.

I've tried restarting my machine, reinstalling iTunes, reinstalling iTunes then restarting my machine then trying it again etc. No go.

Once it came up saying something like, "The iPhone "" Could not be connected because the device returned an error" - or something similar.

That's it, so far. I have another Windows machine and a Mac, but I want to sync it to THIS machine.

What version of iTunes are you using?

Have you done anything with any of the jailbreaking/unlocking/activating programs yet?

I use the TV-Out on my iPhone for a bit of iPlayer goodness on my telly. Works a treat!

BUT! HEED MY ADVICE!!!

Don't buy an iPod Universal Dock (or whatever they call it). It may have an S-Video output, but it's not compatible with the iPhone. What you instead need is the hideously overpriced Apple Composite AV or Apple Component AV iPod cables. Also note that the iPhone can't output a progressive scan picture, so in many respects the Component cable is useless, so get whichever is the cheapest.

All that said, iPlayer does look good from it. Other stuff, less so.

Thanks for the ADVICE!!! I dunno what progressive scan is so I imagine I'll live without it

Try on another machine. You can sync it to that one at a later date.

Component, basically.

Does the iPhone talk to the 360 (for music playback purposes)?

I formatted mine and boxed it up. Thinking of selling it actually.

iPods do, so it should.