I knew there was a lot of hype for this phone, but damn. I didn’t know that many people could get up so early in L.A. Even with a reservation, we didn’t get in to the Apple store until 9:45. I felt bad (only slightly) for the people in the non-reservation line, which had close to 1000 people in it, snaking around the entire Grove shopping center. But honestly, just like before, it was worth the wait. This new phone looks almost too nice to be slinging around in your pocket all day. All glass on the front and back, with an aluminum ring around the outside; it’s definitely svelte. It’s also lot thinner than I thought it would be, and feels extremely solid in your hand.

Things I’m digging: The camera is great. It shoots fast (pretty much instantly) and the pictures look great for 5 megapixels. It also does a solid 720p video, and decent videochat with the front camera. The best feature has got to be the screen, AKA the “Retina Display”. I know that sounds like marketing speak but you will have a hard time seeing pixels when you have this in your hand. I’ve never seen a phone that looks so crisp. Also, the overall speed is really impressive. It flys compared to the 3G.

Things I’m not digging so much: Glass on the back? Come on, Steve! You know how many times I dropped my last iPhone right? A lot. Even with the claimed helicopter windshield-grade glass, the odds of seeing this phone cracking somehow are not low. Also there are some claimed signal issues depending on how you hold it but luckily I haven’t been able to replicate them with mine.

My first step in iphonization (thats a real word. i think) was installing the iWPhone wordpress plugin which checks if you’re using the mobile safari browser and switches the theme accordingly. Then i took the generic WP theme and chopped it up, dropped the sidebar, added some javascript to resize the images to 300 px wide, and tested it a million times until the look was consistent in most aspects with the normal site.

There’s a lot of little tips and tricks out there to make a site function better on the mobile Safari browser. Probably the most helpful was Razak.nl. He shows you how to make your site look and act more like a native app by getting the browser out of the way. If you’re going to try this out for your own site, make sure you also look at Molecular Voices and iPhone Microsites to get you headed on the right path.

When it comes to hacking the iPhone, I was a bit more cautious. It made sense to jailbreak the first-gen phone; Apple didn’t have a way to add new software. But now there’s the iTunes AppStore and it kinda nullified the need to jailbreak for a lot of people. But as cool as it is, there are quite a few features that should be common place on a smartphone yet absent on the iPhone: video recording, MMS messages, most of the bluetooth features like file transfers and stereo music, copy/paste, etc.

This is where jailbreaking comes in. Just like Knight Rider’s KITT had KARR, there’s a renegade version of the appStore out there called Cydia that lets you install all the apps Apple doesn’t deem fit for its precious baby. My current fave is Cycorder, a video camera app. Sure it’s only 12 frames a second video, but that’s 12 more than it could do before. Here’s a sample I took at the skatepark.

A few things that could be better:
For one, image placement lacks any kind of align in the image tag, so the picture placement is very haphazard and it just plain looks bad. Sure you can manually add the align code, but I think a lot of users of this app won’t know how to do that.

Also, I don’t like how when you hit save, it puts you back into the list of posts. When you use the actual version of WordPress and you publish, it keeps you in the post so you can keep editing it. I’m a prolific saver by nature, it’s burned into my brain by years of working on large photoshop files on crash-prone computers. Having to go back into the post after every save isn’t that big of a deal, but it breaks up my work flow and typing on the iPhone isn’t the easiest task.

These annoyances aside, the app works, and the few things it does, it does fairly well. If you need to post on the go, this app could be for you. Besides, it’s free.