But there are many times I hate it. In no particular order, here’s why:

1. It’s trying to kill me. The Bluetooth is flakier than a chocolate named 99*. I mean really. Sometimes it’ll talk to my car kit, sometimes it won’t. I wouldn’t mind if it was otherwise highly specced, but no A2DP means it won’t stream music to my car or a headset, so I’m forever fighting wires, getting tangled up, and generally shouting at the iPhone when I’m driving. And that’s why it’s trying to kill me – using it in the car, while driving, is a death sentence.
2. It doesn’t want me to have memories. That excuse for a camera… coming to the iPhone after an N95 you suddenly find yourself transported back to 2003, when phone cameras were still new, still fuzzy, still didn’t work in low light and still didn’t do video. The upside is that it’s encouraged me to carry around a proper compact digital camera – something which does a far better job of images than any phone camera I’ve used.
3. It wants me to lose friends. After all, why bother letting me know they’re calling when you could just amusingly redirect all calls to voicemail until the next reboot?
4. It wants me to lose business. See points 1 and 3. I can’t answer the phone when driving any more, nor can I make calls by simply prodding the bluetooth button on my dashboard and calling out the name of whoever I’d like to talk to. Similarly, that call avoidance strategy may be great for battery life, but it’s rubbish for making money.
5. It’s pretty, until you start to use it. Especially if you’ve just been eating donuts. Try it, you’ll understand.
6. It’s trying to lose me. Many high-end phones come with GPS software. That stands for Global Positioning Satellite. The iPhone has something which you could also call GPS – Guesswork Positioning System. That’s right – you can go to Google Maps and ask it where you are. It’ll then tell you to an accuracy of… oooh, well in my house it says I could be anywhere in an area covering about 25 square miles. The worst thing is… my house isn’t in any of those square miles – it’s about two miles outside. This is not a phone that’s going to save you when you’re lost in the Atacama dessert. It’s probably simply a part of the functionality designed for reason 1.
7. It doesn’t like being charged up. Most of the things that should charge it up, won’t. I suppose that’s my fault for equating “charges iPods” with “charges iPhones.” How silly of me.
8. It’s noisy as hell. I don’t mean that when it rings it causes complaints from neighbours. Don’t be ridiculous – ringing is something to be done quietly – see point 9. It’s worse than that. What it does is to use hi-fis, car stereos, computer speakers… anything really, as a sort of noise proxy. Whenever it’s receiving a call, making one, thinking about it, checking your e-mail… off it goes. BIDDY-BIDDY-BIDDY-BIDDY! It’s like I’ve got Twiki hiding under my desk.
9. It doesn’t want to disturb me. I buy phones to receive phone calls. It would be nice if, when someone calls, that phone could muster up enough noise so that you could hear it ringing. The iPhone’s ringer is easily drowned out in noisy places. For example, places such as museums, convents and libraries.
10. It’s jealous. You get it on a contract from O2 and you mustn’t ever leave. Oh no. Put that SIM into another telephone and that’s it – breach of contract time! You’ll be cut off pretty soon after which you’ll have to go grovelling back to O2 with a sincere apology and a promise not to be naughty again. And you can’t transfer the contract to another phone, even if you pay the same amount. No, you’re trapped. Trapped like you might feel when you’re with a beautiful but violently jealous girlfriend who, it turns out, you just got pregnant. Think Betty Blue. That’s how you’ll feel from about month 3 to month 18. The freedom when that contract ends… oh you know – it’s going to be like ending a relationship with a beautiful nutter. You’ll feel free as a bird, yet somehow… empty. Sad. Forlorn.

I’ve just realised, I have another ten reasons…. I’ll post them next time I have an energy spurt.

Until then, if you’re thinking about an iPhone… well, it really is the dog’s wotsits when it comes to surfing and playing music. Nothing comes close. As a phone… well… you know how I feel.

* In Britain, if you say to an ice cream man “make mine a 99″ he’ll give you a normal ice cream with a Flake chocolate sticking out of it.

Addendum. I wrote about the charging problem because, at the time of writing, my iPhone wouldn’t charge from any of my portable chargers. Turns out it was just it hadn’t noticed – rebooted, I went from 10% charge to full. Damn phone’s a liar too!

Then I realised, there’s actually three hot topics.

But first, the original two.  This blog had been quietly pottering along and not really generating much interest until two features.

One was called “Selling Sex” and concerned a possible escort agency client.  The other was about the new iPhone update.  Thing is, although they generated spikes, the ongoing benefit in traffic has been significant.

I also added an RSS feed to the blog from our Interconnect IT site.

Then we published a WordPress User guide.

Traffic’s been much more significant since then.

But what are the three things that generate the most traffic?

1. Anything about the latest hot gadget.
2. Sex.  We’re really simple creatures. People are interested in sex.
3. Articles about how to draw more traffic to your blog.

Anything else will just plod along, picking up scraps from obscure Google searches – especially on a rather techie biased blog such as this one.

Anybody else care to comment with other surefire traffic winners?

What do we get?

Here’s the official list according to Apple when the download started.

iPhone Software
Version 1.1.3

This version of the software includes additional new features, bug fixes and supersedes all previous versions.

New features include:

• New Maps application
- Find location
- Improved UI
• Send SMS text messages to multiple recipients
• Customize Home Screen
- Rearrange icons
- Add Safari bookmarks to the Home Screen
- Create up to 9 Home Screen pages
• IMAP support for Gmail
• Support for iTunes Store movie rentals
• Enhanced Video Player
- Chapters
- Subtitles
- Alternate language tracks
• Lyrics support in iPod

The SMS fix was badly needed, but the most interesting, to me, is the Map Find Location gee-gaw. How this works, I’m fascinated to learn. I’m going to play and add more to this post once it’s installed (as long as my phone isn’t bricked… eep!).

So – here we go, I’ve got images showing the new bits…

So here we go – the install’s in, and that’s the first thing we see – an instruction about home screens.  Neat – multiple home screens, allowing you to get nicely organised.  Or disorganised, depending on your nature.

Not much changed, but the iTunes link has moved from the right to the left.  Presumably because of the facility to do your own icons and move them around.

They’re blurry because they’re jiggling around.  As you can see, I’ve moved the Calendar icon down to the bottom left, just for illustration.

The Map application locator uses triangulation to work out where you are.  At one point it thought I was at the green pin.  That was when I tried to use the directions option and said “from current location” to our office in Liverpool.  But the big blue ring is massive – that’s about two miles wide, at a guess, or about three kilometers or so.  Next time I tried it, it got closer, but was still out by half a mile.  The green pin is approximately one kilometre from where I actually live.

Click on the eye and you get various options.  Show Traffic showed nothing.  I’ll be interested to see if this works in Europe.  You can drop pins, and you can easily see the different types of map.

The routing isn’t great at finding where you’re starting, but it works nicely.

Now to Safari – nothing much to see here except I’m sure that the search icon wasn’t there before.  But I’m not 100% certain – anyone care to double check and comment?

Now here’s an interesting thing.  Mailing links is handy, I guess, but being able to add something to your home screen is very handy indeed – especially if you’re into the various mobile (and in particular iPhone) oriented web apps that people are developing.

And as you can see – there’s a link to our company website – Interconnect IT.

You can sleep your iPhone on the timer now.  Not sure how useful it is, and a part of me is thinking “was that there before?”

And last, but one of the most important for us text mad Europeans… the ability to text more than one person at a time!  Finally!  Thank God Apple actually listen.  As you can see, the process is easy, and you can tap that plus sign as often as you like for more entries.

And that concludes my epic day – I’ve blogged three times on this site today, a personal record.  And not only that, but achieved most of my work related to-do list in spite of phone calls aplenty.  Something’s wrong.  Did I o/d on vitamin pills or something?

So it’s a shame that they don’t work that well together. In this article I go through the following:

• Posting to WordPress.com from the iPhone
• Posting to a self hosted version of WordPress using the Mobile Admin plugin
• Posting to WordPress from the iPhone and including images with the post

The latter is a particularly vexing problem, and one to which I can’t solve for WordPress.com. However, it’s relatively easy for self-hosting, or profesionally managed WordPress site owners to get images into their website, from their iPhone. Or for that matter, many other platforms. But this post in particular is all about getting on with WordPress when using an iPhone. Mainly because my shockingly generous girlfriend got me one for Xmas, I’m poorly, and I don’t feel like doing any ‘proper’ work today.

So let’s begin…

WordPress.com and the iPhone

WordPress and WordPress.com both use, by default, the TinyMCE editor. And it’s not a bad little editor either. A little buggy at times, but it’s feature rich and simple to use. What it won’t do, at least as supplied by WordPress, is work with the iPhone. You’ll have to tap on the Code tab above the editor and just enter plain text. You can then publish just fine.

If you’re only blogging from your phone you can turn off the visual rich editor in the WordPress Users | Your Profile tab in order to make this a simple one touch job. It may also save you the occassional Safari crashes that I experienced with the MCE editor running, even though I didn’t use it.

But… you probably aren’t limiting yourself to phone only blogging, and you probably like the editor. It lets you do nice things. But there’s also another problem… go down to the Upload part and you’ll notice that you can tap as much as you like on a “Choose File” button, but nothing will happen. So you can’t add images from your iPhone to your WordPress blog.

WordPress, the iPhone, and the Mobile Admin Plugin

If you’re a regular mobile blogger and you have your own, self-hosted or managed WordPress installation, then you have the option of plugins. And one of the handiest for WordPress is the Mobile Admin Plugin. You’ll need to follow the usual plugin steps – checking for compatibility, installation, and activation. But once you’ve followed the instructions it really does make using the iPhone (and for that matter, many other phones) on WordPress sites a cinch.

What’s great is that if you access the site admin using a normal PC, you still get the normal control panel.

Below are a couple of screenshots showing it in action:

Lovely isn’t it? And if you’re wondering why I’m not posting any of my own screenshots, it’s because I’ve not hacked my own iPhone in order to get the SSH access I’d need to take screenshots.

There’s only one downside, and I feel it’s a big one, to the whole Mobile Admin experience. It’s important to me as I’m a visual type and I like illustrations wherever possible – especially if I’m travelling and feel like showing some shots of where I’ve been. I’m also particularly keen to make it work as I had photoblogging to my WordPress site (Dave’s Geeky Play Area Blog) working just fine from a Nokia N95. Ok, that took some hacking too, but I’ve had photos… I want to continue with photos!

Posting Images to a WordPress Blog With Your iPhone

If you host your WordPress site yourself, you can do a lot… and get images from your iPhone directly to your site!

Now, the iPhone won’t tolerate MCE yet, and it won’t use the upload wizard in standard WordPress. So what’s to do? ftp tools don’t exist yet, so you can simply ftp your shots onto your site… which suggests that you’re stuck.

Well fear not. I’ve been casting around all afternoon and found the following works best. Basically, with WordPress you can set it up so that you can post to it by e-mail. This does require setting up either a cron job (something many hosting providers won’t do or allow) or it means hacking around so that the job fires off every now and then. Thing is, the standard WordPress wp-mail.php program doesn’t actually work all that well with images. In fact, it doesn’t work at all with anything other than text. So you’ll need something a little more…heavyweight.

But with WordPress there’s always a way. The plugin you need is called Postie, and this is what you have to do:

1. Install the Postie plugin
2. Read the instructions! Maybe do that before installing it?
3. Go to the Postie config page as instructed (it’ll show the readme first – just refresh), and set your image resize to something appropriate to your theme
4. Set up an e-mail account on your host that’s especially set up for receiving posts to your blog. Keep it a secret and make the password tricky too. Configure this information in Postie, bearing in mind the default port for e-mail is 110 (not defaulted into the form by the Postie plugin).
5. And then the easiest way to get an image to your site is from the iPhone image gallery press the little swoosh icon in the bottom left of the image viewer.
6. Tap Email Photo.
7. In the New Message box you should enter the To: e-mail address that you set up in step 4. You can also enter some text in the box. Press Send.
8. Now, the content won’t appear yet in your blog, but it’ll be waiting… all you need is to send a browser to http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php or, if your WordPress is installed in its own directory: http://www.yourdomain.com/WordPressDirectory/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php
9. You can set up a cron job if you’re allowed, but it’s not my favourite way anyhow. I like to just have a favourite in my browser for mail posting which I click on whenever I need to update the site.

And that’s it! Ok, it took a bit to get there, and it’s not integral to WordPress so you can’t guarantee support on version changes, but… it’s one way forward, I’ve tested it, and it works well on WP 2.3.1. If you spot any mistakes, please comment!

If this post is popular I may well try and add some screenshots, photos and sample posts. I also plan to do a similar post soon on the Nokia N95 and WordPress.