It’s been a while, but so far I’m still very happy with the iPhone. In fact, I just discovered a Wordpress iPhone app that let’s me write posts (like this one) on the iPhone, even when I’m not connected to the Interwebs (like now, when I’m waiting underground for the subway).
There are still significant annoyances, though. Selecting a block of text is often insanely hard (especially if you don’t want to select on a word boundary, or if you want to select more than a screenful of text but not “select all”). Battery suckage is immense, especially since the 3.0 upgrade.
And it’s still annoying that I can’t fix the screen to be horizontally rotated. The “iPhone can’t rotate 180 degrees” trick makes surfing while lying down bearable, at least—otherwise you’d never be able to have the screen properly rotated no matter how you held it—but if I move from one side to the other, I have to rotate the phone 180 degrees (and slowly, often pausing for five or six seconds at 90 degrees to get the iPhone to adjust) before I can continue my reading or browsing or whatnot. Hardly a seamless experience. And sometimes it just doesn’t rotate at all.
I haven’t tried kanji input much lately. I got a special iPhone stylus, which worked surprisingly well for drawing characters, but at the end of the day the minor differences between the Japanese and Chinese characters made it more or less unworkable for daily study. However, I’ve discovered renshuu.org, which has the vocabulary for the textbook my class is using, conveniently separated by chapter, and a Leitner-style spaced repetition algorithm to ensure that I get the most practice on the words I know the least. In the latest site upgrade, they’ve even made the multiple-choice questions more tricky, making it difficult to guess if you don’t really know what the word is. I’ve been doing that vocabulary practice nearly every day, and I think it’s helped significantly.
All in all, the iPhone has been a win in general, but I wish they’d fix some of the minor annoyances.
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