So, I bought the iPhone, but I’ve been hanging onto my Treo 600. There it is, tucked into my Tom Binh bag (it’s the only bag I use to carry my Tom Binh in). The Treo gets to ride shotgun with me for one reason only: it supports a little app called SplashID, which stores my – no lie – 475 different website logins, server credentials, frequent flier numbers, and all the other bits of digital identity that I need to survive in this crazy world. SplashID on the Treo syncs with SplashID on the Mac, so whether I’m at the keyboard or on the go, my important digits are never more than a few keystrokes away. For all its whiz-bangery, my un-hacked iPhone still can’t sport a utility like this.

Or so I thought. The good folks at iPhoneAtlas mentioned a Mac app called Password Wallet the other day that looks like it may let me retire the Treo once and for all. Password Wallet has the ability to send an encrypted bookmarklet to the iPhone that is viewable in Safari. I can’t add to or edit my password list, the way I can with SplashID, but just being able to view the list would be close enough to good for me.

The only gotchas I’ve encountered so far: it takes way too long to display all my passwords through the bookmarklet. Even if I export only a subset of about 150 passwords, the list still takes about 20 – 30 seconds to display fully. I’ll really have to slim down to the bare essentials in order to have a usable experience.

Also, Password Wallet doesn’t support as many fields as SplashID, so the import function didn’t bring over all my info. That means I’ll have to go back and manually update a good portion of the records. Still, I suppose it’ll be worth it to save a few more ounces of bag weight.

At least, I haven’t heard this stuff about the iPhone mentioned anywhere else…

Cool thing that nobody’s talking about: Built-in speakers. No more passing earbuds or plugging into external speakers when I want to share some song or snippet of a podcast with friends and loved ones. Just unplug the mini jack and crank up the volume. Beauty.

Frustrating as heck thing that nobody’s talking about: Audio seek. I really like the iPods’ scroll wheels for finding my place in podcasts and long songs. With the iPods, you can just vary the speed of your scrolling to find a specific point in the file, but there’s no similar function on the iPhone. You can take big jumps with the file pointer, or hold the forward and reverse buttons to scrub the audio, but this is nowhere near as elegant as the controls on a true iPod. Very frustrating.

Seems to me that this post about the iPhone at Investor Village is right on point. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a key bit:

When Apple first started talking about the desktop computer as our digital hub, they weren’t kidding. And the mobile phone companies weren’t listening. Instead of seeing the mobile phone as an extension of the desktop computer, they saw it as a stand alone device, precisely because they weren’t in the computer business. (It’s that well known business issue of knowing what business you’re really in.) If anything, Apple has the required expertise in this market as opposed to the fanciful notion that they are new and inexperienced in the monstrous wireless market.

The activation of the iPhone is an example of the kind of infrastructure that Apple has developed. We plug our iPods into a dock, sync our music and contacts, and update the software. The iPhone is just an iPod that makes phone calls, so it didn’t require a stroke of genius to see that the iPhone activation could be easy and painless with iTunes plus an Apple ID.

Putting key pieces into place until the whole becomes more than the sum of the parts has been an Apple theme for quite some time. We saw Sound Jam evolve into iTunes for ripping, then the iPod, then the iTunes Store. The rest of the industry has nothing to compare to this. Think about it. Every time you charge your iPhone, iTunes has the opportunity to check the software and install fixes and new features.

This elegant, evolving infrastructure should also scare the hell out of Apple’s competitors.

Mobile phone companies have been building wireless analogues to the traditional telephone. They have added features here and there, and have made token stabs at connecting users to the internet, but they were basically designing phones. Apple did something different: they gave us a device that is meant to serve as a conduit to our digital lives, to the entertainment and information we want with us all the time, the things that are relevant to us, that identify us as us. And, oh yeah… it also, if you’re interested, makes phone calls.

In creating this device, Apple not only outflanked the mobile phone makers, they blew the doors off the PDA makers in usability and integration. Finally, a mobile device has the kind of transparent layering of technology that many people crave. I want my movies, music, contacts, lists, reference sources, address book and the rest of my knowledge cloud available at all times, and I don’t want to think about how to find it, collect it, or access it.

This isn’t a phone. If you think that it’s a phone and you evaluate it on that basis, you will miss the bigger picture. This is a new kind of device, and it hints at a new way of thinking about and interacting with the digital world.

I’ve been saying it for a long time: the world is going mobile. It needs to. If information wants to be free, it wants to be free to move. Information shouldn’t just pop up through periodic wormholes; it should be with us anywhere we are.

The major promise of web-based applications is their availability cross-platform, cross-device, and cross-country. My personal contacts, email, bookmarks, calendar, photos, and even voice mail are all either exclusively kept in web-based services or are kept on my computer and mirrored into online services. I’ve gone this route because I want access to all that information at any time regardless of whether I’m in front of my computer or not. I want regular access to this information in order to ease the running of my life.

I’ve carried some sort of Palm PDA with me since 1997. In 2003, I bought a Treo 600, hoping to take advantage of its wireless internet connectivity. While the 600 is a great device in many respects, and was certainly a big step forward for smartphones, I have always been frustrated by the low fidelity of its mobile browsing. (And by AT&T’s outrageously expensive data plans.) When I could connect with the 600 (which wasn’t always), web sites could take a long time to load. And since I never knew if I was going over my alloted data plan, I often avoided using the browser so I wouldn’t have to pay overage charges.

But the 600 still fulfilled my desire for data portability. As long as I synchronized regularly with my computer, I always had my latest contact and calendar information handy. And even though it was clunky, email was at least accessible.

But here’s the thing: it’s not just my personal information that I want access to. What I really want is access to the vast store of information available on the web. When it’s 5:00 on a Friday and my wife and I want to go out to eat, I want the name and address of that restaurant I bookmarked in Menuism. I want to find out what movies are playing downtown. I want to know the name of the actress in Double Indemnity, and put that movie in my Netflix queue. I want driving directions to the Boeing Surplus Store. When I’m in Barnes & Noble, I want to look at my Amazon wish list to get the name of the book I read about on my favorite blog. I want to manage my Backpack to-do lists; what groceries did I need to buy, and where was I going to stop next time I’m in Fremont?

In other words, I’ve been using the tools of Web 2.0 to simplify and organize my life, and to improve my understanding of the world. But those tools are only really useful to me if I happen to be in front of a computer, or if I somehow wrestle the output onto the Treo or onto paper. If I do that, though, my data can rapidly get out of sync; it takes time and energy to reconcile all the bits again.

My buddy, Travis, hit the nail on the head recently on his Crap Monkey Podcast when he mentioned that he had three lives to maintain now: work life, home life, and online life. It shouldn’t be that way. Technology has got to start layering over our lives, enhancing our work and home lives instead of remaining separate; reducing complexity instead of adding it.

The iPod does this with audio. I carry my Nano around my neck, so it’s always available to me. My music and podcasts move with me, allowing me to effortlessly dip into that well whenever I want. The promise of the iPhone is that it will do for information what the iPod does for audio.

After less than a day of use, I can tell you that this first-generation iPhone isn’t perfect. But it is very, very well done, and in many ways it is an astonishingly long jump forward for mobile technology. Whether it actually turns out to be the device of my dreams, the one that actually helps simplify and enhance my first two lives remains to be seen. But so far, it looks to me as if the iPhone lives up to the hype.

Here are some thoughts and impressions from my first 18 hours with my new best friend:

Surprises & pleasures

• The screen is gorgeous. Oh my god. I mean… GORGEOUS! (Did I mention it was gorgeous?)
• Apple has a knack for making incredibly intuitive and useful user interfaces. As I’ve been exploring all the nooks and crannies of the phone, I keep muttering, “Nice!” “Oh, very nice.” “I wonder if it… yeah, it does. Nice.”
• I’m surprised at how much I like watching videos on the iPhone. I really didn’t get the appeal of the video iPod, but now I do. I think I’ll end up using this a lot while I’m traveling, and I’ll probably watch all my video podcasts this way.
• Touch screen typing is a non-issue, at least for me. Someone with larger fingers might have a different feeling on the subject.
• AT&T finally got the data plan pricing right. $20 for unlimited web and email, and 200 SMS messages. My bill will actually go down this month!
• I’ve read about varying experiences at AT&T stores across the country, but the crew at Pacific Place in Seattle were phenomenal. Jerry and Trish worked the line to let us know what we could expect, folks who needed credit checks were taken care of before 4:30, the door greeters looked me in the eye, asked my name, and shook my hand… everything was done exceedingly well. I was about #80 in line at 6:00 when the phones went on sale and walked out of the store with my iPhone at about 7:10.
• Despite an interface hiccup, the activation went brilliantly. Apple really did things right with this rollout.
• I can bookmark web pages using the del.icio.us bookmarklet. Woo-hoo!

Disappointments & kvetches

• As far as I can tell, you can’t copy and paste text. That seems to me to be a glaring oversight.
• I have really gotten used to carrying my iPod Nano around my neck using the headphone/carrying cord. I’d love to have something like that for the iPhone, rather than carrying the headphones separately.
• The thing I’ll really miss about my Treo is SplashID, which I use to manage usernames and passwords to my hundreds of online accounts. I don’t know how I’m going to function without that program.
• I REALLY wish the period and comma keys were on the same page as all the letters.
• On the Palm, I can drop documents into a folder to read on the device. The only way I can figure to do something similar on the iPhone is to email them to myself and read them through my Gmail account. Why couldn’t I have a docs/notes folder synchronized through iTunes?
• Web sites that use Ajax have limited functionality on the iPhone, because you can’t hover over text. So, for example, I can add to lists and check off items in Backpack, but I can’t edit or trash an item because those options only appear when I hover the mouse over the text.