Well, my first weekend was enough to convince me I liked this thing. But, as I said in a previous comment, I am in no way enamored with the device Apple sold me — I love what I turned it into.

What Apple sold me I had to use on AT&T (a carrier I would not use), I had to sign a new cellphone contract (no thank you), I could install no applications (WTF? There’s no task list on a iPhone), and I had to pay for the privilege of hearing a song I own as a ringtone.

What I turned it into is a device I can use on any GSM carrier — I’m quite happy with T-Mobile, thank you — and is riddled with applications (admittedly, ranging from useful to trivial to useless), and plays a jaunty tune from Brak whenever my wife phones me.

The AppTapp installer provides a great number of utilities and programs. Here’s a short list of my favorites:

  • Community Sources, BSD Subsystem, and OpenSSH — obvious. I had to use these to unlock the thing.
  • MobileChat — There are a couple of IM clients, and I’m using this for now. But Apollo should soon have libpurple ported, which gets it the ability to use more than just AIM. At that point, I switch.
  • SendSong — lets you e-mail any music on your iPhone, but even better lets you set anything as a ringtone. It’s trivial, but the mere fact that they want me to pay to do this makes me want to do it for free even more!
  • Sumbler — Always nice to have a WiFi network finder at your disposal.
  • Mobile ToDo List — Gots to have my task list.
  • SummerBoard — Springboard (the iPhone’s desktop application) replacement that lets you customize things a great deal. The ability to scroll the application list is crucial if you’re installing applications.
  • UIctl — GUI for LaunchAgent that lets you manage services. This is how I turned off sshd without removing the OpenSSH package.
  • Five Dice — Yahtzee. Prior version was buggy, but 0.8.0b is much more stable.
  • Lights Off — A nice diversion

The lukewarm list:

  • iFlickr — has potential, but I don’t like that as soon as I snap a picture it’s uploaded to Flickr.
  • Term-vt100 — minimally functional, but the terminal emulation is horrific. It also seems to be using a proportional font, which leads to an interesting display.
  • MobileTetris — Enh. This phone doesn’t have enough buttons to pull this off. The screen controls are not the best, and it’s pretty buggy.
  • iPowerHour — Huh? Why would I want 60 second snippets of my music played for an hour?

All in all, I’m generally very pleased with the phone. It’s doing what I need it to do, and doing it well. The last puzzle piece I think I need is to get it to act as a modem for my laptop. That can come in tremendously handy when you have a wireless data signal but no WiFi. This guide looks reasonable, and I’m going to give it a shot soon.