Big news: I finally bought an iPhone

My digital life will never be the same. My 3G iPhone is my new best friend. I take it everywhere, of course.

I blogged about my experience with the iPhone over at the Consuming Interests blog at BaltimoreSun.com.

The only downside to it is that it doesn't support Flash video and you can't record video with it. But in all other respects, it is an extremely powerful device for communicating and for surfing the Web. It also has very strong GPS capabilities, and Apple's App Store offers a huge array of applications, many for free.

One little app I found, which I think people who work in media will greatly appreciate, is called 12seconds.tv. The app allows you to take three pictures with your iPhone and then record a 12-second audio track as a narration. As a reporter, I find this to be an excellent little app because it packages a couple of technical steps together (shooting pics, assembling them into a little 3-shot gallery, and automatically embedding your audio narration) into a relatively fluid and dummy-proof process.

I hope to try it out during breaking news incidents. :-)

UPDATE: Here's a sample of what I did with it at a press conference on Jan. 8th. I had a couple issues with it, which is good to discover in field-testing for stories where there isn't a lot of breaking news pressure. One prob: the audio I recorded sounded fine when I did it, but after I uploaded the 12 sec clip to the website, it apparently clipped it by about 1.5 seconds at the end. Not sure why.


[iPhone] Maryland Mortgage foreclosure scam alert on 12seconds.tv