This article was submitted on 9/4/07 to be published in the 9/13/07 issue (for Frank Sisco's "iPhone Tapper" column not Frank Sisco's "Life and Money"column) of the 9 newspapers of the Rising Publications (formerly Martinelli Publications) in Westchester County, NY including The Westchester Crusader, The Rye Chronicle, The Eastchester Record, The Pelham Sun, The Sound View News, Home News & Times, The Mt. Vernon Independent, Harrison Independent, and North Castle News.

Written by:

Frank Sisco, 30 Mill Road, New Rochelle, NY 10804

Home office - 914.740.4422, Cell - 914.740.4422; Email – ideasmoney@aol.com

www.iphonetapper.com

"iPhone Tapper - Getting Started"

By Frank Sisco, CPA, PFS

(Word count = 1,688 words plus 56 words for About the Author)

New column every other week:

A person who uses an iPhone is not just a "user." That sounds much too clinical, too regimented, too boring. Instead that person, like me, is an iPhone "tapper." It's not just because it is by tapping on the multi-touch screen how I interact with the amazing device that, with its extreme ease-of-use features, combines (1) a cell phone, (2) an ipod for music, photos and videos and (3) a device being the full internet in your hand. No the real reasons are these. First, using the iPhone is so much simpler than ordinary cell phones and personal digital assistants that you feel like a "tap dancer" moving freely, lightly and in rhythm with the rest of the world, adding your own sound to the music around you. The second reason is when you tap on the iPhone you are "tapping" into an extraordinary wealth of communications and data that is destined to affect your life significantly.

If you haven't bought the iPhone yet, you may want to clip this column for when you do. Apple Inc. and many experts predict that over ten million people will be buying the iPhone by the end of 2008. I think the iPhone success wiill be huge as the very positive word-of-mouth spreads about not only its amazing easy-to-use features and versatility, but also how people creatively use the iPhone to make their lives simpler, richer in more frequent and deeper communications, and even more profitable in the myriad business applications. Talk to iPhone Tappers and you'll get a feel.

This column will appear in these newspapers every other week and provide a wide variety of information about the iPhone to help both Tappers (users) and prospective buyers. Importantly, the column will also provide readers with a perspective on how technology and new products and services get assimilated into and then change lives, through the prism of seeing how the iPhone affects my life over the next several months. In addition, the column will cover related news events, answers to readers' questions, testimonials from other users, efficient ways to use certain features, excerpts from reviews, and so on. To get some background, you may want to visit www.iPhoneTapper.com and read my prior two columns, including "The You in iPhone" (published in Rising Publications on 7/12/2007) and ""The iPhone - Tool and Toy" (8/23/2007). In addition to future columns, the website will contain a blog into which you can enter your own experiences, comment on the columns, and pose questions to me or to the online community.

How I got started:

Don't follow the usual advice of waiting six month to a year after the introduction of a product before buying it so that the many bugs will then be worked out. I think if you can afford $600 for the 8 gig iPhone now, don't wait. Get it now so that you can experience the many benefits of being an early adopter such as (1) the excitement of being on the leading edge (2) the feeling of belonging to a special group who may be advising throngs of others as they come aboard later and (3) creating interesting uses for the iPhone, perhaps reaping financial rewards. For me, visiting the Apple Store in midtown Manhattan ignited my enthusiasm leading me to buy it, as per the videoclip on www.iPhoneTapper.com. When I bought the iPhone I also bought certain accessories I think are important, including an open-front case (made of leather and spandex) that I keep the iPhone in, strapped to my left forearm (as opposed to strapped to my bicep) for cushioned safety in case it fell and for the convenience of my being able to immediately tap on the iPhone with my right fingers when I hear it ring or buzz for phone calls or emails, instead of reaching into a pocket, pocketbook or brief bag for it. Once I'm connected, I then remove the phone from my forearm if I want to use both hands to type on its virtual keyboard. By the way, the following videoclip on the Apple.com website shows how simple and fast typing is on the virtual keyboard due to technological advances, including intuition. http://www.apple.com/iphone/usingiphone/keyboard.html

Also, worth buying are a hard plastic screen protector, a car charger/adaptor to recharge while driving, and an adapter to make it possible for two headphones to be plugged in at the same time. Perhaps a blue-tooth, too, to be more hands-free.

When you bring your bundle home, you can activate your ATT service online through www.apple.com/iphone webpages. There's no need to stand in line at a cellphone store. Before I did the activation, I contacted Verizon and terminated the service for my Verizon phone and transferred the main account from my name to my wife's name, with my daughter, as another user, so that there would be no inadvertent termination of their accounts when I transferred my cell phone number from Verizon to ATT. The next evening I set aside one hour for a preliminary review of the information and tutorial videoclips on www.apple.com to familiarize myself with the features. I researched available guidebooks online and bought the very well-organized and beautifully illustrated guidebook called "iPhone - The Missing Manual" by David Pogue, an expert, personal technology columnist for many years for The New York Times, and best-selling author of several books on computers, software and devices. I found the book to be a treasure trove of how-to tips and time-saving ideas. Then, to start using the iPhone the next day, I learned the iPhone's basic features and then I synced by Macintosh laptop to my iPhone so that I was able to copy all my selected songs, photos and videos from my Mac to my iPhone, effortlessly. A few days later I synced all my key contacts from my database on my Mac to my iPhone. The easy syncing enables you to record changes on either device and update the other by simply connecting the two via USB and from your computer accessing a few commands in the iTunes software. Another unique time-saving feature is the virtual voicemail. It is a major improvement over the usual audio-only voicemail so you don't have to slog through all the recorded messages to hear the one you want. Instead the visual voicemail is a list of numbers (and names if they are on your contact list) for you to speedily "flick" through.

To augment my learning phase, I signed up on apple.com for a free one-hour workshop on a Saturday afternoon at the Apple store in White Plains, NY. Many of my questions were quickly answered by the friendly Apple staff and I was shown steps to streamline my using the iPhone. While I was there, I bought a few more accessories mentioned above. I found out that Apple offers for $100 a package of workshops that can be taken as often as once-weekly during the upcoming twelve months. It's a great value (about $2 per hour) and I may sign up.

When you buy your iPhone, you should call Apple iPhone Support at 800.694.7466 and enroll in AppleCare, which for only $69 extends the one-year warranty for an additional year to repair or replace your iPhone in case of an Apple defect, to cover related shipping and handling for repairs, and to allow you unlimited 24-hour customer service and technical support, whom I've found to be quite knowledgeable, courteous and eager to help.

Question from an iPhone Tapper:

When I use the internet feature and look at my own website and some others, I'm not able to see various videos, including Quicktime videos. Also, I can see some youtube videos and not others? What's up?

Answer from Frank - Unfortunately, regular Quicktime videoclips with the suffix mov are not compatible with the iPhone, at least not yet. The clips can be converted to an acceptable format like MPEG-4 (that show up with the suffix m4v or h.264 which I understand are videos from the itunes store. I was told on 9/4/07 by Ashley in Nova Scotia when I called the AppleCare tech support that in the near future, Apple would be expanding greatly the number of preformatted youtube videos that will be viewable from the present modest level of about 10,000.

In the News:

The iPhone may be seeing some competition, according to a New York Times article on 9/3/07 (page C5) that discussed possible new phones from Google, Microsoft and Sony Ericsson. Regarding a recent issue of battery life, "PC World" magazine (September 2007 issue) stated "The iPhone's rechargeable lithium ion battery lasted the maximum 10 hours in our talk-time tests, running 2 hours longer than Apple's own stated call time" however lasted only 4 hours and 21 minutes when viewing a movie. The article contains the results of a detailed review of the iPhone, compared it to four other PDA phones, and did not rank it as well as others, primarily due to the higher price despite the superior design score. Personally, I felt their article was very complimentary about the iPhone's many outstanding features and I was surprised by their lowering of their overall assessment due to the high price and a few annoyances.

Tip using "Favorites":

You can use the "Favorites" function to set up "to call / todo " type lists. When I was editing a few of my contacts, I realized I could adapt the "Favorites" star key for my contacts. I looked down my bright easy-to-read list of a 100-plus contacts, and tapped on the eleven people I wanted to call the next day, and designated each of them as a favorite. Voila, I tapped my Favorites star key and there's my list of eleven people to call. Then I just tap on each one to call them, and then remove them from the list after we speak. For those I leave a message, I "grab" their name on the favorites list and slide them to the bottom of the list. Very neat way to handle calls-in-process. Tomorrow, I'll add my people-to-email on this list too.

About the author:

Frank Sisco is a businessman who loves finding ways to enhance life through personal technology, and writing about it. You can contact Frank by email at ideasmoney@aol.com or by phone at 914.589.1013 in order to express your opinion or send in questions, comments, or videoclips. He resides in New Rochelle, NY with his wife and daughter.