Mc-Kenna.com

A simple statement for you: unless you have AT&T stock, don’t take your iPhone with you when you go abroad. If, for some crazy reason you decide you moost haf eet, at least do yourself a favor and:

• disable data roaming
• disable 3G

You may also want to enable Airplane mode, just to be sure.

I say the above after having returned from two weeks in Ireland. Before we left we signed up for the 20mb international data plan and international roaming. What we didn’t do was:

• sign up for the 30mb data plan
• sign up for the international calling plan

I believe if we’d signed up for these two we’d probably saved about $100 off the $350 bill that followed soon after our return, but quite possibly not that much.

Some details have been made available by The University of Washington on how to develop web applications for iPhone - lots of basics in there, like keeping a good separation of HTML and CSS, but also some specifics on e.g. the screen width, some limitations in place, etc. Mandatory reading for anyone doing iPhone apps.

UPDATE: Apparently someone didn’t like the info being posted publically, so someone posted a copy of the iPhone details elsewhere.

Any recommendation on which of the above phone to get? Our current carrier has them pretty cheap as refubs (I could get one for free by moving carrier, but that itself is complicated) and they’re both tempting. The requirements I have are:

• camera higher than VGA, preferably 2mp or more
• PDA functionality - calendar, tasks, etc,
• MP3 playback
• Video playback of some sort

Things I don’t need are:

• Exclusive music or video deals - I’ll supply my own, thanks.
• 3G service, again the fancy stuff will copied over via USB first, I can cope with that.
• Email - see above.

They’ll both be set up to sync with our Mac at home, and thankfully there’s lots of great software to do that, all of which seems to be written by MarkSpace.

So has anyone tried these, and if so which did you prefer?

UPDATE: They’ve sold out of the Blackjack. :-(