Thanks to grateful client and a user of some of my applications. this week I got both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Even though I love high tech stuff, I've never been a big cell phone guy. I spend most of my time at home, so cell phones just don't do a lot for me. But I spent a lot of time traveling this year and I'm definitely using my cell more. When the iPhone came in on Thursday, I plugged it in. iTunes launched and the set up process began. Now I was already an ATT customer so it may have been easier for me, but I have to say, the setup was the absolute coolest thing I've seen in a long time. I basically entered my phone number, answered a few questions, and five minutes later it was done. My Razor reported that it was unregistered and my iPhone was working - all with my old number. I had no idea it worked that easily. (Again though - I assume it isn't quite as easy if you don't have ATT already.)

After being impressed by that - I was then a bit surprised by some of the choices Apple made for working with the phone. You can't drag music or pictures to it. You have to sync playlists or photo albums. That's just plain silly. I'm not a big playlist guy. If I want to play a Britney Spears album, I'm not going to make a playlist, I'll just find her in the library. I've heard rumors the next update will improve this, but again I was pretty surprised.

Once you get your media on the phone though, it looks beautiful. I filled mine with pics of the kids which lets me show them off when I travel. I've copied one video so far (Superman - Doomsday), and the quality is perfect, except a bit quiet. (But that may be more my DVD rip then anything else.)

I've played less with the iPod Touch, but it's pretty much the same. The iPod Touch though lets you copy individual songs (didn't try pictures). It also seems a bit thinner, which makes sense.

And no - I haven't tried to jail break either of them. While I'm tempted to - I'm just too much of a wimp to do so. About the only 'hack' I'm considering is the ring tone hack, which from what I saw is just a file rename, no firmware munging.