For the past few weeks we’ve had a lot of static & interference on our home phone line … it doesn’t effect the Vonage line, so I figured it was coming from outside the house.

Well, it turns out the ‘NID Splitter’ we have in the phone box is giving out.   A NID Splitter is a device that plugs into the Network Interface Device that acts as a DSL filter for all the inside phone wiring.  A NID is the box where the telephone companies wiring interfaces with the house wiring.  Everything on the ‘Customer’ side of the NID is is your responsibility, anything on the other side of the NID is the telephone companies responsiblity.

It’s called a NID Splitter because it lets you split the phone line signal into two parts … one part that goes directly to the DSL modem, and the other half that goes to the house phone wiring.  The NID Splitter filters out the voice data on the phone line so it doesn’t interfere with the DSL signal.

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It’s been more than a year since we got the original iPhones … so when Apple announced the new hardware version for the iPhone, I figured it was probably worth getting.  The new version has a lot of features that I wanted … and, frankly, thought should have been in the first version.

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We bit the bullet … we got iPhones.  Our Verizon cell phone contract has been up for quite a while and they’ve been bugging us to re-up for a new two year contract … but I haven’t been super happy with the service and phones, so we started thinking about what other provider and phone’s would be a suitable substitute.

My co-worker Jerome has the iPhone and is very happy to show it off.  Even on the first release I have to admit, it was pretty cool.  The interface was nice, the features were nice, and the sound quality wasn’t bad at all.

The only things I really didn’t like at the get go was the fact that you were tied to AT&T and the battery wasn’t replaceable.

After mulling our alternatives, we decided to go for it.  Both Ginny and I got the 8gb  model.  We were originally thinking about the 16gb model, but the Apple store didn’t have any in stock and we figured, since we only used a fraction of our 4gb iPods, it wasn’t that big a deal.

A few observations …

1. It doesn’t like the fact that I use self signed certs on my mail server.  I’ll probably have to bite the bullet and get a proper cert.
2. I haven’t found any ability to select which folders I show in my IMAP mail account.  Wish I could, as I really only care about a handful on an ongoing basis.
3. One feature that’s missing, and was almost a deal breaker, was the lack of voice command dialing.  On my old moto phone I could just tell it “Call James Rich Mobile” and it would call James Rich’s cell phone (in my address book).  Nice for talking while driving.
4. As one would expect from an Apple product, the user interface is slick.  The screen is a bit over sensitive though.  I suspect it’s just something to get used to.
5. The pseudo GPS functionality is very cool … I really want to figure out how they do it, because it was able to figure out where was I better than my GPS can.
6. Porting of both the phone numbers on my Verizon account was smooth and fast.  It only took 30 minutes to complete.  I’m going to verify that Verizon cancels my account just in case.

One annoyance, unrelated to the iPhone itself, was the fact that it seems kind of hard to find accessories at stores that don’t actually sell the iPhone.  Woodfield mall, and the Apple store, were both very crowded … and both Ginny and I were in a hurry to escape (yeah, so we could play with the new toys) … so we skipped getting protective skins for the new phones.  We stopped at Best Buy on the way home, but they only had 2 or 3 skins & cases for the iPhone.  I’ll probably stop at Frys on my way home tomorrow to pick something up.

I’m kind of interested to see what the SDK is all about … I’ve got some ideas for apps that could be  fun.