Some iPhone tips...

After having played with the iPhone for a few days now, I have found several handy tips that I'd like to share:

Cheap International Calls

When on the go, I have been using a 'virtual calling-card' service called PennyTalk for my international calls. Calls to countries like Germany and Norway are usually just a 2-3 cents a minute, which is a fraction of what AT&T would charge you, even with an international calling plan.

On of the caveats is of course that you have to first dial the PennyTalk number and when prompted  the number you actually want to reach. However, with the iPhone, I found that by using commas after the PennyTalk number it makes enough of a pause to wait for the prompt and then dial the final number automatically. When showing the contact card the phone number looks something like "1 877 736 6925 ,, 011 47 907 21 745". Notice the double comma here which adds twice the "pause". 

With this setup I can pretty much call anyone in the world for just pennies a minute. And there are no obnoxious menus to deal with! I wonder if AT&T knows about this? ssshhh....

So how did I get those commas in there? Well, I actually had to enter them in the Mac OS X Address Book application since the regular telephone keypad on the iPhone did not have a way to enter commas. But after a short sync all those cheap numbers are ready to go!

Number port from a different city

I wanted to keep my current Verizon number that I got back in Chicago when studying there. However, since I entered my new address in California during the iTunes registration process my activation got hung up and I actually wasted 12 hours because of it. When AT&T finally deleted my initial registration I registered again through iTunes, this time with my old address, and my phone was activated in 3 minutes!

So when porting your number, make sure to register with your old address that originally registered the phone number at.

Control your Mac

Wouldn't it be cool if you could control just about anything on your Mac from your iPhone? We'll apparently a couple of guys had the same idea and did something about it! They started an open source project named telekinesis, or more marketing friendly: the iPhone Remote.

It's just a small application that will enable anything from VNC, media playback, file browser, terminal access, iSight views and a bunch of other stuff. Even through your firewall if you set up port forwarding correct (hint: port 5010 and 5012)

So there you have it, three simple tips. Now let me hear yours. Add them to the comments or email me so I can post them here! What? You don't have an iPhone yet? What are you waiting for?