iphone: do not buy [yet]

what is a designer blog without the mandatory entry on the iphone? well here's mine, and i'll make it short: do not buy yet.

the iphone is an amazing leap in interface design, but there are some drawbacks no fault of apple: ATT super sucks. the edge network is painfully slow and their billing practices need to be investigated by the authorities. i read all the new york times articles about getting $1,000 iphone bills when traveling abroad so i called ATT BEFORE my trip to sign up for the international data AND voice roaming plans [i'm tech-savvy and turned off the international data roaming whenever i was in a wifi hotspot as well] -- i still got an $1,000 bill!! [no BS, will post a scan of the 2 bills here soon]. calls to ATT only confused the matter as they tried to explain that they bill present and next month in advance [is this legal?]. my sense is that they bill the data transfer even when on wifi as i was very careful not to use my fone much the month i was traveling.

only buy the iphone when the following things happen without unauthorized hacks:
VOIP is available,
IM [not just iChat] is standard,
available unlocked,
edge is upgraded to acceptable speeds,
or if you have shitloads of money or never plan to use your iphone overseas.

a ping from pingmag japan

a couple of weeks ago i did an interview for ping magazine in japanese. the edited version of that interview was uploaded yesterday. since the interview was conducted in japanese i assumed it would only go up that way, but an english version was prepared. surprisingly, it's a pretty good translation! there were a few emails back and forth to clarify my responses, no doubt because japanese is not my native language, so it was weird that i never got a draft of the translation to check....

anyway, the english version is here. japanese version here. thank you chiemi!