It’s been an interesting week using the iPhone. I’ve become more proficient at typing with it, and even picked up a couple of tricks where sliding your finger around on the iPhone keyboard saves you a couple of key presses. However, its flaws as a suitable device for the deaf have become more apparent. Read on to learn more.

Yahoo! Mail doesn’t have any problem pushing my forwarded pager email to my iPhone on a timely basis. However, some users have been reporting that Yahoo! push mail doesn’t work reliably, so they use Google’s Gmail to guarantee getting email every 15 minutes. You can have the best of both worlds if you forward your Gmail to your Yahoo! Mail account. You’ll get a first notification (hopefully) via push, then a second notification via Gmail scheduled download (up to 15 minutes later). This could be one way to work around the single vibration notification issue. I love my Treo’s Chatteremail program - I set it to vibrate eight times when a new email is pushed in, then if I don’t check email right away, it will continue to vibrate once every 30 seconds to remind me. Hopefully the iPhone team will take this into account.

Instant messaging is getting easier to access on the iPhone, even though there is still no public word on if there will be an official iPhone iChat client. Meebo is now more iPhone friendly, but I don’t like their interface, it’s still too desktop-centric for me, having to scroll around to visit the different chats in different windows on the Meebo webpage. Someone else has posted an alternative iPhone-friendly web interface to IM, and there is a live “alpha” of BeeJive’s JiveTalk Messenger, which is probably the best web IM interface for the iPhone that I’ve seen yet, but the fact still remains - no vibration to let you know a new incoming IM has arrived. You also lose your connection when you surf away from those sites in Safari, or open another window.

I posted earlier about forwarding your AIM screen name to your iPhone number via SMS, but this only allows people to contact you, because you won’t have access to your buddy list. If you want access to your buddy list and contact people, you will need to log into AIM directly via SMS. You can do the same thing with Yahoo! Messenger (YIM), and because YIM is now compatible with MSN, you can talk with both YIM and MSN buddies via SMS too. This is extremely convenient, and you will get vibrates on incoming IM’s, but it will eat up your SMS quota real fast unless you have unlimited SMS on your plan.

The iPhone is still reported to be ineligible (either Apple’s fault, or AT&T’s fault, depending on who you speak with) for AT&T’s $30 Text Accessibility Plan, despite some people claiming they were able to get their iPhone plan switched to the AT&T TAP. The best bet is to either wait it out until Apple & AT&T decide to give in to the masses of deaf people complaining for equal access for their iPhone! Check out the above link to DeafMac.org for more information and a sample letter. You might also want to wait and see if the people at Hackint0sh are able to unlock the iPhone, and hopefully use a T-Mobile sim card for $30/mo. They are currently able to activate the iPhone without an AT&T plan, using it as a Wi-Fi iPod of sorts, and have enabled write access to the iPhone. We shall see if their quest is successful.

A couple of other things - I had a colleague who hears quite well with hearing aids use the iPhone, and they reported that they were able to hear very clearly without any static while making a voice call. However, since the iPhone isn’t hearing aid rated - your experience with the iPhone may vary. The iPhone may not be a very friendly device if you have long fingernails, like some of those lovely ladies out there enjoy - typing was reported to be difficult with long nails, but a female blogger reported it wasn’t all that bad. However, her nails were shorter than the lady who tried typing on my iPhone. Maybe it just takes time and practice? I’m a Treo user, and I enjoyed this Treo power user’s take on the iPhone, and have to agree with him regarding the crashing. I’ve had the iPhone crash or choke a lot lately.

I’ll be back one last time with one more article wrapping up my iPhone experience, before I return it to Apple. If you have any specific questions you want answered, now is the time to ask!