Tempted to get the iphone (pc guy though) and have a few questions

[DaffyDuck]

Someone above said that itunes downsizes and compresses images for the iPhone. I believe that is not correct. In fact, I think it stores images as downsized but uncompressed bitmaps so that they respond much faster in the photo viewing app. I copied a couple thousand photos onto the phone and they should have only taken a few hundred megabytes of space. Well, they took up 1.5 GB (you read that right). I'm currently looking for evidence to prove this.

BTW, I'm also an amateur photographer and I wish images could be stored as full size jpegs on the iPhone.

EDIT:

I found the photos on the iPhone stored in /private/var/mobile/Media/Photos/Thumbs

I calculate each photo is taking an average of 640KB. If they were in fact downsized and compressed, they would be taking up much less space.

 

[westernmass]

Another photographer here. I love this feature to have pictures right at my fingure tips. I have a website I share photos with family and friends. This makes it so much easier then saying check the site. Or even better for parties and people want to see the pictures of the kids. The images look very good on the phone. I have more photos then songs

 

[G4R2]

Someone above said that itunes downsizes and compresses images for the iPhone. I believe that is not correct. In fact, I think it stores images as downsized but uncompressed bitmaps so that they respond much faster in the photo viewing app. I copied a couple thousand photos onto the phone and they should have only taken a few hundred megabytes of space. Well, they took up 1.5 GB (you read that right). I'm currently looking for evidence to prove this.

BTW, I'm also an amateur photographer and I wish images could be stored as full size jpegs on the iPhone.

EDIT:

I found the photos on the iPhone stored in /private/var/mobile/Media/Photos/Thumbs

I calculate each photo is taking an average of 640KB. If they were in fact downsized and compressed, they would be taking up much less space.

That's unfortunately true. iPods and the iPhone reformat images into .thmb files. This would be fine but for the fact that when image files are converted into this format they usually lose image quality as well so when you zoom in they become pixelated and blurry.

 

[Consultant]

Yes, you do have to use iTunes. And it doesn't support WMA

iTunes can convert WMA files into AAC or Mp3 (no DRM files for obvious reasons)
http://www.apple.com/itunes/hottips/#convertingwma

By the way, independent tests all concluded that music encoded with WMA is INFERIOR or similar to mp3 quality, while AAC (mp4) is a better quality format that is 10 years newer than mp3.

 

[Surely]

I believe that with AT&T the family plans work like this...

$70/month for family plan (includes 2 lines/ 700 minute plan) (+ activation $36 for 1st line, $26 for 2nd)
$10/month for third line (+ $26 activation fee)

So your bill every month would be $80+ taxes/fees for all three phone lines.

When you sign up you could get 3 free phones, then you would just buy the iPhone and activate it for your line ($20/month extra for data). The other two lines would use their free phones, but this would give you an extra phone incase you need to downgrade for some reason or one of the other free phones gets damaged. It does not cost you any more to do it this way than if you just got two free phones and our iPhone.

So you would end up paying $100/month for three lines and your unlimited data.

Is there an activation fee for the iPhone as well? Because, doing it this way, you would be paying for 2 activation fees: one for the 1st phone (which will be sitting in a drawer) and one for the iPhone.

I was going to post a thread with a similar question last night. I'm glad I didn't, I found my answers here.

We're moving to Los Angeles, and we want to get a family plan with 2 phones- one regular phone (my wife still likes her unlocked Sony Ericsson W810i), and one iPhone (for me!). I couldn't figure out how to go about doing it, since the iPhone activation is through iTunes, and I wasn't sure if there was a way to link up with another non-iPhone phone number to form a Family Plan.

 

[DaffyDuck]

That's unfortunately true. iPods and the iPhone reformat images into .thmb files. This would be fine but for the fact that when image files are converted into this format they usually lose image quality as well so when you zoom in they become pixelated and blurry.

It's blurry not because of the format but because it has been downsized. Take an image and downsize the long side down to about 480 pixels. Save as a TIFF (uncompressed) and it takes up about 500KB. That's close to what I estimated above. Zoom into it and you'll quickly see loss of detail. The thumb file is simply a container for the bitmap images.