I've been trying to use Voice Control on my iPhone and thought that it totally sucked. I'd say stuff like "play Crystal Method" and it would get it right about one time out of five. In some cases it would call somebody... awful.

And then I watched the iPhone commercial on TV and noticed that the phraseology is very specific. You can't say "play Crystal Method", you have to say "play songs by Crystal Method." Apple tried to make this obvious by having Voice Control show you these phrases in a scrolling background, but I'm too stupid to do something complicated like read.

And once you use the right phrases - damn. I read it a phone number using the "dial" command, and it picked up every digit perfectly.

Nice job, Apple.

I'm sitting here in bed listening to The Crytal Method's "Tweekend" and typing a blog post on my iPhone, something that would have been totally undoable on the Blackjack that I had before. I'm going to write up a post on my top favorite idiotic behaviors on the Blackjack another time, but for now, suffice to say that it suffers from some of the worst usability issues of any phone I have ever owned.

iPhone FTW. It took a long time for the planets to align properly for it to make sense for me to own one, so forgive me if I'm late to the party, but so far it definitely seems to have been worth the wait. Anecdotally, the keyboard on the 3GS seems to get my typing better than Jessica's old 3G did...

More thoughts to come as I get more familiar with my new digital friend.