Recently, I’ve found I can’t exactly rely on 3G or wireless when out or about. However, sometimes email is the only way someone can contact you about that urgent appointment or coffee date, and what’s more modern than email? Twitter DMs.

Thanks to O2 and Gmail filters, you can get urgent messages SMSed to your phone, a trick I first heard about with Beejive IM (a mobile IM client that can stay connected when not running, and email you). Simply text ‘on’ to 212, and your email-to-phone address of <yourphonenumber>@mmail.co.uk will magically work. Set up Gmail filters to forward direct messages, email from certain people or matching certain labels/keywords, etc: your imagination is the limit.

A word of warning, though. Firstly, the SMSes aren’t free. According to my bill they’re 8.5p each (I’m not sure if that’s pre-VAT; it probably is). A small price to pay if you know you’re getting urgent notifications, but if you’ve succumbed to the auto-DM spam (“Hello, thanks for following, check out my ebook!”) then your inbox will be full of fluff in no time. Also, you only get a few characters of the message after headers, mostly enough to make you decide whether to check your email or not: you need to send additional SMS messages for the rest, and it all adds up.

Idyllic retreat, or boredom incarnate? Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.

You would easily be forgiven for thinking the iPhone was a paragon of technical perfection, the answer to all of our prayers and so forth. Certainly I would warrant that a quick Internet trawl would throw up many articles praising the iPhone as Steve Jobs’ Second Coming, and more or less establishing it as the de-facto web 2.0 geek’s mobile phone of choice. But in amongst such positivity, how do we find the negative? You guessed it, that’s one of the problems I’m trying to solve.

Sometimes it’s as easy as adding the word ’sucks’ to your Googling. And yet an article like this MobileCrunch rundown of ‘8 things that we still can’t stand about the iPhone‘ is full of negative language without using too many explicitly laden adjectives, while also being very specific, constructive and useful. The comments thread is a goldmine for anyone looking to make a better iPhone, so it’s not just Apple that should be paying attention, but its competitors too.

My point here is that although things seem black-and-white when you’re trying to pull out the negativity surrounding a product, often really valuable content can be hard to find manually, whereas a sophisticated natural-language algorithm that weighted several factors would identify the above article as being fairly key to the negative sentiment around the iPhone yesterday and today. Such as, I don’t know, the one I’m developing.

As a side note, most of the poster’s concerns about the iPhone are pretty valid, and as commenters immediately identify, lack of copy and paste is a big problem too. To be frank, though, only two of the problems really affect me – no SMS counter, and no email search. Due to being Twitter-trained, 160 character messages are a luxury, and Gmail offers a web interface for when I need to search — sometimes we train ourselves to work around the device’s faults, rather than expecting the device to work for us.

After carefully adding more Gmail filters to make sure it didn’t go off all the time, the regular email-checking is definitely useful, although processing a large amount of email can get quite unwieldy and I leave the bulk of the work to do while at my desktop. The ability to go for a walk, get completely lost and then pull out the iPhone to see a handy dot on the map is pretty amazing; I know it’s not exactly new and unique, but last time I got lost with nowt but a mobile phone on me, it took me about twenty minutes and half my battery to figure out where I meant to be. I look forward to trying the maps and GPS function out in less familiar territory.

One important factor for me is that I feel comfortable using it in public in a way I never did squinting at my Nokia. I’m somehow quite happy to pull up a web browser in a shop and quickly check the online price of something, or grab the web page I was viewing at home for final confirmation of my destination. This doesn’t always work, mind, as some sites redirect you to their mobile versions when the phone could cope perfectly well with the full thing…

There’s a lot of play potential too; I’ve been messing around a bit with a photo-editing application, making music, taking part in a RPG and catching up on some TV shows in bed. I’ve been Twittering and checking Facebook via their custom apps, and recently installed the extremely dangerous eBay application, which I can use to spend even more money. From a consumer point of view, that’s a downside to the micropayment approach the iTunes store offers — it’s oh-so-easy to blow much more money than you intended simply because it’s taken off in smaller chunks. Apple and the developers are laughing, though.

It’s going to be interesting coping abroad without this permanent wire into the ‘net; thank goodness for free wi-fi, something my N95 never really got the hang of. Already I can find myself thinking about things with the iPhone in mind when I’m out and about, whether it’s wondering whether to twitter an event or photographing a funny sign. It’s easier to keep track of things that I might use for inspiration or work later, as I can note them down, take a photo and so on, and I’m still investigating more productivity-based apps (they aren’t necessarily the top 10, but I’m trying an expense tracker that might prove invaluable). 

Buying the iPhone was definitely a purchase decision I commend myself for, although since my old phone was unreliable with slow and expensive Internet access, the leap is predictable; however, I daresay I would have done it even if I’d had a decent phone and provider.

As a recent convert to the iPhone lifestyle, one of the first things I did was jump online and look for some funky applications to install. Having seen mentions of a myriad different apps that could do anything from recite Byron to wash the dishes, finally being able to install these wonders was similar to letting a child loose in a sweet shop.

Have you ever let a child loose in a sweet shop? So many unimaginable treats, the poor blighters don’t know where to begin. And it was the same for me and the App Store. Let’s take a look at how you can shrink the masses of possibility into a few easy starting points…

Five Easy Ways to Find the iPhone Apps You Want

Whether you know what you want or you’re simply trying to find something ‘cool’ via the wisdom of crowds, here’s a few ideas to get you started:

1. Browse the App Store.

This should be easy enough, really. The Store has categories you can drill down into, reviews from users and a homepage highlighting new, hot and favourite apps. Certainly a good place to start. However, once you start browsing the categories it becomes almost hopeless. With nothing but the application name to guide you, you end up in a forest of wasted clicks. That said, if you’re simply after either browsing everything, or some interesting apps to install to get started, you could do worse.

2. Word of Mouth.

If you’ve bought an iPhone recently, chances are that – like me – you know other people who own them. Hit them up for some app recommendations; poll your twitter followers, blog readers and FriendFeeders to truly harness the wisdom of crowds. Who knows – you might even start a mini war over which IM client is best.

3. Background Reading.

There are plenty of decent blogs and websites dedicated to Apple products, and particularly the iPhone, some of which you might not have been reading before you became a new owner. Here’s a couple to get started with: TUAW, Macworld, MacSlash, Gizmodo. Add ‘em to your feeds and before you know it, any hot new iPhone apps will come to you, rather than vice versa.

4. Best-Ofs.

Following on from the ‘push’ approach in #3, you can also go out there and look for blogger roundups of applications. A bit of Google-fu with phrases such as “top 10 iphone apps” (no, really) can get you a long way: check out posts like Lifehacker’s top 10 free apps, the Telegraph’s top 20 and Gizmodo’s marathon blog for starters.

5. Develop your Own.

Chances are that there will be some itch you really need to scratch when it comes to the iPhone. Whether you want to show off your WoW characters to friends in the pub, use Skype to save on call charges, or SSH into your servers, there’s probably an application that already does what you need. But if it’s not perfect, or if there simply isn’t anything that fits the bill, consider learning to write your own. Whether you simply choose to make an iPhone-friendly web interface to your own website, or a fully-fledged app running on the device itself, the tools are out there – make your world a slightly better place!

None of the above approaches are really perfect. It’s very hard to find “the best” apps, whether by blogosphere consensus or simply pure quality. There’s a lot of information about a lot of different apps out there, although obviously only a few people bother to give official feedback; pulling data from the numerous reviews out there would really help give a folksonomic style metric to judge what’s worth installing and what isn’t.