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The iPhone, Apple’s pearl of the mobile device. Perhaps one could even say its the evolution of Apple’s early “Newton” hand-held from decades ago.

Well, this story is likely short, but important to me. It’s about the evolution of one man’s experience with a product. A product loved by many, particularly me. As a designer, and one most critically involved and interested in the design for experiences, the iPhone presented a revolution in the mobile phone or mobile device experience. A very true and valiant translation of experience from Mac OSX on the desktop to a mobile device.

I was a relative late comer to the iPhone, allowing the market to pick out all the bugs or issues that typically follow an early product. I learned my lesson after buying the first round of Intel touting Mac’s, placing my order at midnight the evening of their release. The following months weren’t too bad, but certainly contained a mix of “bugs” related to a new product. It comes with the territory.

But enough with that. Let’s fast forward to the issue at hand. My iPhone, and it’s presumed “evolution”.

Since the release of the devices 2.0 OS my experience has progressively gone down hill. Missed calls, late messages, required restarting the entire OS in order to web browse, download or send email, or even making phone calls. It’s really been a fairly disasterous experience, and one that makes me wish the old days of just having a phone that works (namely my old Samsung….).

Don’t get me wrong for one minute. I still love this phone. Sorry, this device. It’s far more than a phone, and no competitor on the market can come close to the experience this little puppy provides. It’s mind blowing, amazing, refreshing, a new outlook on how communication, productivity and fun can all play in the same sandbox. But Apple must recognize that the experience they provide is extremely fragile, and by releasing updates to software in the name of progress only to diminish the presumed and proven value of the device is extremely detrimental.

With that said, I’ll end this post and go play with my iPhone!

I’ve been playing with Davidville’s Tumblr publishing application for a few weeks now. After discovering the site a few months ago right after it was launched, I set up and account and as usual, just let it sit.

Honestly, I’ve been hard at work. Really.

But that said, I finally started testing out the full breadth of the tools a few weeks ago and it’s so very well done. Simple, easy, egaging, and intuitive (well fairly). I suggest everyone check it out. Now I just need to find a way to publish to it from here, and vice versa. Integrate streams if you will. Which is the one thing that I love so much about it.

I tend to use Tumblr as more than just a blog publishing tool. I use it as an aggregate of my life online. A trend that’s seen popping up with Plaxo Pulse, Twitter & Facebook integration, etc. The idea that as social networks and social people we exist in many places, but our activities in those many places should be displayed and celebrated throughout. It’s useful obviously for marketing (as in “What’ this link from? Oh Del.icio.us? Cool. Sign me up) but also a great retention tool. Heck I use Twitter because it’s an easier Facebook. I don’t use Facebook anymore. Sorry guys. It’s just overwhelming.

That said, check out Tumblr.