A Soon-to-be Cherished Hand Me Down, And a Soon-to-be Very Happy 6 Year Old iPhone Owner
That ‘s a screencap of my V1 iPhone, back in the days of jailbreaking and theming to my heart ‘s content. When I got a 3G last year, I debated for a while about what to do with the V1, and luckily decided to keep it in the hope that it would either become a useful test device for me, or that my wife would come round to using it.
It took a while, but a few months back my wife did adopt it and now uses it as her single phone for work and home and all that jazz. By the time she decided to take it up, our 6 year old daughter was already a big iPhone fan “ so they ‘ve really shared the phone for the last few months. They ‘ve both got email accounts on there, and both have apps they use on it – though Zoe, our daughter, has a lot more than my wife does.
So tomorrow is a big, big upgrade day for all three of us
I ‘ve got my pre-ordered, reserved 32GB iPhone 3GS waiting for me at a local AT%T store. And not for much longer I hope. 
My 3G will go to my wife “ and we ‘ll move the numbers so that each of us maintains their existing one.
And on the V1, we ‘ll end the phone service and give it to Zoe as more of an iPod Touch device.
My wife is well happy with the idea of 3G speed and just a newer iPhone. She ‘s also pretty keen on OS 3.0 and some of its features which will help her tons with her job-related iPhone usage “ Spotlight search, push notifications, copy&paste, and so on.
I ‘m psyched to get my hands on the iPhone 3GS and all that new speediness and video and voice control.
But I dare say that by far and away the happiest camper in our household tomorrow evening will be Zoe. She is a huge iPhone fan now, uses a ton of good apps “ from entertaining stories and audio books, to many fun games, to the wonderful Brushes app for drawings. She also loves using the mail app to keep in touch with her grandparents and send and receive silly photos.
She ‘s also rapidly becoming the smartest iPhone user in the house. She knows her way round all the built-in apps quite well “ she ‘ll often start Googling something that she has asked Mom or Dad about, when she is finding that our answers just don ‘t sound feasible enough. She knows how to take screencaps, how to zoom in on existing pics and screencap them to blow up a particular area of a pic. She knows about sync and what it ‘s needed for, knows about the App Store. She wanted to make sure ‘her phone ‘ got the 3.0 update yesterday, and checked on me today to make sure I ‘d got it on there for her. And she likes 3.0 “ thinks Spotlight is cool. Oh, and she pretty much provides first-level tech support for her Mom “ and if she can ‘t work it out, I get called in. I rarely get called in.
When Zoe and her mom first started sharing the phone we talked about whether she could take solo ownership of it at some point, and I was convinced she was just too young.
Boy was I wrong. I think she is more than ready to get stacks of good use out of her ‘new ‘ iPhone. I think it will continue to be a source of fun and entertainment and education for her, and is constantly helping to make her a tech-savvy kid.
So a very happy iPhone household we ‘ll be come tomorrow evening. Only the dog is left out now.
Re: Zoe knows "how to zoom in on existing pics and screencap them to blow up a particular area of a pic" – That's awesome! I'm impressed! Even though I've seen that as a tip before, if I needed to do something like that, I would have probably ended up doing it in PhotoGene or even synced to iPhoto, cropped it, then synced back totally overlooking that simple trick.
And generally I would have thought that six years old would have been a little young as well. I believe I was still quite irresponsible with my toys and such at that age. In addition to general rough housing and leaving things out where someone might take them, I remember, despite my parents warning, many of my Ninja Turtles being washed out to see because I played with them to close to the ocean at the beach.
Yeah, that it is one of my favorite little tricks with the iPhone – and now on 3.0 it adds the newly created to the Camera roll straight away, rather than only showing up after exiting and re-opening the app.
I'm with you – when I was 6 I could never have been trusted with an iPhone or any similar device – like you, I was good at losing / breaking / generally mishandling stuff. I think girls are just a little calmer / more level-headed than boys – at that young age only of course.
What a great story! Zoe sounds like quite a character.
Susannah – she really is. I believe she gets her smarts (and good looks) from her mom, and her smart-ass-ness from her dad.
how do you get the phoen to work with out phone service – mine will not!
Jody – the phone portion of things does not work of course, since we took the SIM card out of it and transferred to the 3G. My daughter will use it like a Touch. Everything non-phone related will continue to work just fine – apps, WiFi, and so on.