It could be that I’m still a bit telephonophobic for social calls, but it is more likely that the design of the phone call has subconsciously made me choose not to use it for anything where it isn’t absolutely necessary.  While I’m on the phone all the time for work, I will almost never call a friend up on a telephone…and some find that weird.  But, this story articulates many of the reasons why I dislike phone calls.

“Consider: If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail even more excruciating: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)

The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.

In fact, the newfangled media that’s currently supplanting the phone call might be the only thing that helps preserve it. Most people I know coordinate important calls in advance using email, text messaging, or chat (r u busy?). An unscheduled call that rings on my phone fails the conversational Turing test: It’s almost certainly junk, so I ignore it. (Unless it’s you, Mom!)

Indeed, I predict that as this sort of hybrid coordination evolves, it will produce a steep power law in the way we use voice calls. We’ll still make fewer, as most of our former phone time will migrate to other media. But the calls we do make will be longer, reserved for the sort of deep discussion that the medium does best.”

via Clive Thompson on the Death of the Phone Call | Magazine.

This is just a note for others that may be having the same issue.  I’m not sure why, and there doesn’t seem to be a fix that consistently works, but here’s my experience with this.

Issue:  My iPhone 3GS was working fine prior to upgrading to iOS 4.  Once I did that, I couldn’t connect to the 3G network anymore even though all the apps worked while connecting via wifi.  I tried turning the Airplane Mode on and off, rebooting, etc. etc.  Nothing worked.  It was completely frustrating!

Fix:  YMMV, as I’m on the Fido network in Canada, but this what I did.  I have to do this every time there is an update as well.  I went to Settings/General/Reset/Reset Network Settings  Once I did this, the iPhone restarted, searched for a network, and everything worked again.

If you try this, you’re on your own, but it worked for me.  Good luck!

If you are like me, you HAD to have iPhone tethering even though it wasn’t supported yet. So, you poked around on the web and found/hacked a profile config file for Fido/Rogers and installed it.

Well, as of iPhoneOS 3.1, the iPhone will not accept unsigned config files (unless you have jailbroken); as such, this file will no longer work. This means that if you have the unsigned config file, your tethering option will disappear.

However, seeing as Rogers/Fido has officially embraced tethering (for now). If you have the hacked and unsigned config file installed it (or any similar file for other carriers, like AT&T, T-Mobile, etc.) and upgraded to iPhoneOS 3.1 or 3.1.2, you will need to remove it.

Open Settings > General > Profiles (at the bottom). Remove the profile you see there. Tethering should now show up for you.

Enjoy! The credit for this goes to http://cdslash.net/about/ who helped me work out the whole config file thing in the first place…