iTunes rental: pretty smooth

During my latest trip to Boston I thought I’d experiment with renting a movie on iTunes and watching it on my iPhone on the flight out.  Overall, I have to say the process was pretty smooth (in fact, smoother than I expected; I was a little concerned that it’d start the 24 hour clock as soon as I transferred the movie to my phone).  The worst part was downloading the movie itself; with a DSL connection it took nearly an hour, and the download was not improved by my laptop deciding to sleep partway through the transfer (that would seem to me like an obvious no-no, but then I’m not an Apple designer).  Otherwise transferring the movie to my iPhone was dead simple, the iPhone iPod UI clearly identified how much time left I had on the rental (both the number of days before watching it and the number of hours once I started), and the iPhone didn’t start the countdown until I actually started watching.

In short, the $4 experiment worked well.  I’ll definitely be renting movies on future flights (with a small child watching movies on flights is one of the few ways I actually see contemporary movies).