3 steps 4-ward and back: iPhone’s iOS4.0
June 29, 2010
There may come a day when, codger-like, I querulously decline to upgrade a gadget, fed up to the teeth with all these young whippersnappers who can’t leave well enough alone.
That day has yet to arrive. When Apple’s new iOS 4.0 popped up last week, I eagerly grabbed Gigi-the-iPhone and went for it.
I’m glad I upgraded, but just barely. iOS4 offers some cool things I can mostly take or leave, and it solves a couple of irritating problems but adds others. It also isn’t quite the promised boon, since there’s a fine print problem: The upgrade doesn’t work on all previous iPhones–you need an iPhone 3G or later–and the most-needed feature of all doesn’t work unless you have an iPhone 3GS.
All in all, it’s not a great leap forward as much as a bone thrown to loyal old customers. We get just enough taste of new features to (hopefully) keep us from defecting to Google Droid, while still making us hunger for the sleek new iP4.
Tethered
June 25, 2010
When I said I wanted to be tethered, I meant “use my iPhone to connect my laptop to the Internet when I’m out and about.” I did NOT mean tethered as in “chained to AT&T in a weird kind of neverending technological bondage.”
AT&T obviously thought I meant the latter.
Shake shake shake
June 9, 2010
Shake shake shake. Shake your boooty…I purely hated that song. Of course, any band that has the word “sunshine” in its name ought to be shot anyway, but that’s not what I’m talking about here:
Forget “gestures.” My favorite new techno-thing is the “shake.”
First noticed it awhile back; enter the wrong password on a Mac and the log-in will literally shake its head, or rather, its container. It’s kinda cute; I started mis-entering passwords just to watch it. (Not always a good idea; wound up locked out of one and had to call tech support to reset).
My cheatin’ heart
May 27, 2010
I snuck into a Verizon store yesterday and toyed with an HTC Droid Incredible. It was enough fun that I can see myself shoving Gigi-the-iPhone into a drawer somewhere…and for some inexplicable reason guilt’s setting in and I’m starting to feel like an errant spouse.
Gigi’s aptly named; she’s gorgeous, eminently capable, capricious and demanding. And she’s not perfect. Is she due for replacement, though?
Well…I’m not ready to say that, but problems keep cropping up. This week I discovered that I can’t use her to connect my MacBook Pro to the Web, the way I can with just about every other Internet-capable phone. I’d tried this with a beta copy of the OS last year and it worked just fine, then I never did it again. Usually when I’m traveling about town, Gigi *is* my laptop, so I hadn’t needed to try.
This week, though, I’m helping to host a meeting about selling art online, the speakers must demonstrate with live websites, and our venue doesn’t offer wireless access. No problem, I said, I’ll just use Gigi to connect up my laptop, hook the laptop up to the projector, and we’re set. I made sure of the process (known as tethering) with the online iPhone manual on Apple.com, and went over to test it, just to make sure.
It didn’t work. I called Apple and they confirmed that the tethering feature had been removed. “I think you probably used tethering last year during the about 48 hours before AT&T turned it off,” sighed the rep, “They were afraid it would swamp their 3G network and we can’t get them to turn it back on. Believe me, we’ve been asking.”
Drat. I called AT&T, who naturally said it wasn’t their fault and blamed Apple. They might be releasing a tethering solution sometime in the future, “…but don’t hold your breath.”
And then it got weird. “This is what happens when you’ve got management that doesn’t understand technology and won’t pay for enough network capacity,” the AT&T rep whispered, “But tethering IS available on the iPhone…if you know where to look.”
“Uhm…do you mean jailbreak the phone?” (i.e., uncouple the phone from the AT&T network–which voids the warranty, can knock you out of things like iTunes and in the past has sometimes literally killed the phone)
“I can’t advise you to do that, ma’am…but you might visit Google and explore the, uhm, possibilities.”*
Hmmmm. I love the iPhone, it’s an incredible, paradigm-shifting device…but it’s definitely missing some key features: Voice dialing, voice-controlled GPS (unless you pay a fairly hefty fee and then it doesn’t work all that well), easy photo messaging, multitasking (which lets you switch between apps without having to restart every time), Adobe Flash, the ability to change batteries and a memory card slot that would augment storage and allow easy file exchange…
…and no tethering, either.
Verizon offers the best wireless performance in town–and I was a long-time Verizon customer before iPhone–so I headed to my local Verizon store, grabbed a couple of technoweenies there, and we played with a Droid Incredible for a couple of hours.
I gotta say, I’m impressed. The DI offers just about every one of the missing features I mentioned, and quite a bit more. It supports a classic iPhone interface, i.e., pages of apps that you can organize and move through, or you can opt for its standard star-like interface with different “homescreens” for different application groups. It’s faster, the low-light photography is better than on iPhone (and higher resolution, with the ability to adjust exposures), it offers faster websurfing and allows video playback directly in the browser.
Most everything else looks about on par with an Apple 3GS, or slightly better, but with Verizon’s better (and I think faster) network. The iPhone has almost an order of magnitude headstart on apps…but many of the services that require separately purchased apps on iPhone turn out to be native to the DI’s Sense Interface.
I sternly told my gadget jones to settle down but…just to be on the safe side, did a price comparison. Uh-oh. Verizon will sell you a DI for $199 with a two-year contract (there’s a $350 penalty for early cancellation, so beware). Monthly service at my usage level runs about $70 per month.
Right now I’m paying nearly $140 for my iPhone service. 50% less? Ulp. At that rate, the Droid pays for itself in three months.
Of course, Apple’s coming out with the iPhone 4G, which supposedly will blow away even the Droid Incredible, and may indeed include some of those missing features. It’ll still be on AT&T network, though, and I doubt the price will come down…
…so I need to think about this.
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*Instead of exploring THOSE possibilities, I called the venue owner, found out where the nearest Ethernet plug is in the building and will be installing the world’s longest Ethernet connection for tonight’s meeting. Say what you like about landlines, but sometimes they come in awful handy…
Boxed in
March 13, 2010
I’ll admit I’m a gadgethead, love ‘em to death. But when did gadgetcool become “couldn’t open it with an IQ of 265 and a sledgehammer?”
Apple’s famous for making gorgeous-but-difficult packaging: Both my MacBook Pro and my iPhone came in boxes with no visible openings. Not even Microsoft, which tends to eschew supercool for nerdish efficiency, escapes the packaging problems: Office 2007 for Mac came in a clear acrylic puzzlebox that took as long to open as the software did to install. Love the software but by the time I got the box open I very nearly returned to typewriter and paper.
But Motorola just won the dumb packaging of the year award with the Motorola Endeavor HX1 Bluetooth headset.
Maxtor. Grrrr. Urgle. Ugh.
August 4, 2009
Right at the moment, Seagate is driving me nuts.
Seagate makes the Maxtor One Touch Plus external backup drive, which supports Barney BigBoy, my primary Windows machine. It holds backups for that computer as well as a fairly large Lightroom library of my photography, and I liked it…until now.
iPhone, bathtubs and blogging
March 24, 2009
However useful Gigi-the-iPhone may be, she has some limitations. For one thing, she’s not really a great companion in the bath (although I’ve been surprised at the quality of pictures she takes, even there–left).
Gigi and water don’t mix. In fact, the first thing that the Apple tech did when I brought Gigi in was to open her case and check to see if water had gotten in.
Apparently every iPhone comes with a wet indicator, some kind of reactive paper that changes color permanently if it gets wet. If it does, the tech said, “it voids your warranty and we can’t fix it.” [Read more]
All sound, no sale: iPod Shuffle
March 17, 2009
Just played around with the new iPod Shuffle, and I gotta say, I don’t get it.
Maybe it’s just my fuddyduddyness talking, but in an age when we can cram more and more information into personal mobile devices, why would I want one that takes me back to the dark ages?
Kindling the iPhone
March 8, 2009
For those of you who think that headline means I finally tossed Gigi-the-iPhone on the fire: Nope.
Actually, Gigi and I have gotten along pretty well in the last six weeks. She’s finally resigned herself to living with a peasant, and I’ve learned that she can be a pretty good phone…as long as I don’t try to use her 3G network. The only time she drops calls now is when I turn the daggone 3G back on. (If there’s a more perfect example than AT&T of why you shouldn’t sell a technology before you get it right, I don’t know what it would be.)
In fact, Gigi and I have been visiting that irresistible money magnet, the iPhone apps store, and trying things out. And I’ve discovered a natural rating system of sorts for the apps I try: Gigi presents apps in groups of 16 per page, and you can move app icons to any page you like. I’ve got five pages of the little buggers, pretty much arranged from most-used to least. Anything that makes Gigi’s first page is pretty darn indispensible. Anything on page five is about to be blitzed off the phone.
Amazon’s Kindle app (Amazon.com, free) has made it to page two.
Now, I’ve just not seen the sense in buying a Kindle. I mean, even a first-class gadget freak has to draw the line SOMEwhere. In Gigi, I’ve consolidated phone, pager, email, browser and all kinds of other gadgets I used to carry and my purse is about four pounds lighter. Why the heck would I want to add stuff back?
Besides, Gigi offers apps like Stanza, which lets you read just about any book or magazine in the public domain. It’s not great–no real illustrations, the interface is a tad clumsy–but it works.
But when Kindle came out for iPhone this week, I just had to try it. And I gotta admit, I kinda like it. It’s not–repeat NOT–the same as reading a book,. But if the book’s good enough, I could be reading it on a roll of toilet paper and I’d still love it.
You download the app, register with your Amazon.com username and password, and you’re automatically connected to your Amazon.com account. Buy a Kindle book, and it automagically shows up as an available download on your iPhone the next time you open the app.
(And, btw, here’s a fairly significant difference between the app and the Kindle: I’m told you can acquire books directly on the Kindle. The iPhone app only supports reading them; you still must buy them using a regular computer.)
I downloaded Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book ($9.99–the paper version is a couple bucks more) and gave it a shot. Text was easy to read, the illustrations were there, and the interface was very iPhone: A fingerswish moves you from page to page, you can easily select different text sizes and the “book” always opens to your last-read page. If you move about, you can resynch to the furthest page read. (BTW, TGB just won a Newberry Award, well-deserved. If you haven’t read it yet, you should.)
So…tell me again why I should buy a Kindle?
Loopt (free). Loopt has barely made it to page five and I probably won’t keep it. The Loopt app uses GPS and text messaging to do a geosynched kind of Twitter. Anyone connected with you can see where you are and, to some extent, what you’re doing. They can share geotagged photos, give you directions to places they’d like you to try, etc.
I’m all for presence detection, i.e., using applications such as instant messaging to learn when a person is (or isn’t) available to take a phone call, email, etc. But Loopt is kinda scary. The default privacy level on this app is essentially zero, and figuring out how to restrict others’ access can be challenging.
To use Loopt you must enter a bit more personal information into the app than I’m comfortable with. Besides, it works from your address book to match up with other potential Loopt members (and also to invite them to join–gee, isn’t that what malware does?).
Anybody with a significant online life (say, someone who, er, blogs a lot and has accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and heaven knows where else) knows that privacy is an illusion and has made some measure of peace with that. That doesn’t mean, though, that I want folk checking to see if I’m out of the bathroom yet.
I suppose that kicks me up a notch on the fuddy-duddy scale, but too bad.
Facebook (free). I’ve also installed the iPhone version of Facebook which has, to my surprise, made it to page one. It’s a useful little precis of what’s going on with your Facebook friends and, aside from the iPhone’s lousy keyboard, is pretty easy to use.
(BTW, if you’re on Facebook, come find me; I’m gathering a nice network of glassists and techists and they’re fun)
BBC World News (free) kicked the New York Times newsreader out of its page one spot last week, mostly due to its broader news focus and slightly faster performance. It’s a quick, fast update that also gives you access to “World, Have Your Say,” which has to be one of the most fascinating radio programs on air.
MagicPad ($3.99), one of the the first rich text editors for the iPhone, also moved to page one. It lets you cut and paste text from one application to another, something that’s been sadly lacking in the iPhone, and also allows you some rudimentary formatting such as changing fonts and text color. Using it can be an exercise in frustration until you understand how the gestures work with the editor, but once you get the hang of it, it’s quite useful.
Been playing around with more apps, including FacePhone ($2.99), which matches up your address book and your FaceBook friends, iStethoscope (free), a heart monitor and sound amplifier for iPhone that so far hasn’t so much as found my pulse, and Pinger, which lets you send text messages for free and integrates your social and instant messaging accounts into a single place.
So far, only Pinger looks like it’ll make it off page five, but I’ll keep you posted…
Making the iPhone phone
January 18, 2009
After my rant about iPhone woes the other day, my buddy Ed sent me a note: “…after you get rid of the I-phone. I love my Macs but would never put up with the mess you keep telling us about. Buying a back up phone, phooey!”
Hmmm. Right after that, when I’d reconnected to her for the third time, a friend said, “You know what? Don’t call me on that thing anymore. Just wait till you get to a landline.”
OK. Something had to be done. AT&T insisted that it wasn’t THEIR fault, it was Apple’s, so I called Apple.