Entries tagged as 'iphone'
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Posted Thursday, 10 July 2008
The first reviews of the iPhone 3G are coming in, and they are less than glowing. Two of the reviewers are iPhone users who have been using new 3G models provided by Apple for a while.
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal likes the iTunes App store and 3G bandwidth, but he did not like the shorter battery life. During one day of testing, his iPhone ran out of power.
Mossberg also notes that the AT&T’s new data plan pricing means that the iPhone 3G is more expensive than its predecessor. His article called Newer, Faster, Cheaper iPhone 3G has a video review, and a good amount of detail.
David Pogue of the New York Times has his review in an article called For iPhone, the ‘New’ is Relative. Pogue seems to agree with Mossberg that current iPhone owners shouldn’t rush to the store for a new iPhone.
There’s still no voice dialing, video recording, copy-and-paste, memory-card slot, Bluetooth stereo audio or phone-to-phone photo sending (MMS).
Upgrading to the iPhone 2.0 firmware will provide access to official applications, along with many of the software tweaks in the 3G model like Microsoft Exchange support. The firmware won’t make an old iPhone use 3G frequencies or upgrade an old unit’s psuedo-GPS, however.
I’m less interested in getting an iPhone now, and more interested in looking at an iPod Touch, the WiFi-only cousin of the iPhone. The Touch won’t make phone calls, but I can buy an old unit and add the iPhone 2.0 firmware for $10, or just buy a new model.
Want to see the insides of an iPhone 3G? iFixIt from New Zealand has posted plenty of pictures. At least the battery is no longer soldered onto the board connections!
Image courtesy of dotmotion through a Creative Commons license.
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Posted Wednesday, 9 July 2008
I’ve claimed for several years now that email is broken. At best, email is the lowest common denominator (LCD) for sending messages to a specific Internet user. Every ISP subscription comes with some kind of email account. Free webmail addresses are easy to get. Many mobile phone accounts come with an email address. Alex Iskold’s post from ReadWriteWeb called Is Email in Danger? discusses how microblogging services like Twitter can overcome the inherent problems of heavyweight email clients like Microsoft Outlook.
Broadcasting with a microblog
Microblogging services are best suited for broadcasting messages to lots of users. FriendFeed, Twitter and similar services are widely used by popular bloggers to publicize their latest posts and mention their daily activities. Most of these services accept text messages and offer mobile versions of their web sites, so they are easier to use than email from an ordinary mobile phone. iPhone and BlackBerry users have better email clients on their devices, but microblogging from these devices seems to work well.
As I mentioned yesterday in my article called The battle against Twitter spam, microblogging services like Twitter have their own problems. Because email is a mission critical service, it’s almost always available and working. Collecting comments and posts from microblogs can be accomplished with RSS - I use this to repost my FriendFeed activity to billso.com, but it would take a bit more effort to do this as part of an archiving and compliance effort.
I’ve never been a fan of Outlook. In its easly versions (Outlook 97 and 98), the application would crash at least once a day. Microsoft developed ActiveSync software to support PDAs, but 10 years later it is still a maddening piece of cruft.
Look out for Outlook and iTunes
My university uses Microsoft Exchange as its faculty/staff email server, so I occasionally get meeting invitations and Outlook forms in my Gmail my box. All of my university email is auto-forwarded into my Gmail account. Microsoft meeting invitations are useless in Gmail - I have to tap out a reply to accept or decline the meeting.
To be honest, Apple’s iTunes is following a similar evolution. It start as a music player, but has become a media storefront, disc burner and iPhone application installer. I’d think that several specific lightweight apps would work better than a huge, monolithic instance of iTunes. On a Mac, iTunes performance is barely tolerable. iTunes on a Windows box is a lumbering behemoth.
Gmail, on the other hand, was designed as a lightweight solution that would work in a standard web browser. I love Gmail because I can search for messages quickly, and I know I won’t run out of storage room for old messages. There’s no reason for me to delete an old message in Gmail.
Attacking the inbox
One approach to managing a bulging email inbox is to sit down and clear the queue. The Inbox Victory web page tries to make this process fun by letting users post pictures of themselves with their empty inboxes. I clear out my Gmali inboxes a few times a year.
Luis Suarez of IBM claims that he reduced his incoming email by 80%, thanks to his usage of social networking tools like RSS feeds, Twitter and IBM’s internal clone of Facebook, Beehive. Suarez discussed his article in the New York Times called I Freed Myself from E-Mail’s Grip.
Suarez admits that his job as a social computing evangelist helped him cut his email volume. He’s supposed to encourage his fellow IBM employees and managers to use Beehive, which is as much a knowledge management (KM) tool as it is a social intranet application. IBMers are supposed to use Beehive to share events, lists, pictures, tips, and ideas across the enterprise, as part of formal and ad hoc workgroups and project teams.
Image courtesy of gwENvision through a Creative Commons license.
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Posted Friday, 27 June 2008
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I see more white and silver laptops than black models when I walk around campus and the shopping mall these days. Colored laptops might look nice in the home, but do people really want to live with one color choice for 2 or more years?
If you don’t like the stock color of your device, Colorware will sell you a custom painted Blackberry, iPhone, iPod, game console or laptop. They’ll also paint your equipment. Their process takes a few days, and you have to wait for the mail or FedEx, though.
It’s easy to wrap a laptop in decals. Students and programmers like to do this, because it’s a great way to personalize a computer. The decals also help the user identify their computer easily.
But I’m not sure I’d go to a job interview with a laptop covered in bumper stickers, unless I knew the client well enough. An accountant might not visit carry a bright purple computer with Astroturf on the lid to a major client meeting.
Erica DeWolff has posted a nice article about this issue at Professionalism and computer color: What do you think? The comments on that article are fun to read.
Skinit.com, schtickers.com, skinvo.net and other companies sell a variety of large, colorful stickers that are custom cut each model’s dimensions - and some companies will let you design your own laptop skin.
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Posted Monday, 23 June 2008
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I write technology articles for BrightHub.
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Posted Sunday, 15 June 2008
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