How Many Bars Do You Have In Your Hood?
Wednesday July 4, 2007 at 10:05 pm | Filed under Gadgetry, On the Web, mobile
Tonight I found a cool site that let’s you explore neighborhoods to get the feel of what kind of mobile signal strength you’ll get. Check out SignalMap to see where the good signals or the dead spots are. You can even contribute if you know where your cell strength goes hot or cold. This site is great when shopping for a new phone — you can see the differences in the big wireless companies’ coverage, and the differences between phones on the same network in the same neck of the woods.
Of course, I’m not buying another cell phone for a long time.
First iWait. Then iPhone. Now iHappy.
Saturday June 30, 2007 at 2:27 am | Filed under Gadgetry, Mac
Who was I kidding thinking I wasn’t going to get an iPhone? I tried to convince myself of just this fact about a month ago when I started to believe some of the negative speculation and getting caught up in the idea that if I went with a cheaper phone, I could get the same satisfaction of a new gadget, but also solve the problems I was having with my current phone, which was losing it.
I went down to the freshly painted AT&T store 3 weeks ago and picked up a Nokia n75. I liked the phone a lot, but the serious flaw was that because it was “3G” (meaning it runs on a newer, quicker data network) it sucked the every lovin’ life out of its battery and had to be charged every night regardless of actual time being used that day. That was a deal breaker! I returned it on Wednesday amidst all of the hype about the iPhone. Then Thursday I made my Friday plans to stake out the local Apple store.
So I got to the Brea Mall at 9am Friday morning — prepared to wait 9 hours until 6pm, when the phone went on sale. I was a little discouraged to find out that I was #75 in line! Each person could buy 2 iPhones, so I was hoping the store received more than 150 of them. Waiting in line with all of the other crazies was a lot of fun and the time went by so much faster than I thought it would. There were some great people around me and we talked the whole day and I didn’t have to resort to my book or laptop that I brought with me. Most of the conversation was about speculation of inventory, and general pre-admiration of what the iPhone could do for us individually. But there was also some funny moments where 5 different people knocked down the line dividers, there was this old bitter dude (he looked like Larry David) who came by to give everyone a hard time and bounce his blue raquetball around, and of course the robo-security mall cops on Segways. Nice.
By the time 6pm rolled around we were ready to shell out some dough. The Apple store folks were awesome. There were like 50 employees in there, some as a welcoming crew screaming and giving high-5’s to people who were coming into the store to buy, and those leaving with their new treasures. I’ve always had a great experience at the Apple stores, but this was overkill. They were very organized, and most “checkout counters” were just employees with mobile credit card processors that printed out receipts right there on the spot. The girl that helped me had trouble with my card. It wouldn’t swipe!! I had to call Monique, who had met up with me about 5:30 and was waiting outside the store, to give another card to an employee and run it in to me. Well, it turned out to be the card reader that was at fault, and it finally all went through. We were out of there by 6:30 with our iPhones. Yeah, we got two! Monique’s going to decide if she wants to keep the 2nd one or no.. we’ll see.
As for the phone itself. I’ve been playing with it since about 7:30 (I had to eat!) and I’m really impressed. The touch keyboard I was worried about having trouble with is super intuitive and works great. The screen is the best screen I’ve ever seen on any small video device. It pairs up with the car’s bluetooth perfectly. It’s got a great camera. It’s the first phone I’ve even wanted to get my email with. I’m getting a much better signal in the house than I have with any other phone I’ve had. The visual voicemail is simply how voicemail should be done. After all my messin’ tonight the battery is only half drained. …and it’s a phone with a Video iPod built in! But I think the key is that it does all of these things in an incredible sexy design and with a (naturally) kick butt, easy-to-use Apple interface. Simple, and amazing.
Apple To Offer DRM-free Music
Monday April 2, 2007 at 10:06 pm | Filed under Entertainment, Gadgetry, Mac, On the Web
Starting sometime in May Apple will offer a large portion of it’s iTunes music store catalog at higher quality and WITH NO DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT for an additional 30¢ per song. That’s right for $1.29 per song you can get a 256kbps AAC file (that would mean more than just iPods could play in the iTunes Music Store) with no strings attached! No news on a full album price but it will be interesting to see how they price’em. Read the full article here.
Something tells me that May will also bring the next Apple OS.
In other Apple news related to me — I ordered an Apple Airport Extreme last week which should arrive in the next few days. I’m anxious to play around with the speed of the 802.11n and not care about the range of our router ever again, plus utilize an apple interface for my router (both Monique’s new iMac and my new work MacBook Pro have 802.11n built in). I’ve not many complaints about the Netgear router I’ve had for years, but it’s losing steam lately and the control panel blows.