I couldn’t sleep so I thought I might as well pre-order the iPhone 4S. Denied!
This, despite being assured last night when I called customer service that I would be able to pre-order via their website.
I’m going back to bed. :p
Category: Tech
iPhone News
Like all the other fan boys/girls, I eagerly awaited the announcement of the iPhone 5 today but it never came. Yes, I’m disappointed but not broken-hearted. I’m also glad they didn’t discontinue the iPod Classic because there’s nowhere else you can get that kind of storage for a decent price.
Honestly, I blame all the tech sites for posting the rumors and getting my hopes up. Looking at past releases it makes sense that this would be an upgrade instead of a full redesign. Plus for me, who has the 3GS, it’s going to be a major upgrade with the retina display, improved camera, HD video, and faster processor.
My only true disappointment is that the screen is still 3.5″. I’m not looking for a 4.3″ screen but 4″ would have been nice. I’m sure it will be in the next phone but I’m not going to wait because if you can trust history it will be at least another nine months before that happens. Plus one could play the wait game forever since it’s inevitable that a better device will be released not that long after you’ve purchased one.
I suppose I’m going to be on the upgrade schedule like their phones where I get the improved version of the latest design every two years and I’m ok with that. I just need to find out if I’d get the phone quicker by pre-ordering or standing in line at AT&T. Anyone know? I’m off work for a whole week later this month taking another staycation so I’ll have the time.
Also, iOS 5 looks great. I can’t wait for the new notification functionality. I’ve always hated how I’ll unlock my phone and get multiple pop-up screens successfully. It’s obnoxious.
Coins & Apples
It’s crazy that banks no longer cash your change for you. Well, to be fair Chase did but then they implemented a service fee on all their accounts so we closed ours and they don’t do it for non-customers. Bank of America offers the service, but get this, they take your change and then ship it somewhere to be counted. They promise to credit your account later for the value. Um, who the hell is opting to trust them with that because I sure as hell won’t!
Coinstar gives you the full value of your change if you get a gift card or e-certificate instead of cash. I had forgotten about this so we had amassed $85 in change until this weekend when we decided to just bite the bullet and use Coinstar thinking we’d have to give them a cut of our money. The Coinstar machine at Walmart only gives you iTunes credit or cash but the one at Jewel is full-service and includes gift cards.
Thanks to them I now have $20 in iTunes credit to buy apps (I had been surviving on $15 from Valentine’s Day or possibly my birthday), Joe has $25 for Starbucks, and the rest went toward Amazon.com because we get a lot of stuff there. In fact I’ll be using all of it shortly to order a recharging station for our Wii because I’m sick of it eating through batteries, even the rechargeable AA’s. I’m also ordering a Kindle for my step-daughter’s birthday. Let’s just hope she takes better care of it than her iPod Touch which could not be fixed. The place Joe called said not to even bother coming in because once they are water damaged they are $300 paper-weights. Fantastic. Perhaps if she’s lucky the iPhone 5 will be released soon and I’ll buy it because then she can have my 3GS. It only has 16 GB whereas her Touch had 32 GB but that’s what happens when you’re careless with your possessions. Lesson learned for her.
Broken
The storms we’ve been having lately overnight are intense and make sleeping difficult. Last night was no exception. We awoke to heavy thunder and near constant lightning. The ceiling fan in our living room kept going on since it’s sensitive to power fluctuations. Joe looked out the window and saw that a branch from the tree out front was resting atop the neighbor’s car in their driveway. A walk past the car this evening revealed a dent in the roof. Driving through the street this morning was a challenge due to all the bottles, cans, and even an empty box of Pampers strewn about thanks to it being trash day. Luckily we don’t put ours out until the morning.
I’m not sure if last week’s storms had anything to do with it but our beloved PS2 is dead which sucks since the PS3 doesn’t play the earlier games. Not only that but we had the old school “fat” PS2 that housed a hard drive so it’s going to be difficult to replace. I’m hoping we can repair ours. Maybe it’s just the power supply that needs replacing.
Speaking of repairs, K’s iPod Touch isn’t working. It turns on but the touch screen doesn’t respond. At first she claimed no knowledge of why this “suddenly” happened but then revealed she had it in the bathroom while shaving her legs (because it’s practically attached to her 24/7) and it fell in the tub and got wet. This weekend we’ll be taking it into a place that claims they can repair it. Fingers crossed for her sake!
Awesome iPhone Apps
One of the many things I love about the iPhone is all the apps that speak to my obsessive need to keep track of the stuff I do, would like to do, am doing, or own. Below are some of my recent discoveries:
Home Library – It’s not just for books, and in fact I use it for everything except books since I don’t own enough to care tracking them. It’s pretty good at scanning items in; much more so than other apps I’ve tried that do the same thing. The interface is simple, and you can log into the website and download your media collection to Excel or PDF. It’s also great because it estimates the value of your media collection if you ever lose it. I spent about two days obsessively scanning all my DVDs, games, and CDs into the app and it turns out right now I own 388 CDs, 190 DVDs, and 82 games estimated to be worth about $10,000. It seems like a lot, but when I look around, it doesn’t look like much because everything is confined to a relatively small area. POther features of the app include being able to search your collection, keeping track of loans, maintaining a wish-list, and tracking what you’ve borrowed from others. Things I’d like to see added to the app – better sorting capabilities as well as a field to define the gaming platform for the games, otherwise you don’t know unless you are looking at the cover art which is not part of the downloaded PDF or Excel file and is only shown in the app or on the website.
Time Flies – There are tons of apps that remind you to do things in the future, but this simple little app lets you track the last time you did something and a history of how many times you’ve done it (provided you remember to log it). It’s very handy for tracking the last time I changed my contact lenses or got my hair cut, or even took my vitamin D. I would like to have it remind me to do these things at preset intervals and hopefully that will be an enhancement to the app in the future.
Goodreads – I just discovered this one yesterday right before I was going to opt to buy a subscription to LibraryThing. I thought I should see what other book tracking services were available and found the website where I learned there was a free iPhone app to compliment it. Score! It took about an hour messing around with the export file from LibraryThing to get GoodReads to recognize certain fields correctly. Goodreads claims the export file from LibraryThing is automatically supported but I found that it really only used the ISBN number and discarded most of the other information including the date I read the book and my rating – only THE two most important pieces of data, IMHO. They show a sample import file, though, so I manipulated the file I exported from LibraryThing a few times to match the column headings and data formatting and after a few tries was able to successfully port all my information over to the new system. Now I can track the books I’ve read on my iPhone easily which is great because I’ve read 14 books since getting my Kindle which is way more than I was reading last year. I prefer Goodreads’ interface to LibraryThing as well. The app is a bit buggy when it comes to sorting the books by date read, but it’s tolerable and still a heck of a lot better than going to LibraryThing’s non-mobile supported site to add new books.
I’ve become quite spoiled since buying my iPhone – I expect most websites to support it. In addition, any site that claims to offer functionality that will make my life better best have an app in the appstore or I’m not interested. Maybe I’m becoming one of those dreadful Apple fangirls or something, I don’t know.
Other iPhone apps I highly recommend, and use on a daily basis:
Dropbox – To the cloud!
Evernote – To your other cloud!
FeeddlerRSS – Best free Google RSS reader I could find
Firefox Home – Your bookmarks everywhere you go
Momento – Simple diary app for those non-blog-worthy thoughts/feelings
ToDo – Get it done!