Category: Tech

iPhone News

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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

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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

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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

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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!

HTC Inspire

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Wednesday evening we found ourselves at the mall to take care of a couple of errands – Joe had an appointment at Sears Optical, and I wanted to take my new bracelet to the jewelery store where it was purchased to see whether they could remove a link so it wouldn’t be quite so loose around my wrist. They said they could, for $30, which I think is ridiculous. I’m going to wear it a few more times and if it bugs me too much I might just return it instead. I’m more of a necklace person myself. Speaking of which, the chain broke on my new necklace the second time I wore it so I have to go back there and ask them to replace it. I have another chain just like it from the same store which came with my pretty blue sapphire pendent and that one never broke so I think it was just a fluke.

Directly next door to the jewelry place is a new AT&T store. They used to just have a kiosk but the store is much nicer. We went inside to browse because Joe has been itching to join the 21st century and get a smartphone and he’s eligible for an upgrade in mid-March. He made a beeline right for the new HTC Inspire which I had told him about a few weeks ago before it was released. An employee approached us to help and suggested Joe call AT&T Customer Service to see if they’d allow him to upgrade a little earlier without penalty. Apparently sometimes if you’re within a month they are lenient about it.

Joe called AT&T and they said no problem. Before getting off the phone Joe confirmed, “so you are waiving the $200 early upgrade fee, correct?” and the guy said yes. We walked back into the store and the employee pulled up his account to see they notated the $18 activation fee was waived instead. Seriously? Are people retarded? Joe called back and spent ten minutes on the phone with them before they would notate the account correctly, but eventually everything was worked out and he bought the HTC Inspire for $100, and we also got a package of screen protectors and had the employee put one on since they do such a good job. You should have seen how excited Joe was walking out of the store with his first ever smartphone!



Initially I was jealous because the 4.3″ screen puts the 3.5″ iPhone one to shame, plus I was having new gadget envy because his phone responds faster than mine does to commands, but I think I’m still in love with my iPhone enough that I will wait for the iPhone 5 before I upgrade. I’m sure the faster processor, retina display, and improved battery life will be awesome. There are a few things Apple could learn from Android, however, and one of the big ones is notifications. The iPhone notification system just sucks, but so many people have pointed this out and complained about it that I’d be very surprised if Apple wasn’t already working on it for the next iOS release. They might be slow adding some features but they tend to design them well once they do. I’d also like more personalization options for the phone, the ability to create home screen widgets like the Android offers, and a larger screen too. Someone please tell Steven Jobs to get right on that.