Ranting Kenya

The new iPhone 3G S

I recently picked up an iPhone 3G S 16GB. My three year contract on Telus was up so I was eagerly looking at the iPhone, Palm Pre, and some Android devices. I ruled out Pre mostly because it wasn’t out yet, and their app store would have a lot of ground to make up. I ruled out the Android devices mostly because I heard the battery life was terrible.

Anyway, here are my thoughts on the whole thing.

Purchasing from Apple Store

I initially went to a Fido booth, and talked to the guy staffing the booth. Evidently nobody in the city had any iPhones, but I should keep calling back until they got some. Ok fine. So I walked around the corner to the Apple store where you can now buy the iPhone with a plan (something you HAD to do at either Fido or Rogers before). And what do you know, they proclaim proudly that they are the only retailer in Calgary who has any iPhones. Interesting…

So I said I wanted to get one, lady says I’ll have a iPhone sales guy meet you when someone’s available.

A couple minutes pass, and I’m greeted by a sales person, if you could even call him that. So I said I’m looking at getting an iPhone. He said “ok great”. This is where I paused for his sales spiel, or whatever praise he was going to bestow upon the device and myself. Nothing. He basically leaned on the shelf with one elbow with this arrogant hipster pose. I was already contemplating punching him the face. I really didn’t need him to tell me anything about the phone, but I was shocked at his sales tactics. I knew I was going to get one anyway, but his lack of effort was annoying. I would test him a bit later however.

So asked him to get a 16GB 3G S. He punches his fancy code into the computer to have someone else bring me the phone from the back. Henry Ford would be proud of his assembly line concept adapted so cleanly to retail sales. A little pretentious to say the least, but hey, I am in the Apple Store after all.

So we start going through the plans and the paperwork. This is when I ask him about battery cycles. What’s involved when the built-in battery is no good anymore? Seemed like a legitimate question to me since no cell battery I’ve ever had has lasted more than about 18 months max. Well, how foolish of me! This phone has a built in battery, I’ll “never” have to replace it. And, I can charge it whenever I want. I had no idea Apple had developed the magical rechargeable battery that doesn’t have a limited number of cycles. Strange, because I had read otherwise from what I felt was a reliable source. Clearly he had no idea what I was talking about so I moved along. I figure the geniuses will bail me out later on. Hopefully my faith isn’t misplaced.

The Keyboard

Typing in portrait mode

Coming from a Motorola Q, I liked the physical keyboard. This was basically my biggest knock on the iPhone. And I can say, I can already type basically as fast as I ever could on the physical keyboard. The text prediction/correction is quite good. My biggest gripe about it is when it does make a mistake and you’re already a handful of words ahead of that spot, getting the cursor back there to correct it is a pain.

I know many blackberry users, and they all rail on the on-screen keyboard. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. Their heads are in the sand, and they’re hopelessly devoted to an excellent device that’s feeling a little more irrelevant lately. Physical keyboard or not, I don’t really think it’s an issue. I have the biggest, most sausage-like fingers around, and I can navigate that on-screen keyboard in portrait mode without issue. You have to type with a little more care for web page addresses, but taking the time to get those right the first time is no big deal.

The Secret Sauce

So I walked out of the store with the phone, looked at all the icons, and basically felt a little under-whelmed. At this point, I really just have a phone with good internet ability and a flashy screen. But then there’s the app store.

There’s an app for virutally everything. There’s excellent games (check out Flight Control, my favorite thus far), handy tools (urbanspoon/all recipes), good website apps (score mobile, giantbomb.com). There’s something for everyone. And most of the apps seem to be $2 or less. I have my eye on a more expensive golf stats app… but holding off for the time being. Nevertheless, I could track my birdies, driving distance with the GPS, handicap, sand saves, whatever. It’s the app store that makes this baby shine.

The iPod Headset Functionality

I also really like using the headphones with the built in mic. The experience of listening to music, and taking a phone call it unparalleled. So seamless and convenient.

Things That Could Be Better

Probably my biggest suggestion doesn’t go out to Apple, but to iPhone game devs. You all need to start thinking more about the phone as a device and how people use it when creating your games. The first person shooter ports and neat, and I like them, but you need to use the device in unique ways. The Nintendo DS took a few years for devs to really embrace the device properly to create unique experience, iPhone needs the same focus.

The GPS also needs to be improved. It’s neat, but it can’t really be used very well as a GPS without a second person. There’s no automatic re-routing, voice prompts etc. And if you’re on a long car trip, the spottiness of a connection on the Rogers network would lead to some huge map gaps inbetween major centres.

I expected not a lot from the battery. Most of my use on the phone so far has been data. I’d say I get about a day’s worth of battery life. No bad, but not great.

All In All

I’m quite happy with my new iPhone. It’s still really new, and it’s not perfect, but it’s so much better than everything else I’ve ever gotten my hands on. Maybe it doesn’t do email as well as a blackberry for some people, but blackberries lack that “special” quality. When you’re using the iPhone, you feel like you’re really getting treated to some different (more so than a Mac compared to a PC). So far, so good.

The day the iPhone was released, things changed for cell phones. Smartphone awareness skyrocketed. I have seen more new blackberry users since the iPhone was released than any other phone. Perhaps all old Razr users…

Since then, in the consumer’s eyes, no other phone touches it. The G1 was released with google’s Android OS, and the Blackberry storm was heavily hyped, but neither can hold a candle to the popularity of Apple’s shiniest product.

So why would anybody think the Palm Pre has a chance? Well in my opinion, it has the best features of the iPhone, G1, and a typical Blackberry all rolled into one.

A wicked looking/performing OS

Though the iPhone is physically a nice phone, the real gem of the device is the OS. It looks nice, it’s easy to use (it is an Apple product), and has lots of great features. Install the apps you want, jailbreak it if necessary, bring google maps to the masses etc.
Palm will up the ante in the OS space. Evidently a much lighter OS, it is capable of running many processes in the background. To many this doesn’t seem necessary, but it will make a huge different to users, and developers. The Web OS is also designed for a touchscreen device, not just patched in like some other phone’s OS.

A truly open SDK for the app store

Hopefully we won’t be seeing any more Tweets from Trent Reznor chastizing corporations regarding their contradictory policies regarding app/music ratings. The Web OS SDK promises to be open, and that Palm’s role won’t be to screen applications, only to make sure security issues are plugged.

Haptic feedback done right

What’s the best way to implement haptic feedback in a touchscreen device? Not a clickable touchscreen (talk about a half baked solution, I can’t feel the buttons before I press them), not a vibration function, but an actual physical keyboard.

So to review, the Palm Pre should be an excellent device since it combines the best features of the iPhone’s (touchscreen and a well built OS), the openness of the G1 (open marketplace for apps with little to no interference from Palm), and the single best feature of the Blackberry (an actual keyboard).

Sounds like a winner to me.

When I here stuff like this, I can’t help but get angry. The fact that these large companies think they can control everything on the products they sell to you drives me nuts. What makes me even angier, is that Apple gets away with it all the time and barely anybody notices.

Anyway…

Wellington Financial Blog – News, Views & Purviews » Blog Archives » Bell to Blackberry users: “Pay us or get lost” Literally.

Interesting. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing if Android can take some wind out of the iPhone’s sails.

Android – Boing Boing.

I just knew they couldn’t stomach an unlimited plan. I just knew it. It is however still a pretty good data plan for Canada…

Here we have it, iPhone 3G pricing for our better mannered, gun-toting friends up north. All the plans from Rogers Wireless require that lovely, three-year contract and include visual voicemail, free evenings and weekends, and unlimited WiFi at all Rogers and Fido hotspots. The plans start at $60/month for 150 minutes of voice and just 400MB of data before topping out at $115/month for 800 minutes voice and up to 2GB of data. None of these plans offer unlimited data as previously rumored.

Rogers announces iPhone 3G plans, unlimited data isn’t one of them – Engadget

Tags: iphone, rogers, mobile, data

This information would have been really, really helpful to have had yesterday afternoon when the announcement was made (though certainly part of the blame rests with me for not checking to see if Rogers’ website had been updated.) You guys are technology companies, right? And you deal with communications services and such? Maybe next time you could send me an e-mail, or (gasp) pick up the phone and call. Seriously. WTF.

Load This – Apple (p)i(e)Phone

Tags: rogers

On July 11 no less.

Gee, I wonder what it could be? Rogers, who are you kidding? You’ll hold out all your information until the last dying second won’t you?

Well, Apple’s WWDC event for 2008 has had it’s keynote now. As expected, the 3G iPhone has been unveiled. I must say, this phone does actually make the previous iPhone look kinda light in the features department. The wireless speed alone is a big difference, the GPS tracking should be awesome (doesn’t cost extra money to have like on my Moto Q). So July 11 should be a big day in Canada and elsewhere.

But aside from a release date from Apple (a search on Rogers’ reveals no matches whatsoever for “iphone”), there is no price information on the Canadian page. Two screenshots below show the differences between the US and Canadian pages.

US Page:

Canadian Page:

Also, there’s no info on data plan rates either. I find this interesting since it was heavily speculated that Canada may have been left out of the last round of iPhones due to Rogers’ data plan greed. But $199 sounds good to me.

At any rate, at least now there’s a date.

So by now, everybody’s heard the news.

Phil made an interesting comment on one of my other posts. He said:

…Chances are a lot of Telus subscribers will ditch their CDMA phones in favour of the trendy iPhone, especially the young and fashionable population…

While I believe this is certainly a possibility, with all the news surrounding the next version of the iPhone (Engadget has a bunch of posts), how many people are really going to go for it? Perhaps many, since not everyone follows this type of thing in the media.

If Rogers negotiated a lucrative exclusivity deal, and their voice/data plan is actually good, then yeah, I think Rogers will be selling them hand over fist. I heard a rumour that a 5GB data plan might be an alternative to unlimited.

However, I believe Rogers will be Rogers and will be greedy. Any really good data plan will undoubtedly be quite expensive. That’s really the deal maker/breaker in the Canadian iPhone story. The monthly charges.

It will of course sell out when launched, it will get all the media attention, and I will see more of them and want one more.

Now that my new computer has arrived, I’ve had a chance to play around with Windows Media Center included with Windows Home Premium. I have clicked around Media Center before, so I had some idea of what to expect. I would also like to preface this by saying I haven’t used a TiVo before.

Media Center immediately makes me mad angry at my cable provider. I can’t get the digital channels, and obviously that includes the HD channels. That is a huge let down, because this product is excellent. It has features for every possible contingency. The guide is snappy, the interface is efficient and good looking, the program loads quickly, it’s generally very good all-around.

One thing I’ve noticed, is that the PVR functions are working without any hitches. On my Motorola 6416 PVR, which works just good enough that I don’t run it over in my car, pausing usually skips a couple frames, same for pressing play afterwards, sometimes the sound goes down, or the picture goes wonky. None of that happens in Media Center. It’s very polished by comparison.

Sports

As a sports fan, I suppose I could complain since there’s not dual tuners for PIP or using two channel buffers. However, this is pretty much as good as it gets with only one tuner. In the sports section, you get to watch a sporting event in a “windowed” screen. But, around the reduced size video, is a ticker of the other sports games across the top. So you may be watching the Calgary Flames game, but you’ll have the instant updates for other NHL games, the NBA games, MLB, NFL, Tennis, Golf, whatever is on. If you click on one, you go to that channel to watch the game.

Also, accross the bottom, there’s a news ticker. It’ll scroll news that you’d see on Fox’s sports website. You can scroll down and click on it, and it’ll take you to the article within the Media Center interface. This is excellent since it doesn’t launch a browser so you can read it all from your couch using just the regular remote control.

Along with news stories that appear on the bottom, it’ll also have game highlight updates from other channels. Things like “Sidney Crosby Scores”. When you click on that, it takes you to the appropriate channel. If you’re paying attention, you’ll be on that channel before the televised replay. It’s an excellent feature.

Searching

My Motorola box also has searching, but it’s really an exercise in patience to use it. In Media Center, searching is easy. The numbers on your remote work like the numbers on a phone. Each number has about 3 letters. As you type, you get real-time results. So you can just type until you see the show you want, saving you the most amount of time possible. Excellent.

Searching allows you to look for shows and movies by a number of categories. Title, keyword, genre, actor, director. What’s neat is say you search for “Sean Connery”, not only to you get the movies he’s been in that are playing in the next 2 weeks, you get all the movies he’s ever been in. You’ll see all the cover art for all the movie boxes, which is much nicer than scrolling through a list of text. Now, seeing all the movies at once doesn’t sound very useful. Who cares if he was in “Dr. No” if it’s not going to be on. Well, Media Center allows you to mark shows that aren’t necessarily on in the next two week to record eventually when they are on. I believe this is a stupendous feature. I could program Media Center to record the world movie premiere of whatever movie when it eventually comes out. I don’t have to think about it.

Online Content

Now I haven’t clicked on all my options here yet, but I did find some excellent features. For instance, you can find other related videos to certain content on the web. So, in my case, I was able to find some post-game sports interviews to watch. They stream right off the web. Awesome.

Media Center Extender

I have an Xbox 360, which I’ve finally been able to use as a Media Center Extender. I didn’t know exactly what it was going to be like, especially since I’m running my 360 wirelessly now. If you look at the network connection on my Xbox, the wireless signal is only 3 out of 4 bars.

This, however, was enough for me to stream HD content (on an 802.11g wireless network) to my Xbox with no frame rate issues whatsoever. It was actually quite exciting that it worked so well.

You can stream live tv, recorded shows, pictures, and music to your extender. There are really only two limitations to this interface. You cannot stream DivX videos with the media center interface. You can play DivX videos on the actual computer in media center, or through the Xbox (but not in the media center extender mode).

The other limitation is that you can’t stream a movie from a DVD in your media center computer to your Media Center Extender. But the Xbox 360 has a DVD drive already, why would I care about this? Well, I was hoping that would work because then I’d go buy a Blu-Ray drive for the computer and I’d have Blu-Ray movies on my big screen. Unfortunately, I was not that lucky. So close!

In Conclusion

I’ve really only had my computer hooked up to the analog cable for a day now, and I’m already really impressed. I’m wishing I had another Media Center computer to hook up to my cable box and then eliminate the need to use the cable-box’s software. I’m also wishing that Canada would go cable card or something similar so that I could get my HD directly into my computer. It’s when I see the potential of things like this that I wish I lived in the US.

All in all, I’m going to be looking forward to getting a flatscreen TV and a comfortable couch/chair in my computer room.