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April 13, 2009

iPhone Case Review: iSkin Solo FX

I call this: phones — Posted by KP @ 9:46 pm

I’m not a big fan of iPhone cases. I prefer to install the Zagg InvisibleShield, which is like a millimeter thin skin with a somewhat grippy surface, and be done with it. It adds almost no thickness to the phone, and is pretty much invisible.

However, my InvisibleShield has started to peel in a couple places, and that, combined with the fact that we have 5 iPhones on our crew bus, and all but mine are in cases of varying coolness, somehow got me researching iPhone cases again.

The only one I liked was the Solo from iSkin, which is pretty much only available online. There’s the regular Solo, and the Solo FX. I will let their graphic explain:

They are basically the same case, except the solo is a solid primary color, and the FX comes in more funky colors, with a circular pattern.  I went with the orange one.

The other difference you can’t see is in the screen protector it comes with.  The regular solo is a plain clear protector.  The FX comes with a mirrored screen protector.  This inherently sounds like a bad idea to me, and when I received the case this was proven.  The mirrored finish looks cool, and would be pretty handy as a mirror, but it creates a pinkish cast to the screen, and similar to a glossy screen on a computer, picks up reflections which make it harder to read the screen.  Most of all, though, I don’t know why anyone would want a protector that affects the tint of the screen.  I’ve never felt it necessary to use a screen protector on the iPhone due to its glass surface which is very resistant to everyday scratches, so trying the protector on was more of a curiosity.

As someone not a fan of cases in general, I really like this one.  The material is somewhere halfway between a hard plastic case and the more rubbery ones.  It’s kind of a jelly-like plastic, which is very flexible, but doesn’t have the extreme grippy powers that make other cases hard to get in and out of a pocket.  It has enough tack to it that it easily keeps the phone still on a tabletop or in your hand.

All the buttons are covered by the case except the silencer switch, which has a cutout.  There is also a cutout for the camera and headphone port.  I’m not sure how it would do with more chunky headphone connectors than the one the iPhone comes with, but if you really had to I don’t think it would be hard to cut the hole out bigger.  There is also a long cutout at the bottom for the dock connector and mic and speaker openings.  The case does not fit in the standard Apple dock (like pretty much any case I’ve ever heard of, except for the InvisibleShield and similar products), which is a bit of a compromise for me, since I like having the dock at my bedside.  I also found that my old-style iPod cable (with a larger connector and the two tabs you have to push in to disconnect the cable) is a teeny bit wider and took a little forcing to get through the gap in the case, so I recommend using a newer cable like the one that comes with the phone.

One other minor complaint is that the power button is a little tough to press through the case.  Personally I find that button harder to press than it should be under any circumstances, so I don’t think it’s really the fault of the case.  It just requires a firmer press than usual, and gives little feedback that you’ve actually depressed the button, until you see the screen react.

Overall I think the case looks cool.  It’s semi-transparent, so you can still see the Apple logo on the back, if that matters to you.  I’m sure it looks even better on a white iPhone where the color will really come out, but it adds some color and personalization to the black phone as well.  It also does a cool thing when it’s under a strong light, it almost seems to glow, and the color becomes brighter.

Here are some pics of mine. I purposely left the flash off because it was making the color seem a little brighter than it is under normal light.

UPDATE: Because the iPhone 3GS has the same dimensions as the 3G, it works just as well.

Update – Jan 2010

Last time I was in the Apple Store (Mall of America), they had some of these in stock. Nice to see they’re being carried in stores now.


January 25, 2009

iPhone Apps for Stage Managers, Round 2

I call this: phones,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:51 pm

UPDATE: For a current list of apps see the Apps Page

For my initial review of helpful apps for stage managers, read this.

I’ve now had the iPhone for about six months, and the App Store has grown exponentially with new and updated apps, so here is another check-in on what I’m finding useful for stage management and life. All links will take you to the App Store page.

TimeCalc ($1.99) still remains the greatest single contribution of the iPhone to stage management, as far as I’m concerned. I use it every single day. Right now I use it most because the Guthrie requires an 18-minute intermission. Sucking at math as I do, I prefer to input the time the first act ended, and add 18 minutes to it.

Night Camera ($0.99) is a really cool camera app that has completely replaced the built-in camera for me. The gist is that it uses the accelerometer to tell when you are holding the phone perfectly still and takes the picture at that moment. It is so named because it creates much better pictures in low light (which is great for theatre), but also takes better pictures in any light, in my experience. Below is an example of a picture I took in tech, during a very dark cue. I’m no Joan Marcus, but for a midrange phone camera, you can see what it’s a picture of, and I think that’s the most anyone can ask for. The regular camera app would probably have shown a black screen with a red blob in the middle.

MobileFotos is more of a fun app — it is a Flickr upload client, which I’m sure you could justify as a work-related app if you used Flickr to upload and share work photos of some sort — which now that I think about it is not a bad idea for things like documenting the proper look of light cues or scenery on stage). I use the app to update my Flickr stream, which is linked in the sidebar, with photos from my tour. It also is a nice way to pass the time by looking at other people’s photos. It’s very full-featured and nicely laid out.

Night Stand (Free) is used for one thing in my world: it tells the time down to the second. For some reason the iPhone doesn’t seem to have an app or an option somewhere that can show the time in seconds. A minute is a very long time when your director wants to know why the 2nd act got 30 seconds longer today. Personally, I take my running times down to the nearest 5 seconds. I’ve just started using Night Stand, and it’s very good at the one thing it does. Just a few days ago it was updated with some alarm features, but because apps can’t stay active in the background, there’s not much point to using a 3rd-party alarm app, since you can’t do anything else with the phone while waiting for the alarm to go off. I’m also looking at getting LCDClock or Table Clock, which are both $0.99.

Delivery Status Touch ($1.99) is the iPhone companion to the dashboard widget Delivery Status, which has long been a favorite of mine. It tracks packages from the major delivery services, and when you sign up on the developer’s site, it will sync your deliveries from the desktop widget with your phone (which is invaluable for entering tracking numbers since the phone doesn’t have copy/paste).

On the jailbroken front, I use PowerTool to restart my springboard when the phone gets a little sluggish. It can also trigger a full reboot or power down.

The most useful app, whether official or jailbroken, in my mind is PDANet (link goes to website), which has a long history of allowing tethering on Palm devices and others, and is now available for jailbroken iPhones. If you create an ad-hoc wireless network with your computer and join said network with your iPhone, PDANet will allow you to use the phone’s internet connection through your computer. Since AT&T has decided they don’t want our money (yet?) for this service, after a 14-day free trial, you can instead pay PDANet’s one-time registration (I think it’s about $30) for the ability to tether anytime and anywhere. This comes with all the usual warnings about tethering — it’s not allowed under your contract, don’t use enough data that AT&T will wonder where it’s going, etc. If you’re jailbreaking your phone you probably know all about what AT&T doesn’t want you to do already. It’s pretty expensive for an app that violates your data contract and could cease working with a future update, but in my mind there is no price that can be put on this feature.

I often hear people talk about how tethering is useless (or not useful enough to be bothered with). I think these people must get paid a regular salary, file one or two W-2s per year with the IRS, and spend most of their time at a “desk” or in an “office” or “the same place of business every day” where things like “phones” and “internet” are provided by their employer. For those of us whose jobs are a little less predictable, but still desperately need full desktop internet access HERE and NOW, not in 10 minutes, not at the Starbucks down the street, and who have to provide this level of efficiency but aren’t paid enough to afford a wireless broadband card for the laptop, tethering is the only option. I once distributed a rehearsal schedule while sitting in the trunk of my car in a restaurant parking lot. And I have done plenty of shows which rehearsed or performed for weeks in a room (or a building) with no internet available. For reasons such as this, I refuse to have a phone incapable of tethering, whether legally or illegally. When the 3G iPhone came out, before the tethering apps were available, I had to carry my previous phone, the AT&T Tilt, around in my bag so I could swap the SIM card into it if I needed to tether in an emergency. Obviously it was a huge pain, and I am very glad to see that PDANet has pretty much perfected the art of tethering on the iPhone to make it as reliable and simple as it can be without official support.


A Sonnet

I call this: mac,On the Road Again,phones,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:47 am

Tonight I write a poem with pen and pad
Upon this two-show day of Henry V.
My iPhone rests behind my chair plugged in,
The cord supplied of insufficient length.
O what can I with simple paper do
Of import that would match my Facebook’s state?
An email might for many minutes sit
Unknown, unread, devoid of swift reply.
Tomorrow’s weather stays a mystery,
No picture sent to Flickr when it’s took.
I fear a post comes from my favorite blog,
And yet I’ll know it not upon this hour —
Perhaps to wait until I reach my home.
And oh for shame, however will I know
One of my apps perhaps is obsolete,
An update waiting in the App Store now
That was not there to get an hour past.
The world is changing, yet I can’t be told,
But sit and call a show five centuries old.


December 4, 2008

An Observation on iPhone Battery Life from the Bowels of the Earth

I call this: phones — Posted by KP @ 11:31 pm

We’re teching The Spy at Baruch college, at the Nagelberg Theatre which is on level B3, so somewhere in the earth’s mantle, which I can only assume is why the A/C is always cranked so high.  Of course cell service is nonexistant, and since the internal walls are made of generous helpings of concrete, even getting wifi from our production office to the house (probably about 60ft, if crows flew underground through concrete) took two days and two routers to pass the signal so we can get it at the tech tables.  I never quite managed to get it to the booth.

Once I had established our lifeline to the outside world, I kept my iPhone with wifi on and the cell radio off all day (if you don’t know how to do this, put it in airplane mode first, then turn wifi back on.) I was expecting that keeping an active wifi connection all day would kill the battery, so much so that I negotiated an electronics deal with Ian, that I would lend him my Macbook 2-prong power adapter if I could charge my phone from his tech table’s power, since the power strip on mine was being taken up by frivolous things like the light board, sound computer, and LittleLites.  As it turns out I have never needed to charge it in the middle of the day.

During tech I’ve been underground for 12-15 hours a day, off the charger for 18 hours or more, and only once did I come home with the 20% battery warning.  Some days the battery was hardly drained at all.  On an average day above ground, using only 3G and maybe a little bit of wifi, I almost always am pushing the limits of the battery by the time I get home. Plus, my commute to Baruch is longer, so the phone spends more time per day playing music.

All of this just to say that I was surprised to find that the wifi radio uses so much less power than the cell radio.


September 18, 2008

iPhone Wallpaper

I call this: mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 1:20 pm

I’ve created a wallpaper for my iPhone that I’m liking so much, I might as well share it.  Here it is.  I have no idea what it is.  I guess it’s some kind of rainbow laser beam, which as far as I know is a physical impossibility.  But it looks kind of cool as a lock screen wallpaper (especially when an alert pops up in front of it).  If you have a jailbroken iPhone and use Winterboard to customize your home screen, it also looks pretty cool as a background behind your icons.  It’s a good fit for me because I like the default look of the home screen, so I don’t want to customize it with something too crazy.  This keeps the basic appearance the same, but just adds a nice extra touch (see below).

If you like it you can click on the thumbnail above and get it in full size. If you want to post it somewhere feel free, but please link to this site, and don’t sell it or do anything stupid like that, and that’s fine with me.

UPDATE: 8/31/10

I now have an iPhone 4, and decided to dig up this file and make a Retina Display-compatible version, in 640×960 resolution. Click below to get it full size.


September 14, 2008

Cycorder Tutorial For Mac Users Who Hate Terminal

I call this: mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 11:06 am

I mentioned in my roundup of useful iPhone apps, the video recording app Cycorder.  It requires your iPhone to be jailbroken (which I’m not going to get into, but this is the blog of the team of hackers who develop the jailbreaking software, which will have the latest software and info).

I’m going to assume that your iPhone is jailbroken and you’re on a Mac (there are ways to do this on the PC, I just don’t have the experience or interest to do it just for the hell of it).  I am also doing this in Leopard, so the part about the Finder would look a little different in other versions of OS X.

Cydia is the primary app for downloading unauthorized software onto your jailbroken iPhone.  It will appear in your list of apps once you have jailbroken.  

The apps you will need to download in Cydia are:
1. OpenSSH (so you can access your iPhone through Terminal on your Mac)

2. Cycorder (the app we’re talking about here)

3. Netatalk (so we don’t have to use terminal anymore)

You can go ahead and install them all at once.  Only Cycorder will show up as an icon with your apps.  The other two are background apps.

Cycorder will function as an app on its own, happily shooting videos and playing them back for you on the phone.   If you want to move the videos off the phone, this is where the other stuff comes in.  Netatalk gives your phone support for standard Apple file sharing.  Once it’s installed, if your iPhone is on the same wireless network as your Mac, it will show up in your Finder under “shared.”  (If you don’t have access to a wireless router, just create a network with your Mac using the “Create network” option in the airport menu, and call it whatever you want.  Then have the iPhone join the network.)

So now you see your phone in the Shared section of your Finder, and when you click on it it will probably say “Connection failed.” Click the button “Connect As” in the upper-right and it will bring up a username/password window.  Make the name “mobile” and the password “alpine” (the default iPhone password) and it will give you access to your files.   The folder you’re looking for is Mobile/Media/Videos, in there you will find the videos you took with Cycorder, in handy .mov Quicktime format.

Now you have what you want.  You would be done, provided you never find yourself on the same network as someone who knows something about iPhone hacking and wants to take a look at your files.  So it’s a good idea to change the password for the iPhone’s “Mobile” user from “alpine” to, well, anything else.   Now we have to use the Terminal, just for a second.

1. Make sure your phone is on the same network as your Mac.

2. On the phone, go to settings, wifi, and then click the little “>” arrow for the network you are on to bring up details.

3. Look at the IP Address.

4. On your Mac, open Terminal

5. Type ssh mobile@[the IP address from the phone] and hit enter.

6. Terminal will probably think for a minute, then ask if you’re sure you want to connect.  Say yes.

7. It will then ask for the password.  Type alpine and hit enter.

8. You will now be at the command prompt.  Time to change the password.

Type passwd mobile and hit enter.

9. It will ask for the original password (alpine), and then for the new password, and then for the new password again to confirm.  Make the password whatever you want.

10. We also need to change the password for the phone’s “root” user, which is also “alpine,” because the same random hacker on your network could also get in there and cause lots of trouble.  The process is the same.  Follow the steps again, except type “root” instead of “mobile” and change the password to whatever you want.

11. When you’re done, type exit and hit enter, and close Terminal forever.

From now on when you connect to the iPhone through the Finder you will enter the name “mobile” and the password will be the new one you chose.  You can check “remember this password” and never have to enter it again if you like.  The important thing is that some random person who connects to your network won’t know what the password is.

Enjoy!


September 3, 2008

The iPhone App Store and Stage Management (and Fun)

I call this: mac,phones,theatre — Posted by KP @ 8:07 am

UPDATE: A current list of my most-used apps is kept on the Apps Page.

Well I’m in music rehearsals for a NYMF show (Twilight in Manchego), so this means you get some blog posts while I sit doing mostly nothing to the soothing sounds of Chuck Cooper learning his music.

Today my topic is a roundup of what I’m using on my iPhone to make my job, and life, easier.  My initial reactions can be found in this post.

Time:Calc $1.99
Some people reviewing on the app store don’t seem to get this.  “Why would you need a calculator to work with time?  Just do it in your head.” These people obviously don’t understand that there are people who suck at math, or the enormous amount of time calculations a stage manager does all day long, and moreover, that there are stage managers who suck at math.  This app is so amazing, I use it all the time.  I’ve gotten pretty good in my career at calculating in 1hr 20 min blocks (the standard Equity break schedule), but for more difficult calculations, like running time down to the second (i.e. 8:05:30 – 9:21:35), there is much more room for error.  Some conductors will drive themselves crazy over a few seconds variation in the running time, no need to freak everybody out with bad math when it can be done with instant accuracy on the calculator.  This is of course for situations where you don’t enter the run times in a report that calculates it for you.  But whatevs, I don’t spend my whole life on Broadway, you know, and I don’t need to create a database for a show that runs 10 performances or less.  This app is attractive, cheap, and works exactly how you think it should.

OmniFocus $19.99
This app is pretty expensive at $20, but I find it worth the cost.  I can’t afford the desktop companion, but I like keeping everything on my phone in one place anyway.  It also backs up to my iDisk, which is great, since I’m often updating my firmware and reinstalling my apps because the App Store/iTunes is busted.  I was looking for a simple Todo app, and found all the ones I tried suck.  So I decided to go for a very not-simple app instead.  I won’t go into all the details, but it’s location-aware (so you can see a list of tasks based on which are closest to your current location), very powerful with multiple ways to organize projects and contexts in multiple sublevels, and it’s a neat and clean interface that’s very finger-friendly while containing tons of information.   Considering I stopped using Todos altogether with Windows Mobile because the app was such a pain, I feel my life getting a bit more organized already.

iTransNYC $4.99
Much better than the cheaper alternative, it contains a very clean subway map, on which you can tap on a station to see a list of the trains that stop there and their schedules (which are never right, but I blame that on the MTA, not on the app).  It can put your current location on the map.  It gives you service changes as well as current alerts, like trains skipping a station because of police activity.  It can also do directions from one station to another (not from addresses, but I don’t find this to be a big problem in my life), and it will tell you where you need to transfer if necessary and give you a time estimate.  I have no idea if the time estimate is accurate, probably not, but again that’s the MTA’s problem.   It’s got my daily commute at 23 minutes, which is pretty damn close to my estimate of 25 mins, on a good day.  But if all estimates are assumed to be on a good day, at least that gives you an idea.   The best part of the app is that most of the features (including the route calculation, impressively) can be used offline, which is essential for anyone living in New York, where the majority of the time I’m looking something up on my phone I’m underground.   The service advisories are cached, although you have to remember to open the app above ground and download new ones if you want them to be up to date.  That other app, CitytransitNYC, looks up service advisories, but does it live, it can’t show them to you once you’re underground, which is close to useless if you’re debating whether or not to change your travel plans en route.

Weatherbug Free
I don’t trust the built-in weather app for a second — literally I don’t trust it to tell me what’s going on right now, much less in an hour or tomorrow.  Weatherbug is more detailed and also gives advisories on serious weather conditions.  At Reagle I used it to warn me when I was about to get struck by lighting in the parking lot.  This isn’t exactly job related (unless you’re doing outdoor theatre, in which case it might be the most important app you have), but I feel it’s one of those secondary jobs of the stage manager to have an answer for everything, including whether it’s going to rain on our day off.

Flashlight Free, requires jailbreak
There are a number of flashlight apps.  The one I use requires the phone to be jailbroken, because it makes the screen brighter than Apple will allow the official apps to be.  But if you don’t want to go that route, there are some on the App Store, many free.  Personally I think if you have to resort to this you have failed as a stage manager, but not as epic of a failure as if you don’t have a flashlight and don’t have this app.

Files $6.99
When I was looking for an app to put documents on my phone, I had three requirements: doesn’t require a proprietary desktop app, displays the documents well, and has a pretty interface.  This app has all three, so I’m happy.  If you’ve got your phone on the same network as your computer, it tells you what address to put in to mount your iPhone in the Finder (I assume it works on a PC, probably not as simply).  I keep a PDF of the Equity rulebook for whatever contract I’m working on, the script, calendar, schedule and contact sheet for my current show, and whatever else I need.

Wikipanion Free
An app to easily search Wikipedia without having to load the rather phone-unfriendly web page. I suppose this could be used for legitimate rehearsal research, but what I find myself using Wikipedia most for while working is looking up trivia that comes up while running a show.  It can be hard to do while calling some shows, but generally you can find someone on the crew who plays on their laptop while doing their not-so-demanding job. For example when I was doing Annie this summer, during the cabinet scene Morganthau is introduced as “Acting Secretary of the Treasury.” Why was he acting secretary, and what happened to the real secretary of the treasury?  Wikipedia can tell you.  I expect this app to make it much easier to answer these kind of burning questions when it’s not practical to have a laptop backstage.

UPDATE: 1 More!
Cycorder Free, requires jailbreak
This is a video-recording app which takes very good quality video for a phone camera.  It did not originally support audio in its first release, but it does now.  It’s free, and supported by advertising which is very subtle and non-intrusive, and very much appreciated as an alternative to the other video app which costs money (which I think is rather silly for an app that is technically not supported on the phone and could be disabled by Apple at any point in the future). The app doesn’t have a built-in way to get videos off the iPhone, so it requires a little more computer knowledge to do that.  I don’t know much about UNIX and I’m not a fan of using the terminal to work with files, so the method I prefer is to install an app through Cydia called Netatalk, which makes your iPhone able to communicate with a Mac through standard Apple filesharing, so if the phone and Mac are on the same network, you will automatically see the phone in your Finder under “shared.”  From there you can log into the phone and browse to the folder where the videos are stored.  Check out this post for a tutorial on how to do this.


The Penny is Relevant Again!

I call this: mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 7:56 am

This may be the only thing giving purpose to coins in the 21st Century.

Coinstar has begun offering gift certificates in place of cash receipts for coins. Doesn’t sound that interesting yet, right? OK, Coinstar is now offering iTunes gift certificates for coins, AND, you don’t pay any kind of fee on the amount you deposit. If you have $4.28 in coins sitting in a drawer or bowl somewhere, you get $4.28 to spend on the music or iPhone/iPod apps of your choice. This, combined with the fact that Duane Reade is now installing Coinstar machines in many of their stores, has made my app purchases for my iPhone essentially free.  I even bought the one that looks like a lighter, just because I can (iLightr, it’s much more realistic and interactive than the others, though I don’t recommend buying it with money that didn’t come from your metaphorical couch cushions).

Anyway, this development has brought me great happiness, and turned change from a nuisance into an easy way to pay for apps and music.


July 14, 2008

3G iPhone!!!!!!

I call this: mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 3:57 pm

So I got a 3G iPhone this weekend. In brief, it’s everything I thought it would be: incredibly cool, and lacking a number of obvious features that I hope I can live without.

Things I LOOOVE:
MobileMe (when it works). Push seems to work sometimes and not others. Sometimes my phone receives mail before the desktop, and sometimes it seems to forget to check. The other thing to know (which Apple never really made clear) is that push only works on the iPhone and the MobileMe servers, your desktop will not push out to the “cloud,” only at 15 minute intervals. I can see how this will result in things getting completely out of sync.

I woke up this morning to see that about 700 of my contacts were gone. They still existed on my Mac and on MobileMe, so everything was fine, but somehow the phone lost them. Not sure what’s going on with that. I love the idea of what MobileMe is, and I can’t believe it’s taken Apple so long to get something going on the concept of “Exchange for the rest of us.” I don’t work in a corporate environment, but my job could sure benefit from Exchange-type features, and Apple was just the company to do it. I’m glad to see that’s finally taking shape. I just hope it’s more reliable than .Mac was. So far it would seem… no. But it’s only been like 4 days.

Coming from AT&T’s Tilt (aka HTC’s Kaiser), which has horrible video performance, the UI is just gorgeous. This is not something really particular to the new iPhone, but it’s nice to finally get to experience a responsive UI. There are a lot of things that are just iPhone-specific that I’m now getting to enjoy for the first time. Like a wifi setup that’s easy enough to do that I actually bother to activate it to take advantage of the higher speeds. On the Tilt it was such a pain that using AT&T’s network everywhere was faster and more reliable in the long run.

The camera is actually really good so far. It is what it is, and I know other people expected an upgrade, but this 2MP camera takes much better photos than the 3MP one on the Tilt. It seems to do pretty well in low light conditions as well.

Google Maps — so much better than the versions available for other phones. Most of all, the bookmarks. I don’t understand why all the other versions don’t have an easy way of saving locations you use all the time. It works basically like other versions, I haven’t tried the turn-by-turn directions on the road yet. I did get completely lost driving in Boston last night and the GPS helped me escape back to the safety of the Mass Pike in just a few minutes, using just the time I had while stopped at red lights. I didn’t actually do a search for directions, just pressed the button to find my location and looked at the map to figure out which street I had to get on. The GPS link is very fast (probably using a combination of cell location, that wifi-search-thing they’re using, and actual GPS — but I think the real GPS must work quickly because the location is too accurate to be anything else). My Tilt could take minutes to get a GPS lock, if ever.

The App Store I’m a bit addicted to the App Store at the moment, seeing all there is to see. I have always bought tons of software for my phones, but this is the first platform I’ve used where free trials aren’t the norm. I haven’t made any purchases that I really regret, but I know they’re coming.

So far I have: Super Monkey Ball (just because it’s the “in” thing to buy — it’s cool)
MotoRacer (just to play with the accelerometer in a racing game)
Enigmo (a puzzle game which got great reviews — I like it)
SplashID (a secure password and personal info app which I’ve used for probably 7 years now on Palm)
Citytransit New York (I’m away from home right now, but this is a really cool subway / train map and service advisory program which I can’t wait to put to use)

I haven’t gone crazy with the free apps, but these are the ones I have:
Remote (Apple’s own app to control iTunes on your Mac or AppleTV via wifi)
NY Times (nice format for checking out what’s going on in the world while bored)
IGN Reviews (for those times when I’m in a game store and need to read a review fast)
Shazam (listens to a song and tells you the name and artist — seems to work well, even on showtunes)
Facebook (quite limited, but good for quick status updates and stuff)

BAD THINGS:
No ability to send mail from an alias. I have 3 aliases in addition to my main account on MobileMe. Unlike on the desktop Mail app (or any other phone app I’ve ever used) there’s no way to send an outgoing message from one of the other aliases. It’s not something I need too often, but it’s making me consider switching away from my MobileMe account and getting a bunch of gmail accounts for my secondary emails instead.

Copy and paste (of course). Have only needed it once so far in the last 3 days, when someone texted me and asked for someone else’s phone number.

Tethering: I would gladly pay AT&T more if I had to in order to get Bluetooth tethering support. I use it CONSTANTLY at work, and kind of can’t live without it. I often work in places without internet access, so I need to bring my own, and doing everything on the phone is not enough — I need my laptop to be able to get online. The only way I managed to buy the iPhone at all is with the hope that if I had to I could stick the SIM card in my Tilt and tether that way (I hope). But that involves carrying the Tilt around and keeping it charged. Once the new software is jailbroken there should be a way to do it. I just hope that happens soon. I really wouldn’t mind doing it legally, if AT&T were willing to take my money, but I guess they’re not.

I read on a theatrically-minded review that you can’t turn off the cell radio without going into airplane mode, meaning you can’t use wifi with the cell radio off. I have happily found that this is not true! You go into airplane mode and it will shut off all radios, but you can then turn the wifi radio back on. This is very helpful for theatrical types because phone radios (particularly GSM) cause interference with speakers and wireless headsets, and the sound people and anyone on headset with you will hate you if you leave your phone on during a show. But wifi frequencies do not cause this problem, so I’m used to using wifi to continue to have data access when I need to turn my phone off, and I’m glad to see the lack of this was just a false alarm.

Anyway, so far I’m very happy, and I know this is just the beginning for MobileMe and the App Store, and there should be some new stuff coming soon.


July 2, 2007

Treo 700p and my first time touching an iPhone

I call this: phones — Posted by KP @ 8:19 pm

As you may know, for the last several months I’ve had my eye on the Treo 755p, which came out for Sprint in May, and has been reportedly on its way to Verizon by July. Well despite rumors of a July 4 release, there’s been no word on it, and today I read this post on TreoCentral claiming it failed its testing and will suffer further delays. My Treo 650’s talk time is now down under 3 minutes from a full charge, and I’m getting sick of how out of date it is, especially since everyone’s complaining about how slow the iPhone’s data connection is, while it’s several times faster than my Treo. In order to remind myself why I don’t have an iPhone, I must have a device that is faster. So I weighed my options (everything from getting an iPhone just to spite Verizon, to a Windows Mobile device, to a $40 battery for the 650.) I decided to suck it up and do the logical thing — get the 700p, which is exactly the same as the 755p except without the slick new form factor. I even get to keep my current SD card instead of having to buy a Mini-SD.

So I called up a nearby Verizon store and had them hold one for me. It took over an hour to get it, as they were quite crowded, and then they had some problems activating it. Unbeknownst to me, the long-awaited 700p maintenance release (read: Palm released a buggy phone a year ago and has just gotten around to patching it) just came out for Verizon yesterday. I hadn’t heard anything about it on the internet, which really surprised me when the technician came out and explained that he had just installed the patch on all the Treos in their stock and it had probably patched badly or something. After some time he got one working and I went home.

I also decided to go ahead with the purchase because I actually wanted to renew my contract with the Evil Empire. My current plan is very expensive ($124/mo.), and I wanted to scale it down and add basic text messaging. I didn’t realize until I got there and talked to the rep that in the two years I’ve had my plan they’ve actually come up with a cheaper one (imagine that!), because there’s a phone+data plan now, which saves you $5. At the time I last renewed there was no such combo package. So I saved $5 on the combo (which I promptly spent on the TXT plan), and I also reduced from 900 minutes to 450. I will have to keep an eye on that to make sure it’s enough. When I’m really busy my usage can get up to 500, so I’ll have to be smart about it. Ever since my parents got Macs and broadband, we use iChat instead of the phone, so that has probably reduced my usage by 100-200 minutes alone.

I feel like a cassette tape user describing to you the wonders of the CD player, so I’m not going to go into any details about what’s special about the 700p, at least until I’ve used it some more. To me it’s a nice upgrade, though.

While I was waiting for my turn to have my phone activated, I had a lot of time to kill in the store, so I played with all the other smartphones that I had considered getting. To cut to the chase, all of them sucked. No question, I didn’t want any of them, and once I tried them, I had no regrets about going with the 700p. I’ve never owned a Windows Mobile device, and have always wondered if perhaps I was missing something. When a friend will let me play with their phone I try to get a feel for it, but there’s little you can mess around with without screwing up your friend’s phone. A store display model is much easier to work with. I’m sure there are ways of customizing them, but neither the Blackberry or WinMobile UIs appealed to me at all. I’m sick to death of Palm OS, but I didn’t find the others very usable.

When I arrived at the mall, I thought, “Oh cool, when I’m done I can go to the Apple Store and look at the iPhone.” Then I decided perhaps it would be a better idea to look at the iPhone before buying the Treo, just in case the Apple Reality Distortion Field really was that strong. Well, obviously I made it out of the store, but I can’t say I did it with confidence. I think I was shaking a little. God, it’s pretty. If it wasn’t for my strong distrust of AT&T, I’d have overlooked all the phone’s other flaws and walked out of the store with one.

In brief, I found the touchscreen to be a little difficult. Every device responds best to a different amount of pressure, I’ve learned this from all my years with Palm, so maybe it was just that adjustment, but I found it sometimes didn’t respond right away, or in exactly the way I touched it. When viewing web pages I sometimes had to poke at it multiple times to get it to click on a link. Everyone is saying “trust the keyboard.” I found this to be true. When using it in portrait, I made quite a few mistakes, but the software correctly predicted what I was trying to type. I’ve heard in landscape mode it’s more accurate because the keyboard is a little bigger. I didn’t spend much time trying it that way. Overall, I agree with the general consensus online, it’s an amazing piece of work. The screen is beautiful, and the design makes you just want to keep using it. I am more than ever looking forward to seeing what the next version can do.


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