During my two weeks with the Palm Pre, the one thing I missed the most was how it notified me of new e-mail on all of my accounts via push. Any time an e-mail arrived in my inbox — regardless of which account it was — the Pre would light up and show me a short preview of the e-mail. If it was junk mail, I could avoid having to open up my mail just to be disappointed (same goes for random e-mails from friends or colleagues that aren’t time-sensitive).
On the iPhone, even with OS 3.0, there are only two options for push e-mail: MobileMe (which I have, and use for personal e-mail) or an Exchange account. But even with those, I’m still not getting the same experience from the Pre — I still have to actually unlock the phone and go into Mail (which kills the battery faster) instead of the iPhone displaying a preview notification.
I speak, of course, of the iPhone, and in particular, the great App Store that swung open its doors little more than a year ago. As any iPhone user can attest to, it’s a veritable playground of extra functionality that spoils us with every new release. Sure, other cell phones have had applications in the past (and most of them are scrambling to catch up to Apple even now), but let’s face it… they were kludges at best, and few people really used them as a result. The iPhone is clearly a mini-computer that happens to also make phone calls, and the success of the App Store is a testament to why cell phone carriers are nervous about their own little Berlin Wall that’s coming down now, a few bricks at a time.
But make no mistake, AT&T (aka “the Empire”) is striking back, and it’s going to take some great innovation and technology with it if it’s not careful. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s been quite a kerfuffle (if I can use that word in a sentence) going on in blog comments and forum threads around the ‘Net this week, since Monday’s Apple WWDC keynote announcing the new iPhone 3Gs model landing on June 19.
Aaaand, I’m back. Today’s Apple WWDC keynote (and subsequent iPhone-related announcements) sort of distracted me from finishing my Palm Pre post, so I split it into two parts for ease of reading.
The Palm Pre has been exhaustively reviewed and dissected on numerous blogs by now, so I won’t go into a thorough review, but rather spend the rest of this second part discussing some minutiae that I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere as much. To me, it’s the small “gotchas” that make or break handsets like this, so hunker down and let’s get started.
Just a quickie sandwiched in-between the Palm Pre chatter. As predicted by many, Apple today announced the iPhone 3G S, a new model which adds a faster processor, faster 3G data transfer speeds, an upgraded, 3 megapixel camera with video recording & editing, voice control and digital compass, available Friday, June 19 for $199 (16 GB) or $299 (32 GB). And hey, from the outside it’s exactly the same as the current model, which means all of your cases, screen protectors and accessories will get another year’s worth of value for a change.
Also announced was the availability of iPhone OS 3.0 next Wednesday, June 17… which will certainly mark an unbearable 48 hours of waiting for me, since my current iPhone 3G is happily jailbroken & unlocked, and I want to keep it as such so I can sell it on eBay, or possibly to one of my wife’s friends in Ukraine, and subsidize some of the $499 I’ll have to pay for upgrading to the new model, since I’m only halfway through the 2-year contract from last year. (Bah!)
Kudos to Apple for the new model, and for not making us wait until July to get our hands on OS 3.0… that would have killed me. LOL
Unable to contain the lust I described in such detail back on May 19, I lined up this past Saturday with thousands (?!) of others to get a taste of the new Palm Pre (available exclusively from Sprint). For those who haven’t been paying attention, the Pre is basically a make-or-break handset for Palm (and to a lesser degree, Sprint, who has been bleeding customers for quite some time).
So, now that I’ve had my hands on a Pre for 48 hours, does it walk on water or can it barely swim? That depends on your expectations, and ultimately, your patience as a user. Read the rest of this entry »
Man oh man, it’s a great time to be a touchscreen gadget lover… that is, if you’ve got deep pockets or service with most of the major carriers in the U.S. (which I don’t, sadly). There is a veritable tidal wave of new phones coming this summer, beginning this Saturday, June 6, with the long-awaited Palm Pre from Sprint that I was salivating over last time.
Look, I love my iPhone. I was one of the original nutballs who sat outside my local AT&T store on June 29, 2007 for 5 hours to make sure I got one, and then repeated that the following July with a 6-hour wait outside an Apple Store for the iPhone 3G. And I’m a faithful kind of guy, both in life and in gadgets.
But sometimes, something comes along that makes you lust for it just a little too much. And thankfully, when it comes to gadgets, it’s perfectly legal to have two wives. But does it make any sense? Read the rest of this entry »
Last year at this time, I first discovered the Archos 605 Wi-Fi Portable Media Player. As anyone who reads this blog probably realizes, I’m a bit of a gadget nut but most of my media-playing allegiance has gone to Apple’s iPod and iPhone. (I skipped the Apple TV originally because I’m more of a renter than a buyer these days, which has since been addressed. My living room still is without an Apple TV.) Read the rest of this entry »
While I was off vacationing in Ukraine the last couple of weeks, Apple pushed a huge update to the iPhone with version 2.1 of the software. I never got a chance to bitch-blog about the headaches I was having with insanely long backup times and having to delete & reinstall applications for the last few weeks because of major bugs in the 2.x system, but thankfully they’re all a memory.
Long story short, if you have an iPhone, you owe it to yourself to download iTunes 8 and iPhone 2.1. Applications install (and delete) way faster, backups are finally as zippy as they always should have been, music playlists now feature the artist name under the song titles and yes, no more of this nonsense with applications ceasing to work for no reason. Oh, and you’re supposed to get longer battery life and better 3G reception, which seems to be the case on my end. Kudos to Jobs & Co. on this one!
. As anyone who reads this blog probably realizes, I’m a bit of a gadget nut but most of my media-playing allegiance has gone to Apple’s iPod and iPhone. (
