Archive for July 29th, 2008
Facebook ditches Scrabulous. Adobe releases 64-bit Photoshop Lightroom 2. Microsoft shows off new spherical display device. Get your own jetpack for $100,000. Dell bringing out mini-desktop, perhaps a smart phone and Wal-Mart laptops. 70-percent of Government laptops are stupidly unencrypted. DS piracy rampant in Japan. India going to develop a $10 Laptop. Will Android merge with Symbian. China to clone Blu-ray with new standard.
Click to listen:
It has been 18 days since the release of the long hailed, hyped, and over marketed iPhone 3G. Has it lived up to the hype?
I have heard it said that “if you don’t have a love hate relationship with Apple, then you are just a fanboy.” This is a very true statement. I am an apple believer. I see Steve Jobs as a visionary who, barring health problems, will be pivotal in taking consumer electronics into the future. However, I also know enough to avoid the fanboy filled lines for newly released apple products. Why? Because straight out of the gate, Apple generally FAILS. They get it right fairly quick after the release, but the initial release is not usually a pleasant experience.
So, was it different for the iPhone? NO. We all remember the abysmmal launch that saw outages both in the at&t activation servers, and also the iTunes activation process. Lines that should have taken an hour took most of the day because the purchase time wasn’t a swift 5 minute process, like the previous iPhone, but an excruciating 30 minutes to an hour. Even after all that time spent, many were walking out with unactivated iPhones.
After nearly 3 weeks, if you want an iPhone you still get to stand in line.
What about the lucky ones who got their phones and were able to activate them? A friend of mine is on his fifth iPhone 3G and is convinced that the black iPhones are cursed and has switched to the white iPhone. I am sure there is no difference, but he has had battery problems, overheating problems, antenna problems, and apparently one of the iPhone’s got ghetto and cut him…
What about the app store? This, I believe, has been the saving grace for the iPhone. The app store is awesome. Providing needed functions and add-ons to a phone that, unfortunately, should have had them in the first place. Personally, I have downloaded about 30 different apps, and all of them are pretty cool. Even apps that serve no purpose at all just have a flair of awesome that is hard to escape. The best example of that is the iPhone saber app. It literally does nothing except show you a light saber and let you swing your phone around to make the light saber cracking noises, and yet it is so much fun. Another fun time killing app is the iPint. Using the accleramator on the iPhone you slide a brew down to the waiting hands of your customer avoiding all the obstacles on the bar. As a reward the phone pours you a pint you can “drink” and it looks pretty realistic.
Other apps do provide much need productivity and functionality to the phone. For instance, the Wordpress blogging app is a fantastic tool to allow bloggers to report on events, or edit mistakes on the go. Another great app would be the Speed Dial app. Yep, I know you have speed dial on your phone already. This app though creates a block of nine square images of your friends that you can touch to dial, it just looks cool, and it is easily my most used app on the phone.
Also heavily used is Pandora. Pandora is an internet radio application, you create your account and plug in a few of your favorite artists and songs and it creates custom radio stations that you can listen too on the go. The selections can sometimes be a little out there, for example it paired up Journey on my RUSH station, but overall it makes pretty selections.
Lastly I will talk about the “remote” app. This one allows you to control your iTunes from anywhere on your network with your iPhone. While that is a great feature, this app really shines if you are also an Apple TV owner. I love my Apple TV, but one major issue I have with it is that the remote that comes with SUCKS.
It looks cool, but it can be a pain in the rear to use. Enter Remote on the iPhone. Now instead of having to navigate back and forth with the menu button, I can go directly the movie, or song, or picture that I want on the screen. Plus it drives my wife crazy when she has the small remote and “thinks” she is control of the TV. Muwahahahah . sorry .
As an first gen iPhone user, I am extremely happy with the App Store, and it has satiated my desire for an upgrade for the time being, so while an iPhone 3G is in my future, I am content to avoid the lines and the fully expected initial Apple FAIL for now.
So, in the end, no, the iPhone is not living up to the hype. It will, in the end, but as with all things Apple there is a painful early adopter process. In the coming weeks with the release of MagicPad giving us copy/paste ability and continuing upgrade of at&t’s 3G network, the iPhone will be the dominant phone on the market, but if you are currently in a contract with another provider, don’t break it for this phone.