Welcome to my technology blog!
Last week I reviewed the New Navigon Turn-by-Turn Navigation App for iPhone. During that review I didn’t have a mount for my iPhone in my car. I knew what kind of mount I would want and therefore I ordered it from Amazon.
Here’s a short video on how the Arkon IPM129-ST Removable Air Vent Mount works.
If you need to mount your iPhone in your car and you don’t have round vents (like on the Mustang), this mount works great. It ranges from $8-$12 on Amazon and you can order it here.
A couple of months ago I reviewed AT&T’s FamilyMap service. This service allows you to track the location of the cellphones you have on an AT&T Family Plan. However, since that time Apple introduced the Find My iPhone feature, which works with iPhones and iPod touch devices as long as you have a MobileMe account ($99/year or less). After I posted my FamilyMap review, many of the blog readers here signed up for the free trial and many said the same thing. "It’s just not accurate enough." Now while I didn’t have a problem with the accuracy of it, I do have a problem continuing to pay for a service I may not need anymore.
This service works by giving you a website that you can go to and "Locate" your loved ones. Depending on the phone the accuracy and the ability to pinpoint the location can vary widely. For example, a phone with a built-in GPS is liable to be more accurately found than a phone without one as it would have to rely on cell tower triangulation. AT&T FamilyMap starts at $9.99/month for up to 2 phones and 14.99/month for up to 5 phones on the same family plan.
The MobileMe Find My iPhone feature only works with iPhones and iPod touch devices. You log in to the me.com website, click the settings icon and then click the Find My iPhone link. Your iPhone’s location will be pinpointed on a map. You have to have a MobileMe account to use this feature and MobileMe retails for $99/year (or less if on sale). In order to find more than one iPhone, you would need the Family Pack which is $149/year (or less if on sale).
Continue reading “AT&T FamilyMap vs. MobileMe Find My iPhone”
You might remember my post from May when I was in the middle of converting my Movie DVDs over to a hard drive. I have successfully converted my DVD movie connection to .MP4 H.264 format! This means that I can now enjoy any movie I own on any HDTV in my house via Apple TV or I can take the movies with me on my laptop or iPhone. I actually finished the conversion a couple of months ago, which was much earlier than I anticipated.
I have over 380 standard def Hollywood DVDs. Painstakingly one-by-one I converted each one over to an .MP4 file using Handbrake. All 440 movies total (some were already digital or home movies) were imported into iTunes and reside on a Drobo connected to an intel iMac. This iMac serves as my iTunes server. It’s the one that all of my Apple TV’s are sync’d to and it’s the one that I use to sync my iPhone to for media ( you can sync an iPhone to more than one computer for data and media separately). I also use this iMac to sync my iPods too. So it has it all, music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, best of the best photos, etc.
Continue reading “My DVD to MP4 Media Conversion Project is Done!”
The iPhone 3G S is Apple's newest offering for an already insanely successful product. The iPhone's success has exceeded everyone's expectations and even the naysayers can't deny that Apple came from nowhere and all of a sudden became the market leader that every other phone maker now aspires to be like. If you don't believe me, look at all the other smart phones that were recently released and you'll see "me too" like features and advertising. So what do you do when you have one of the most successful phones ever created? You improve it to keep the momentum going. My original iPhone review 2 years ago has had over 135, 000 reads. If you Google "iPhone Review" mine will come up on the first page. The reason for this success is that my first review was one of the most in depth reviews written. I spent almost 24 hours writing it. Then the iPhone 3G came out last July and I followed up with another in depth review. Now it's time to take a look at the iPhone 3G S, however, this review will not be anywhere near as long or in depth as the last two. It's not because I don't feel like writing, it's just that there isn't as much to cover that I haven't already said. If you have read my iPhone 3G review last year and my iPhone OS 3.0 Review a few days ago, you're 95% there in knowing about the New iPhone 3G S. (Also see my iPhone 3G S Unboxing Video here). – Continue reading “iPhone 3G S Review and a little fun with Woz”
Well today is iPhone 3G S day and while I have a full review coming sometime this weekend (no later than early Monday morning), I thought I would share a first look at the outside of the iPhone 3G S in this video. Now keep in mind that the on the outside the iPhone 3G S is pretty much identical to the iPhone 3G form factor:
Yesterday, I gave you my visual walkthrough of iPhone OS 3.0. These were the things that I had discovered so far. The good folks over at MacOSRumors have put together a list of the subtle changes that would be easily over looked. Some good stuff there. They’ve found over 90 things so far and the list is ongoing. Check it out here.
Thanks Jack for the tip!
Now that the New iPhone OS 3.0 Software update is available, I thought I would give you a first look and point out some of the new features that you may overlook or not discover right away. The good thing is that at first glance iPhone 3.0 looks just like iPhone 2.x. This is what makes it hard to know what’s there because there isn’t a lot that jumps right out at ya. Also hundreds and hundreds of the enhancements are under the hood to improve performance and give developers the hooks to write more powerful apps.
– Continue reading “iPhone OS 3.0 Review: What’s New and Noteworthy?”
This one is for the trivia buffs (or to combat them 🙂 ). Cool Facts is an iPhone (iPod touch) app that now boasts 6,500+ Cool Facts. I was actually surprised by some of the entries. Not that I think I know a lot about a lot of things, but some made me go “wow, I’d never heard that before!” This app is a great conversation starter (please resist the temptation to use it on a date. You know who you are).
The app displays the facts in a random order. You can swipe your finger to go to the next fact or shake your iPhone/iPod touch to go to the next one. It seems that shaking is actually a little more responsive than swiping.
6500+ Cool Facts is a FREE download from the App Store. Get it here.
Apple has posted today’s Phil Schiller keynote from WWDC. See the video here.
Upgrading to the iPhone 3GS may cost you more than you think. The $199 and $299 prices for the 16GB and 32GB models are the prices NEW customers or customers eligible for upgrades will pay. As you know, you signed a 2 year contract when you got your existing iPhone 3G (if you did it on AT&T). The policy for upgrading at a reduced rate is typically 18 months. So even if you bought your iPhone 3G on the day it was announced, that’s only 11 months ago. Most likely you won’t be able to upgrade for those prices. You can check your eligibility right on the Apple Store online or log onto your wireless.att.com account to see your upgrade eligibility. Those on the original iPhone should be all set as your two year contract is almost at an end (provided you bought on day one in 2007). Prices could be as high as $599 and $699 for early upgraders. Which, by the way at that point you’d be better off signing a NEW contract, canceling it, and paying the early cancellation fee of $175.
MobileMe get’s some much needed love. Every year many customers ask themselves, “why am I paying for this?” Each customer has his or her own reasons as to why they deem the service worth the price. For me, I like the syncing of info between all my computers. I like the syncing of data (except Contacts, maybe I’ll try it again after 3.0) with my iPhone. I also like the hosted web stuff and email. However, with iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0 you get new benefits. First of all Apple showed off “Find my iPhone”. This feature allows MobileMe customers to locate a missing iPhone on a map. If that iPhone happens to be in your house, you can even send a command to it to ring even if the ringer is on silent! You can also remote wipe a lost or stolen phone so that your info is no longer on the device. Although I wish this feature would actually password lock the phone so that it couldn’t be used or randomly wipe it so that the thief couldn’t really use it. Yes, I know about serial number blocks that the carriers can do, but this is much more fun. It also seems like iPhone users will FINALLY be able to access their iDisks and the data stored on them, with an upcoming iDisk iPhone App. Also in case you missed it, MobileMe now syncs your notes from Mail and soon from your iPhone running the 3.0 update.
I’m typically not one of those users who likes to bash the carrier. All of the carriers have issues! However, I’m becoming increasingly frustrated by AT&T’s apparent inability to keep up with their growth. The iPhone has been missing some key features like MMS messaging and data tethering since day one. These features are probably not hard to implement. As a matter of fact we’re getting them in iPhone OS 3.0 next week. The problem is that AT&T says that MMS messaging won’t be available until “summer” and tethering, well, um it will come to0 at some point, with additional fees. No wonder other countries laugh at us when it comes to our data networks. Oh and don’t get me started about the crippling of the SlingPlayer app to only work over Wi-Fi! If the iPhone was available on multiple US carriers, AT&T would be forced to compete for our business. However, with this exclusive multi-year deal, AT&T gets another free pass. AT&T do me a favor: stop advertising your network if you can’t actually do anything on it!
I thought I’d give a quick recap on today’s announcements since my friends are already ringing my phone off the hook anyway. 🙂 There certainly was no shortage of announcements from this morning’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote. Of course you can go to apple.com and get all the details of each and every item. This post is just serve as a quick recap for those that just want to know “what’s new?”
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Apple updated the specs on the 15″ MacBook Pro, 13″ MacBook (now Pro) and MacBook Air while at the same time reducing the prices!
The 15″ MacBook Pro now gets the same built-in battery as it’s 17″ sibling, boasting 7 hours of battery life. It can be configured with up to 8GB of RAM as well as a 500GB hard drive. Probably the most controversial move here is that they removed the ExpressCard Slot and replaced it with an SD card slot instead and they replaced the removable battery with one that’s built-in. The new prices are $1,599, $1,899 and $2,099.
The New 13″ MacBook Pro. The MacBook has been upgraded to MacBook Pro status. It now features an SD slot as well, configurable up to 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive, and it now has a FIREWIRE port! Apple has seen the error of its ways in this regard. Probably the most exciting feature of the 13″ MacBook Pro is the price. The 7 hour battery is also built-in on this model. They start at $1,199 which is cheaper than the older model which had less features.
Lastly the MacBook Air gets a price reduction as well. Now the MacBook Air starts at $1,499.
See the new MacBook Pros here.
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The Safari web browser had been in beta for the past couple of months and now it’s officially available in its release form. It was already available via the Software Updates when I ran it a few minutes ago. I’ll have to see if they fixed a couple of the bugs I was having in the beta. Namely, posting links on WordPress on this very blog. Apple bills it as the fastest web browser on any platform.
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As you might expect, the spotlight was on Snow Leopard today. Apple showed off a miriad of enhancements and the one that got me most excited was the Microsoft Exchange support which means that I’ll finally be able to say goodbye to Microsoft Entourage for work email. There were all kinds of other neat UI enhancements to the Finder and the OS in general. The big focus was on 64bit as well it should be. Lastly, Snow Leopard will be available in September for only $29 for existing Leopard users. That has to be the lowest OS price that Apple has ever charged since they’ve been charging for OS upgrades. Snow Leopard is only for Intel Macs!
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No surprises that Apple also showed more about the iPhone 3.0 update, which had already been previewed. It’s going to fill many of the gaps that the iPhone has had to date including MMS support, Tethering, Cut, Copy & Paste, background notification for 3rd party apps, Turn-by-Turn directions, peer-to-peer gaming, etc. This update will be FREE to existing iPhone users ($9.99 for iPod touch users) and available next week on June 17th! Yes, you know where I’ll be that day. 🙂
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The most anticipated news of course was the new iPhone hardware. Today Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS. The main points are:
Available Friday, June 19th – 16GB model (black or white) $199, 32GB model (black or white) $299
8GB iPhone 3G now only $99 and available today!