Always Bring Your Wireless Stuff
While I was on the plane to the West Coast, I had the honor to be sitting next to a distinguished public figure. Since I want to honor his privacy, I will not say who he was. We had a brief discussion as we observed that he was reading the Wall Street Journal print edition and I was reading it on the Kindle. I tried to demonstrate the coolness of the Kindle and he was mildly intrigued. For the next 5 hours of flight time, he devoured his WSJ, ripping out many pages, taking copious notes on the torn articles, and filing then in a folder. Try that on a Kindle!
I rented a car from National and wanted to try their in-car navigation system and compare it to my GPS-enabled Google Maps and the VZW Navigator application. The Street Pilot from Garmin behaved like a bad "Saturday Night Live" sketch; it took many minutes to find its satellites and thus, its location. It barked out directions in quick succession: "Turn Right, Turn Right, Recalculating, Turn Left, Turn Left" -- the screen would have an arrow pointing to the right and the voice would say, "Turn left." It was both sad and amusing. 
We finished our meetings and settled into the Continental Presidents Club at the airport to wait a couple of hours for our flight. I connected to the free WiFi network that Continental provides and started to work. The problem was that the effective bandwidth I got through their WiFi was clocked in a not-so-impressive 20 KB/sec. 20KB/sec -- that is so last century!
Wireless for the Attention Deficit Crowd
As my loyal readers will know, I spend a fair amount of time commuting to and from Manhattan. Part of my commute is via NJ Transit trains. During this one hour per day, I try to find ways to either be productive or amuse myself. Since I carry a wide array of wireless devices, I get to try out different modes of time-killing. I also get to observe how my fellow travelers deal with the drudgery and boredom of train travel.
Number 3:
iPhone
BlackBerry gets top marks obviously for e-mail. The Java game capability, with a large screen and trackball has many possibilities for entertaining distractions. I became a Sudoku addict/expert in less than a week on my BlackBerry! There are some OK video options, although much inferior to the iPhone. As long as I don't want to listen to music, I prefer the BlackBerry for the mix of work productivity and entertainment.iPhone -- First Days, First Reactions
iPhone -- First Days, First Reactions: The Good, Bad and Ugly!
I have been using my iPhone as my main mobile device for the last 5 days. I did this by having my main mobile number forwarded to my iPhone. During this time, I used the phone at "work," at “play” and while traveling to
First, the Sexy non-phone aspects:
+++++++++++++The Pluses+++++++++++++
If you want to attract a crowd – just whip out your iPhone. I have gotten lots of “oohs, aahs, wows and omgs.” It enhances your sense of self-worth and may even make you more sexy. (Although you have to read my wife’s blog to find that out!)
I downloaded the movie “Miracle” to watch on a plane. I chose this movie because I can watch it a hundred times and not got bored. It is a classic – almost as good as “lap Shot”. (But that’s the subject of another blog)
Watching movies on the iPhone is spectacular. It is a very good (not great) personal movie player. The movie player would be better with a few more
The Safari Web browser works well once you get the hang of it. The Edge network is okay, not great. 3G would be much better, probably at the cost of battery life.
The photo viewer with position sensing is a real “showy” feature. The ability to flip through an album on the iPhone, as you would a real album, is nice.
The music player is a latest-generation iPod. I really like the carousel album selector.
The So-So features:
The e-mail function is cool. It would be cooler with a Blackberry client or activesync for corporate e-mail.
The camera is okay, but not the best feature.
Google Maps gets a so-so from me because it lacks the killer feature:
It does however make for a great game to kill time. Try this: Without typing in the address, try to tap into each Major League stadium and check out if there is a game! You get an extra point if you can tell who is playing, and 10 points for the score!
Keyboard:
I have to admit that it is better than I expected, but nowhere near that of a real keyboard. I am able to type using one finger (my pinky). My letter accuracy is about 70%. If I try the normal two-thumb method that I have used on Blackberrys and Blackjacks, my accuracy falls to near 0%. So, I would say that the keyboard is slightly better than triple-tapping phone keys, and far less than a real keyboard.
--------Some Negatives:------------
The headset plug:
I was eager to watch a movie on my recent plane trip using my noise-cancelling headset. I plug them into the iPhone and they canceled out ... everything. After a moment, I figured out that the plug on the supplied iPhone headset is not standard. I am sure there will be many adapters available. This served as an annoyance on my first movie experience.
The phone features:
The phone features, surprisingly (or perhaps not), are the least-impressive features of the iPhone. The voice quality seems very suspect. People I called really noticed a reduction in voice quality. Several relatives were not able to recognize my voice! To verify that this was not the network, I called them back with my AT&T Blackjack, and there was no problem.
I still have not figured out how to download ringtones.
Where is the
I sent an
Interestingly,
It appears to me that the phone features were given low priorty,
Battery Life:
The battery life – as I predicted – seems to be an issue. I used the iPhone to watch my movie for about 105 minutes, made 34 minutes of calls, browsed the Internet for 57 minutes, listened to music for 25 minutes, viewed photos for about 30 minutes and had about 5 hours of standby time. This started around 7 am. By 6 pm, my iPhone was dead.
I am confident that if all you did on the iPhone was make calls, the battery life would not be an issue. But if that is all you are going to, why buy an iPhone?
We will have to see if this a big issue in the market.
Lastly: The Nana Test
As the true test of these features, I gave my iPhone to my 70-something mother. She was able to use many of these features without issue. This is the real miracle. She is not the most technically oriented person. She has a Web TV from 1997. The UI was intuitive enough for someone who has trouble mastering her simple Nokia phone. This is a thumbs-up for the Apple UI engineers.
Other iphone blogs:
More on my iPhone trial in a couple of days.
Mobile Campus – Part 1
A couple of months ago I gave a seminar at Union College. Since its been a l-o-n-g time since I was a student in those hallowed halls, I made some observations on how communication technology has changed the college environment.
Back in the day, when dinosaurs roamed the campus, an important highlight for me was my daily pilgrimage to box 1917. In today’s lingo it would be referred to as:
box1917@unioncollege.collegecenter.2ndfloor.ontheleft.thirdboxup.edu
The password was “turn twice to the right, then left 14, right 7, left 32, pull.”
Real letters written by real people were, well, real.
It could have been Mom (always) or Dad (sometimes), a sibling (rarely), a girlfriend (hopefully), friends at other colleges (often), etc. The letters were always several pages long, handwritten, and had complete sentences with good grammar. The letters would be saved, not in an inbox, but usually a shoebox. They would be reread many times.
During my seminar, I noticed several students getting text messages. During the pizza reception that followed (actually, the free pizza was why I had a crowd), I asked some of the students what they were texting?
At first I got “LOL,” then they told me, “Mom,” “GF,” “BF” and just plain “a friend.”
I asked them if they ever get a real letter? The response was, “Oh sure, I get e-mail ... look, here is one on my Blackberry.”
I asked, what about your mailbox at the college center?
“Dude, I get nothing in there but junkmail -- you know, like, spam.”
Sigh …
More campus observations in my next installment.
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