Apple’s MobileMe customers have been having some startup issues, but luckily the company isn’t leaving us out to dry because of it.
On August 18th, users of MobileMe received the following email on their accounts:
We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around. Read this article for more details.
The MobileMe Team
About a month ago, existing customers at that time received 30 days of free service due to email outages, so customers since that time will be enjoying three extra months of free service. While it would be nice for their not to have been problems to have warranted these actions, it is nice to see Apple taking care of their customers in the face of numerous problems.
The Application Store for the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch is quickly getting crowded with an overwhelming number of apps. How do you begin picking them? How do you know they will be worth the time it takes to download them, or the space they take up on your device?
AppVee is a new independent website that is aiming to provide you with unbiased reviews of the applications that are being released. Thus far they are focusing on the free applications, but considering the number available, this could take them a while to get through. They are first giving you their own rating, and a star rating based on a 5-star system, along with a video showing you the application in use. Then they allow readers to add their own reviews, giving you a very true, real world review of how this application is performing.
While it is true Apple is allowing reviews also, it is nice to see an independent site building up a nice collection of reviews. It has been rumored in the past that sometimes Apple will remove unfavorable reviews, so a third party voice is a very welcome addition to this ever growing sea of downloads.
When Apple initially released the popular phone, they did so with an exclusive contract with Cingular, who was then purchased by AT&T. The initial agreement gave Apple a percentage of each contract for the device, but the new deal reportedly gives them a $300 subsidy of each phone sold. This new deal was struck to keep the phone locked in with AT&T for an additional year.
While this will do wonders for AT&T, we hear at StarterTech feel it hurts Apple in the long run. There are people, such as all of our staff, who have no desire to enter in to a contract with AT&T due to previous bad experiences with the company. If Apple was to open the device to all carriers, their current sales would pale in comparison to be locked into one so-so carrier.
Two of us now carry BlackBerry smartphones (I carry an 8830, and Rosemary has a Curve), and we both highly recommend them. They may not be quite as “sexy” as the iPhone, but they do their job, and they do it well. We certainly don’t want to say people make a poor choice by getting an iPhone, but we certainly feel Apple has.
With all of the hype and excitement over the iPhone 3G, it’s easy to forget the phones that have come before it and what they can do for you.
I actually spent Thursday of this week, the day before the new iPhone release, traveling on business. Due to my hectic schedule, I very rarely get out of the office, and this was the first time I had done so since getting my BlackBerry 8830 a few months ago. All I can say is that I was more than slightly amazed by all of the things I really could do from it.
Over the course of the day, I:
- Sent and received IM conversations on GTalk with no problems.
- Was able to check out some posts on Google Reader as I drove down the road (as a passenger, not while driving).
- Using Google Maps, I was able to track my location fairly accurately, even while moving down the road in a car.
It may not be as “sexy” as an iPhone, but it is a very functional piece of equipment, with a full physical QWERTY keyboard that is a heck of a lot easier to type on than an onscreen keyboard like the iPhone features. In my real-life tests of it while out on the road, with numerous issues happening back at the office, it worked with flying colors, and while I am sure the iPhone may handle things just as well, for now I am happy to stick with my BlackBerry 8830.
Keeping multiple calendars can be a pain in the behind. You have one on your phone, one on your computer and one on Google, it would nice to merge them, but that’s not always easy. Luckily Google has a tool named Google Calendar Sync that can help you with this problem if youa re a user of Microsoft Outlook.
Once you install the download, you enter your account information and then choose if you want to sync Outlook to Google, Google to Outlook, or have them sync to each other. You can also set how often you want it to perform the sync, but that is totally up to you depending on how much you work with your schedule.
The major drawback to this for me is that it only works with Outlook. I only use Outlook on my computer as a place to sync my iPod Touch to, and that is also the same place that most movile phones will sync contacts and calendar to, even if you don’t use the program for email.
This is certainly a solution if the $99 a year for MobileMe wasn’t appealing to you and yet you still wanted a way to sync up your calendars. With it being bi-directional, it also makes a nice backup if anything should happen to your mobile device or your computer, and all for free!
Here and there around the Internet you see mentions of people “jailbreaking” their iPhone. What does this mean?
Due to the fact that the iPhone is exclusive to AT&T in the United States, people with other carriers were out of luck on getting to use the phone. Several groups of hackers worked on ways to “break” the iPhone so that it could be used with the carrier of their choice, and get to used custom built applications people were coming up with. Every time a firmware update came out, Apple would defeat the jailbreaking… for about 2 hours.
However, with the new contract for the iPhone 3G, AT&T will be requiring either activation in the store, or at-home activation within 30-days of purchase or they will begin assessing penalties. Until someone finds a way around purchasing the phones, jailbreaking the 3G will be useless as you will still be paying for a contract with AT&T to subsidize the purchase price.
So is there any hope for using the new iPhone with other carriers in the United States? Doubtful this time around. It is a shame that Apple chose AT&T out of all the carriers out there because everyone here at StarterTech refuses to use them for various reasons. Was there ever a more iPhone-friendly crowd? Too bad none of us will have one until AT&T exclusivity ends in 2010.
Printers have come a long way over the years, and this is especially evident in travel printers.
I had one travel printer years ago that, to be blunt, sucked. Now they are full-on inkjet printers capable of doing color and multiple pages per minute.
If you’re wondering why you would need one, there are a plethora of reasons.
- Airlines have discontinued pre-printed tickets, opting for people to do e-tickets, and print their own boarding passes. Hotels don’t always have printers for you to do this, and if it’s a long trip, this would come in handy to print those off.
- On a long road trip? Wouldn’t it be nice to print out updated route maps as you go along?
- If you’re on a business trip, or a traveling salesman, I see these as essential as any other piece of equipment so that you can print off documents or reports for your meetings.
Some of the printers even come with a battery now so that you don’t even have to plug in to an outlet, really handy if you are just running completely behind in your work.
It’s up to each person if they need such a thing, but with our supposed “paperless society” never quite emerging, we at StarterTech do highly recommend buying one if you travel a lot.
What is going to be an endless question for a little while now will be, “should I buy the iPhone 3g?” The answer, sadly, is “yes and no.”
If you already have an iPhone from the original 2007 release, your answer is going to be a tricky one. The first things you need to do is ask yourself if you will really need the new features.
Do you really need the faster 3G speed for viewing websites?
If you are satisfied with the current speeds the EDGE technology gives you, than you would have to go with no. Sure, 3G would be nice, but is it worth enough to make you upgrade so soon?
Do you really need the built-in GPS?
The GPS is a really stellar bonus to the new iPhone 3G, and the ability to add geotags to your images will be nice, but true mapping functions will be a killer update to the iPhone’s functions. However, you’ve lived without this feature for the past year, will it change your life enough to want to buy a whole new phone?
What about the new third-party applications?
Current iPhone users will get to enjoy all the iPhone apps without any worry when they release the new software update in early July. This update will be free, so at no extra cost you will get this new function.
What about the new Apple online service, MobileMe?
MobileMe is an exciting new product from Apple that will allow you to share email, calendars, files and more across multiple devices such as Macs, PCs, the iPhone and the iPod Touch. It will work with the current iPhone also at release.
In short, if you have the current iPhone, you will just have to weigh how important these new features are. Personally I would say most current owners could wait on them until their 2-year contracts expire with AT&T in 2009 (or later, depending on when you signed up).
For people who don’t currently have an iPhone, and have been sitting on the fence, this is what you were waiting for. Buy it, but it now. $199 for 8 GB and $299 for 16 GB with GPS and 3G is a heck of a deal… if you didn’t already buy one.
I recently purchased a Dell Vostro 1500, and while I love it, I am beginning to wonder about the size of some laptop’s screens.
The physical size of the screen is 15.4″, which is a great size, but the resolution is 1680×1050, which is causing some websites, such as my personal blog, to format oddly when I view them. If you click on the image to the right, you will see my screen in its actual size, you will see how an image from one blog entry is colliding into another entry.
Why do I bring this up? If you’re someone who surfs the web a lot, it’s something you should probably consider when buying a new laptop. And as someone such as myself who produces content for the web, I should have considered it more. It’s making it difficult for me to judge how things are going to look once they are published.
So when you are shopping for a new mobile computer, you need to ponder this, and if you are unsure how large a size is going to be, search around in Google Images for an image of a size similar to what your new screen will be, and get some idea of what you can expect.
My Mother called me today because she needed something right away. Is this an unusual occurrence? No, she calls me a lot to help her out—she is 88 and afraid of falling so she calls me to do the heavy stuff. The interesting thing is that she called me when I was in my car on my way to the bank. Yep, she called my cell phone from her cell phone. For some people cell phones are like an appendage for my mother they are a mystery and for her to actually call mine was a giant step forward in her tech training.
I researched phones of every kind with every payment program until I was dizzy. She wanted simple—no bells and whistles and certainly no big monthly bill. After days of searching I finally found it—pay as you go. Beautiful in its simplicity and brilliant in its service—you can make calls if you have paid for the time. You can buy very little time or thousands of minutes and most of the purchases can be made on online. The phones are generally very simple and therefore do not cost an arm and a leg. The amount of minutes you buy are your choice and there are no extra doodads you don’t want. Simple, simple, simple!!
Many service providers for full service plans have ‘go phone’ or pay as you go plans—the one I chose is done by T-mobile. I was so impressed with their service and plan that I also got one for myself to use when my ‘bells and whistles’ phone is out of power or has no service. The beauty of these phones is there is not a great financial investment to make you feel bad if you find that you hate the phone or just decide you are not a cell phone kind of person. Don’t feel bad if you decide that cells phones aren’t for you—it happens!
At that point you can just store the phone away and if your minutes expire (look into the deals for minutes that last a year) and you decide you want to try again all you have to do is contact the provider again and buy more minutes. There is absolutely no reason for you not to be able to try a cell phone and see if it is for you. New territory can be scary but there are very few unknowns with these plans and that should be a comfort.
Apple’s MobileMe customers have been having some startup issues, but luckily the company isn’t leaving us out to dry because of it.
The 
For those of you who were waiting for the iPhone to break it’s exclusivity with 
With all of the hype and excitement over the iPhone 3G, it’s easy to forget the phones that have come before it and what they can do for you.
Keeping multiple calendars can be a pain in the behind. You have one on your phone, one on your computer and one on Google, it would nice to merge them, but that’s not always easy. Luckily Google has a tool named 
Here and there around the Internet you see mentions of people “jailbreaking” their iPhone. What does this mean?
Printers have come a long way over the years, and this is especially evident in travel printers.
My Mother called me today because she needed something right away. Is this an unusual occurrence? No, she calls me a lot to help her out—she is 88 and afraid of falling so she calls me to do the heavy stuff. The interesting thing is that she called me when I was in my car on my way to the bank. Yep, she called my cell phone from her cell phone. For some people cell phones are like an appendage for my mother they are a mystery and for her to actually call mine was a giant step forward in her tech training.
