FT News

So I love the idea of location based reminders and the fact that I can set them while driving around by simply telling Siri, so I tried that out in real life today and found a hiccup. I would say “remind me, when I arrive at work to take out the trash” Siri says “OK when would you like to be reminded? you can be be reminded at a time or when you arrive at or leave a location” I say “When I arrive at work” siri repeats “OK when would you like to be reminded? you can be be reminded at a time or when you arrive at or leave a location” I say “When I arrive at work” siri repeats “OK when would you like to be reminded? you can be be reminded at a time or when you arrive at or leave a location” I say “When I arrive at work” siri repeats “OK when would you like to be reminded? you can be be reminded at a time or when you arrive at or leave a location” I say “When I arrive at work” siri repeats THEN she gets a “tone” I swear! and says “Kevin, I dont understand what your telling me. Now note all this time as I say things to her the screen echoes in type EXACTLY what I say, with alarming accuracy, but alas she does not seem to understand the very thing she told me to do (like a wife). After having a very heated argument wiht her I set her aside for later. When I was ready to speak to her again and she-I, I tried agian and she asked When would….. I replied “When I get to work” she said OK and politely set the appointment…. mmmm Seems Siri tells you “when you arrive” but can only be told “when I get to” so if you are having a spat ith siri out there and need to end the counciling and move on to her super servitude the try changing up the wording a bit, and try more mundane normal ways of saying it as opposed to the more formal way she may give the instruction. So lets see…. we have learned so far the iPhone over all is a superior product, the Bluetooth is well interesting and not totally the solution for all of BTs ails but may be just fine once I update my headset, that you have to treat Siri like a second wife, but like the first wife its well wort effort and always take time to cool off before yelling at any woman, wife or Siri….. They are from Venus, they communicate differently.

K

Siri is still my friend even though I told her I was married and had kids, yup turns out you can tell her about anythign and she remembers and uses it to your advantage.  You can even set location based reminders as simply as telling Siri to “remind me to call my wife when I leave work”  once she knows where you work and who your wife is. She even calls me by name.

I had a mini panick attack when I remembered in my excitement that Apple won’t support asf streaming video or flash for some reason but after a little digging I found a nice app called GPlayer that solves the issue quite smoothly. 

I found out about talk over and tripple clicking the home button too.  I also made my own adapter cable that allows head phones and a proffesional microphone to be connected to the headphone jack for recording and monitoring via headphone.  Pageant farewells may never be the same !

The other interesting thing is that while Apple won’t support windows media they do now support Exchange sync, that was one of the big changes that needed to happen before I could play the game, what is interesting about it is this… The exchange mail/calendar/notes/contacts app on the iPhone is by far superior to the “Pocket Outlook” on the windows mobile phones I have.  The threaded view and smooth interface make it very easy to read and find messages, spotlight seems to be able to find everything including my coffee cup if I buy the “personal GPS dongle” for it. 

The one issue remains to be signatures, I like the iPhone version of signatures better than the newest of my windows phones but less than the older windows phones.  The old windows phones let me have a custome signature for each email account and they kept them even after a reboot, the newer windows phone quite irritatingly would let you set them all but then the exchange account signature would revert to “Sent from my Sprint ES400s” every time it reboot (Daily grr.)  The iPhone allows and keeps a custom signature but only one that is used on all accounts.  I am not sure when the industry got confused as to what a signature is but it is supposed to be your personal closing and contact info like on a letter…. not an advertisemnt or other non custom thing.   I for one act as several different agents for different companies and need to sign the email with the correct one for each account.  So I made it generic on the phone, name and number, no company or job title or email listed etc.   This is at least better than reverting to “Sprint Commercial” every day.  I also think there are apps to help but I have not yet selected one that looks right.

On the plus side the iPhone allows access to all of my Outlook/Exchnage calendars rather than just the main one !!!!  and all of my contact lists including the Global contact list..   This has been a huge issue for a couple clients.  Still not Shared contacts or calendars, I think Exchange just does not offer that out yet in the api.

Well the new iPhone 4S is here and 24 hours old now !
its worth mention that this thing is a stellar piece of equipment, it performs exacly as it says it will and with lightning speed.  I speed blasted it with 4 pages of apps and all my settings and text tones and custom vibrations and 7 email accounts and so on to a degree somewhat embarasing and it still just does what I ask instantly.  Siri is just awsome, sending text while driving is now quite safe and easy, just touch my blue tooth headset button and tell Siri what to do!

So far only a few very small and expexcted shorcomings, there is no official support of apps to control from desktop like veency, my mobiler or pda reach yet, they make them but Apple has not yet approved them.  I hope they will soon but i am not going to risk having it no longer “just work” to get that function. I also wish the battery came out so I could have spares but I got lots of chargers very reasonably priced.

iTune remains iffy at best, the features within it to control the iPhone are wonderful, as always iTunes itself is sluggish, “hangy” and a little less than optimal, but well worth puting up with for the features it adds to the iPhone.  sync over WiFi is great and the WiFi function of the iPhone is super.

It has already made things easier by not having to look at every text to see if it an emergency during a meeting and when I had some gooey stuff on my hands today, the text tones and vibes saved the day. I was able to find a wonderful combined VNC and RDP app called pocketclound, there is a free and pro option and the features are better than any other mobile VNC / RDP app I’ve ever used so the iPhone went from “cant” a few years ago to “superior” for me in that one aspect, nicely done!
K

Ah Mobile Technology….
My wife tells me I will be eating a lot of crow in the coming weeks, this is likely true but I also thought it might be a good time to use the experience to share some tech insights and remind us all of how it’s a challenge in and of itself to keep abreast of the ever changing tech landscape.
So the big news? Well for many it’s something we deal with over and over and some people agonize over the decision and others kind of casually try this and that. I tend to be an agonizer and I also want all the details to be in perfect formation when I jump. Don’t take that to mean I wait a long time to adopt… no I am an early adopter, I just research develop and test at a frenzy pace. Oh yah the news… I decided on and ordered a new smart phone, I know right? Big deal ! nothing new for me right??? Well I chose the Apple iPhone 4S…. Now it’s news.
Not an easy choice and as I hinted earlier in my FB posts some things had to change for that to ever happen, what were they? And why? Well first some history for those of you who have not been present for all the phone throwing moments… For me the smart phone “thing” started a long time ago before they existed through a long progression driven at each step by a very specific set of needs which has evolved over time as much as the devices have. I had at some point several Palm Pilots back in the day and at some point beginning around the Palm Treo 90 days the first one called a “Treo” Palm always did a nice job with hardware and spiffy things like “Graffiti” the early hand writing recognition where all of us geek learned to scribble in a new way, at some point after a few early cell phones my Sprint Star Tac and My Treo 90 got married with Velcro and a homemade serial data cable and poof a proto type smart phone!! Now back in the day Sprint did not even offer or charge for a “Data” connection but you could make one at 14.4 kbps in the fashion that I did. I also connected the laptop this way as well and made a bracket for the smart phone to hang on the laptop, a little programming and a wired network out and I had the first “Hot Spot” too.
Ah how time flies. So anyway through the years my choice of devices and operating systems have always been limited by a specific set of tasks need to be done in my ultra geeky corporate network admin techno dude life, With each new device and each new thing I chose to manage or do a path formed. That path often driven by these specific needs formed a sort of forced compromise on what type of device I could use.
For the eating crow part, many of you may know of my not all the well hidden bafflement at the Apple line of products in general, now a lot of people take that as Apple hating or that I think they have no value, that’s not at all true, what bugs a deep down hard core “form ever follows function” nerd is that something as simple as advertising and hype have created a fever pitch frenzy over a line of products that is largely based on misconception. Ask anybody and they are convinced on some level that a Macintosh computer is better for “Graphics, Photos, Video, etc.” Hard Honest research will clearly depict this as not at all true in anyway. Preferences are preferences and so anybody can use the tool they prefer, and I sure am glad there are several computer makers and software makers out there because that it what creates the competition to improve things every day. Each brand and title has its place doing various tasks for the various humans. BTW I own Numerous Windows PCs, 2 Macs, and several Linux Machines.
The thing that the super marketing people do that is frustrating is miss lead the masses into thinking that either their brand does something the best, exclusively or that the thing is super new. iCloud is an example of that, we are all being told that the new iCloud is this amazing online storage thingy where stuff just magically synchronizes. iCloud is a wonderful service and is nicely built and matches up with the iPhone well, new? Not so much, Windows Live, and MS Office Groove, and MS SharePoint, and many others have been doing for years, yup years… I have had a Windows Live online swap space for a long time…its now called “Sky Drive” , Groove is super cool and Share Point is the same thing, Sprint has been allowing me free space for years to store and share my phone pictures and vids and of course I have had my own space on the web as every good ultra-geek should.
So Back in 1998 Steve Jobs made the famous announcement about the iMac ! and the “I” stuff all came to be… with all the hype oddly I had to go look up what the “I” was for… well even Apple is iffy but for sure it’s for internet and maybe also for individual, inspire, instruct, inform. Pretty cool… It progresses to all these years of iPods, another of those “things” that makes a good old “form ever follows function” guy cringe, beautiful devices but by and large the single most overpriced under functioned mp3 player out there, your forced to use iTunes which in the beginning and for many years was intolerably bad software, a network guy’s and over the home network music sharer’s nightmare and well just not very feature rich, bloated with DRM to the point of frustration.
Oh yah the iPhone…. Well all these years of the buzz and hype of the iPhone and well go figure it won’t do the 4 simple things I need at the time (remote desktop, play windows media streams, connect to MSExchange and fluidly work with MS office docs) and as usual all I see people who flipped the big bucks for the super sexy looking device do is play games and music and yammer on loudly in all sorts of public places like people do when they get a cell phone. So conclusion at the time? Another very elegant but function lacking Apple product that out hypes the better cheaper offerings…. Ahh now we are getting to what had to change! IMHO Apple had to get this thing out of “Play School” and into business, Real Business, nerdy crazy geeky network admin business.
One more small rant before the excitement… oh come on by now your hanging on every word. We have now a host of “I” things…. Most of which follow what I have come to expect… iTouch ??? What?? A mobile internet device / music player that has no internet connection of its own??? Just depends on somebody else’s WiFi… weird… iPods this has actually become what people call all mp3 players just like “skill saw” means circular saw. But iPods still remain to be the “prettiest” an some like that super small Nano are pretty nifty, but features vs. price and flexibility… why??
The iPad practically makes me nutty (I may already be nutty) I have a tablet, it’s the same price as an iPad, it’s the same size (when its nifty keyboard dock is removed) but its full-fledged Windows 7 Pro computer complete with all of my full versions of software on it. So why get stuck in an oversized phone you can’t talk on called an iPad for the same money? Advertising and “iHype” is why. I use mine with a regular wireless mouse and keyboard when I am at desk too. Mostly what I see happen about 3 weeks after somebody buys an iPad is the kids are playing games on it to occupy themselves… I guess.. but a DS is cheaper.
OK so now the super glowing stuff… I had the unique opportunity to have hands on access to the iPhone since Becky got one a few months back, she decided to get it and I thought it OK based on all the research and news of the improvements and changes in the product. I also had access to Greg’s Samsung Galaxy 2 and Ryan’s Replenish and several others. As I said it was grueling… honestly the Galaxy (Android) and the iPhone (IOS) were so neck and neck it was painful. The 2 biggest thing that tipped the scale were 1, as much as I LOVE that huge screen on the Galaxy I did not think I could successfully carry it. 2, iPhone has one simple feature no other OS has “Text Tones” can be individualized to specific people in your contacts list just like ring tones. Why is that so cool?? Here’s the thing… we all do different things, I do a lot of different things, at any given moment I could be lugging equipment, under a truck, on a ladder, in a piece of mechanical equipment, in a show, covered in nasty goo, and so on… all situations where taking the phone off of the belt and looking to see the caller / message sender is, to that end for many years I have used dozens of ring tomes to identify the caller before even looking at the phone, well I use text a lot since the message sits there patiently waiting for me to have moment to look at the phone but I also get rather urgent emergency texts/calls from various places so I am forced to look quite soon each time it goes off… your getting it…. Text Tones !!!!! I also think I will really dig Siri, and having a camera that is excellent quality and super-fast will be great. I cannot count the missed opportunities from having a slow camera phone or the ones I simply chose not to even have the battle for.
Some more…. In the past the “box” that apple lives in has been kind of a dis service in my mind to their systems fining wide spread use. For the iPhone one magical thing has come out of that… since the iPhone and actually most iThings have the same charger/data port on them the makers of accessories have been able to make a lot of really cool stuff to attach to them ! With Android and Windows using lots of hardware makers you may not even be able to get an accessory and if you could it will be useless when you change devices again, very frustrating… chargers are one thing, credit card swipers, audio capture devices and docks are another entirely.
So as indicated I have played with my “in home demo” and found that Apple made some super awesome choices, they had to work with MS a little and the result is a pretty super doper phone that does a lot of things and has the always expected Apple touch of “It Just Works!” I have spent a lot of time with phones complaining that it just won’t do what it says on the box, well the iPhone Does what it says on the box! And a whole bunch more.
The journey also made me test/analyze myself as well as the devices (as it should) but we often forget to do this. For a long time now I have been vehement that I MUST have a physical keyboard and the reason being so I can one handedly type without looking at it. Well when I tested myself it turns out I am looking at my physical keyboard despite the tactile buttons, I was just fooling myself thinking I could do it without looking. And differences in physical keyboards turned out to be just as vexing as trying the virtual on screen ones. In the test I did on all devices I could lay hands on I actually found I was able to type quite well and quite rapidly on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard which also changes just the right amount when turned landscape for two handed operation, some physical and virtual keyboards get too big.
So now I await the arrival of my very own iPhone 4S, feels weird to say that! But I am super excited and I have everything ready for it to be connected and feel right at home, I am anxious to have a device “that just does it” when I press the buttons.
K