Category Geek

Who can relate to this experience? You’re out using your iPhone for whatever reason, perhaps you’re jamming away to tunes, sitting on calls all day long, or simply just ‘using’ it and you find your battery life has severely diminished.   I know what you efficiency zealots will say “You know, you can turn off this feature and that feature, and this and that and that! and it’ll extend your battery life!” Yea, kthxbye! Seriously. If I’m using my location feature and it’s draining my device, turning it off defeats the entire purpose!

Well, inspired by my good friend Louis Gray in his post: How I Stopped Worrying About Powering Up My iPhone 3G I’m writing this because I wanted to make sure those who missed this absolutely amazing-ness, don’t miss it!

This is something I’ve been looking for from Apple for some time, but I never got around to actually trying to search or solve my problem – and now.. now I have, especially as I tend to charge my phone 3-4 times a day from use (Can you say omfg power user? ;))

Our good friends at Mophie bring us the Juice Pack and the Juice Pack Air!  Not only do they double as power enhancing batteries but they also provide a case for you to use! Considering the scratches on my iPhone and my eventual need to get a case (not to mention how my phone partly cuts into me in its sharp bits… Well, there you go, killing two birds, one apple!)

To add to it, they even have a special twitter promotion available, whereby tweeting something about them, following them – will enter you into a chance to win their Juice Pack Air! a $79.99 value.. I’ll take free!

Incase also happens to offer something they call a “Power Slider” but frankly if you look at their website you may have a pain of a time trying to find it as it’s not really elevated to the surface in its ease of finding (Had to search to find it, and even then it wasn’t so intuitive) Which is likely why Louis and others have to resort to looking for it on Amazon like here Incase Power Slider for iPhone 3G – Black (EC20003).

Now while I personally like the look of the back of this particular device with the little lights as you can see in this image above – I frankly am liking more and more the Mophie Juice pack units already mentioned.   But feel pride in knowing when you have a constantly dying iPhone, don’t worry about changing your habits as much when you can rely upon an additional power source to aide in whatever you do!  So get out there and get yourself some Apple Juice!

Yea that’s right! Project Natal is hiring! (Sadly, when I first planned on publishing this to when I am doing it now, the number of positions has dwindled, meaning they were filled ;))

But I know what a lot of you are saying.. Who is Project Natal?!

Why, it’s only the coolest thing to hit interactive gaming… since, interactive gaming?!

But seriously! It takes all the effort things like the Wii and dance pads have done, and stepped it up a serious level.  Check out this Video for further insight into why you want to go rock it out with Project Natal!

Project Natal takes gaming to a new level, leaving the remote on the table and your experience in your hands!

Wow, you should have read my original ‘”Safari 3 a viable replacement” or my “Will IE8 replace Chrome for me” post, which I never published.  It sat in drafts as both of those browsers crashed and burned under the slightest hint of pressure.   To sum it up: Safari 3 crashed after I opened 2 tabs, and IE8 never ‘suggested’ anything for me, let alone not remembering even 5% of my passwords.  But the story is slightly different with Safari 4!

Let’s start with one feature which has been there for awhile

Top Sites!

It looks cool and all, and it’s very similar to the Chrome version of a similar feature, but for what it’s worth.. it looks fine and is editable to allow you to remove sites you don’t think are ‘top’ sites, like pictures of kittens in rainboots or something.  Nonetheless, a ‘usable’ feature.

The next lovely feature is support for Tab-Preview that is available in Win7 (chrome doesn’t support Tab Preview :)) So you get a view similar to this below.  Once you exceed 15 tabs though, it turns into the devil and looks like the second image.

But there is more to Safari than simply pretty looks and colors.  It also has some functionality! (Similar to Chrome).  One of those features is URL completion.   Which translates into ‘I type part of the site I want to visit and it suggests it as the default one, so I can simply hit enter’ not the IE world of things by “Do you mean this, and scroll down to find it?” Which I say ‘hellz no!” I visit the same sites hundreds of times a day, and I don’t want to have to press down, that’s two key strokes too many!

The fact that it hasn’t crashed yet, is very pleasing considering I’ve switched to a full on ‘use it for everything’ model.  And by everything I mean “Not for NetFlix because the bastards don’t support it even though they claim to”.  I still need to check it for WebEx support as well as Oracle support so I can do the rest of my work using it…. :)

Memory and CPU usage have been kind of suckish, but considering I would have 3million chrome processes before, it’s not too bad.

Grammar/Spelling checking seems pretty cool!

One function which doesn’t work at the moment.. typing searches into the URL bar results in… not a search, but instead trying to open whatever ridiculous search term you had entered!

That results in me having to hit enter ‘twice’ in order to get my search term searched!

That’s all I’ll say about it for now! We’ll see how it lasts, considering I’ve used Chrome almost exclusively for the past… since it was released in early beta.. it will be an interesting trial and experience.  One I won’t be shy to throw away if it’s not meeting my particular needs :)   So, look forward to future ‘raving’ or ‘destroying’ of this particular browser, depending upon how it is seen fit.  Oh, and it doesn’t let you view saved passwords like Chrome, which is a major negative in my book. It knows they’re there, so expose them to me, kthxbye!

WTF? Apple wouldn’t seriously say that to AT&T would they?!

I’m sure you’ve all seen this chart by now!

What they don’t share with you though, is this particular version of the Chart

Wait a minute, I don’t agree with that chart at all! It’s not $175 to cancel if you have existing service, it can’t be cheaper than it is to “Upgrade” as Apple has supplied pricing, can it be?

You’re right, I’m absolutely sorry for misleading you.  You are correct, AT&T recently introduced Prorating Cancellation Fees! “AT&T to prorate cancellation fees” So yes, for me at the moment it only costs $150 to cancel which means I have even GREATER Incentive to cancel and obtain new service.

All of this assumes you’d be willing to go so far as to cancel your service in order to obtain the latest and greatest at a lower price.  Yes, that is absolutely correct.  Because I don’t feel I should be penalized to upgrade to the latest hardware by being not only an early adopter/innovator but also by having brand loyalty to Apple and AT&T.

Furthermore, to have ‘paths’ which exist such as making it cheaper to cancel or to have you ‘transfer of service’ to someone else are just ridiculous.

Allow me to elaborate on your “other option”

I recently spoke with the AT&T Retention team and they said that Apple really put the screws to them, putting them in this position whereby it IS in fact cheaper to cancel and get new service than it is to simply provide an honorable upgrade path, so they do have as a semi-out the “Transfer of Service” plan as detailed below. (Taken from Pg13 of Reference Guide)

5.2.
Transfer of Service
Under certain circumstances you can transfer the billing responsibility on an account from the business customer to an End User and vice versa. This transfer of service usually requires that the line move to a new BAN# and a new FAN#.
Key Contacts call the Key Contact Center at:
866-ATT-SMBZ or
866-288-7629
Mon-Fri 7 am – 12 am Eastern
Sat: 9 am – 8 pm Eastern

And all of the naysayers who say that I shouldn’t go so far as to waste AT&T’s resources well beyond the extra $$ so as while the ‘front-end’ cost appears lower, in the long-term as person after person would opt to cancel instead of pony up the $200, that AT&T’s operational costs would well exceed the $200? Well, I say “suck it up, and allow me the upgrade as a Qualified Customer” because frankly I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops, and neither should AT&T.

So to sum it up, what I’m seeing is very clearly this.   Apple (not AT&T) is making me cancel my service in the effort to upgrade to the new Apple 3GS iPhone.  Infact, the incentives to cancel are clearly far better than the reasons to perform an “Early” upgrade.  I’m sorry, but the “Qualified” customers option should include people who are loyal to the brand, to the solution and to the industry; instead of simply saying “Hey you guy who buys our products? Suck on this and pay an extra $200, kthxbye!”

Happy Fathers Day to me! I got one of the coolest gifts you can imagine! That’s right! USB Rechargeable batteries! When you’re as hard to shop for as I happen to be… finding something I’ll enjoy that I don’t already own is nearly impossible, but that task was accomplished with this!  (Yes I know Fathers Day isn’t for a few weeks, but we’re celebrating early this year!)

Part of what makes this so cool is it’s sheer portability!  I don’t know about you, but I have a number of devices I carry with me which use AA Batteries (or batteries in general) and having to carry a charger is quite lame, let alone the fact that they tend to explode in their chargers.

Problem no more though!   So I want to thank the folks of USBCell and Moixa for this, oh and thanks to Emily for thinking of this gift idea to give to me! :)

TEASER Alert!

It also looks like they’re creating some new devices.. AAA, C/D, 9V and Phone/Device batteries! So be on the look out for the other stuff which is so often running out of juice! :)

97i8crwrc4