I’m sitting in my car waiting for my sons soccer tournament to begin. While waiting I decided to play around with my iPhone.
I was curious to see how well the 3g network worked in the middle of Orefield, Pa. I was a bit disappointed.
According to the Speed Test iPhone app I’m only getting 256kbps here. I guess I should be glad that I’m getting any signal. What it is telling me though is that 5 bars of service doesn’t equate to fast 3G.
I kind of feel bad for the person who left their lights on.
This great video, used as promotional material for the upcoming book Socialnomics, drives the point home with lots-o-data. Social Media is a force to reckon with, businesses need to understand it or go home.
Social Media Revolution
Card Star is an application that keeps track of your loyalty cards.
I was one of the thousands of people that helped propel this application into the top slots in the iTunes store. It was featured in an Apple ad and I grabbed it.
The point is that you never have to remember your loyalty cards, enter the data and when you go to a store, recall it, and the merchant can scan you iPhone screen. Neat idea. I don’t have enough loyalty cards that I care to go through the hassle of entering them.
Another in the series of articles on iPhone apps I’ve used.
This is the official AIM client from AOL. The latest version adds push capabilities. If you only use AOL for IM this is a great application. For me though, I’m on about three different networks. I’m looking for a better IM client. Any good recommendations list them here.
In this first of a continuing series of articles of iPhone Apps I’ve tried. I’m doing a quick write-up of Faces. Faces gives you one button access to a list of favorite phone numbers. It’s called faces because the buttons in the user interface can consist of pictures of the people you want to call.
This is my goto dial application. I don’t use the iPhone Phone app directly for most of my calling. All of my friends and family are in Faces.
Over the next few posts, you’re going to see a bunch of lame-o reviews of iPhone applications. This is not so much to wow the reader with my ability to concisely summarize my experience with these applications. It’s mainly so I remember which apps I’ve tried and which, quite frankly, suck.
I wasn’t the only one who was confused by Sarah Palin’s farewell speech. Luckily William Shatner can lend some clarity.
Two days in a row I’ve woken up to a dead iPhone. This isn’t so bad but I generally like to have a working phone while I’m on the road. The first day this happened, I wasn’t sure of the cause. Today, I’ve figured it out. It’s the Pandora client.
I don’t think that the client necessarily is doing anything wrong, I just think it’s not doing some thing right. I was listening to Pandora in my car, when I arrived home, I disconnected the iPhone from my aux jack and didn’t use my phone again until the next day. Pandora, I’m guessing, happily kept open the network connection which ultimately drained my battery.
It should behave more like the iPod client application. When the signal is lost on the headphone jack it should stop playing or in Pandora’s case stop streaming.
Anyone else having strange problems with the battery draining? Post them here.
I like many people eagerly updated the iPhone OS to version 3.0 the day it was released. I did it mainly for the copy and paste functionality. I noticed however, that once I did this my phone no longer performed as well as it did before.
This performance hit has taken a couple of forms. All quite annoying. App loading time has increased, including the built-in Apple applications. Clicking the messages application to send an SMS takes 7 seconds to load. In the previous version, this was instantaneous.
I’ve also noticed that I am dialing wrong numbers a lot more frequently. I’ve finally figured out why. It seems that my brain was programmed to press the iPhone buttons at a certain rate. With the update in the OS, screen changes happen slower than what I am used to so I’m hitting the wrong contact.
All in all, this is a rather annoying circumstance which after searching the Google machine, I’m not alone in experiencing.
I’m going to try one last thing. Wiping my iPhone and starting with a fresh OS 3.0. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to have to try reverting back to the previous version. A rather disheartening proposition but I’m willing to sacrifice some of the new features for stability and speed.
It’s an idea that is so logical, it’s amazing that it wasn’t thought proposed sooner. Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a physicist, has proposed that we start building white roofs and replacing black top with concrete colored blacktop in order to reduce global warming. Scientists say the idea has merit.
It’s great that we finally have an Energy Secretary that has his head in science rather than business.
