Gadgets
Next Entries »The new AT&T - rocking the great customer service!
Sunday, March 4th, 2007I love my HTC Hermes (the Cingular AT&T branded 8525) Pocket PC phone, but lately it’s been giving me some problems. Namely the battery life was getting worse and worse. Modern 3G data devices like the 8525 really suck down the power when doing high speed HSDPA transfers, but when my phone went from 18 hours of battery life to less than 8 I knew I had a problem.
Luckily I walked by the AT&T store today and on a lark decided to go in. After a very brief wait for a salesperson I explained the problem and was delighted by the response: “No problem, let me get you a new battery”. No questions, no fuss, no warranty verification (although the phone is new enough to obviously be under warranty), just a shiny new battery and a smile.
After having so many bad experiences with Cingular/AT&T in the past it was a pleasant surprise to be treated like a valued customer, have a sales rep smile at me, and not be pelted with questions about how I was treating the phone. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come for the new AT&T - if they can improve their customer service like this and continue to provide such great high speed data services they will conquer the US cellular market in no time flat!
I was also delighted to notice that they had an Aliph Jawbone bluetooth headset in stock sitting on the counter:
The Aliph Jawbone is the most bad-ass bluetooth headset known to man. It uses military grade noise reduction technology based on bone induction to provide crystal clear voice calls even in the nosiest of environments. Unfortunately they have been hard to get because neither Aliph nor Cingular has been able to keep them in stock for more than hours per shipment. Fortunately with my timing I happened to get their last one in stock from the mornings shipment.
I win!
“Jawbone” by sparktography
Confessions of a cell phone junkie
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006CNET posted a great write up on a “cell phone junkie“. I guess they now have a name for my condition. I think I might be something worse though: a technology junkie - I just can’t help it.
Oh look - SHINY!
Connect360
Saturday, October 7th, 2006
I just found the coolest bridge between my Apple iMac and Microsoft Xbox 360. I found some software called Connect360 from Nullriver Software. It’s a simple preference pane that allows any Mac to share it’s photos in iPhoto and music from iTunes with a 360 seamlessly. It’s now possible for both Windows and Mac’s to communicate with the 360 for living room entertainment.
Installation was a breeze: after opening the zip demo from Nullriver’s website I double clicked on the Connect360.prefpane to install the preference pane. After starting the service I was able to select what I want shared and configure transcoding options for any files that the 360 won’t be able to play natively.
I walked into the living room and used my Media Center remote to browse to the media tab on my Xbox 360. My imac showed up and after clicking through an authorization screen I was able to browse my music library and playlists as well as browse through all my photos and albums in iPhoto.
The interface is snappy, and browsing the photo libraries were response. It even increments play counts and last played dates in iTunes when you play music. I have to say that Microsoft keeping media interaction open to developers is a big win. Connect360 supports MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF and AAC Lossless for audio files, and JPEG, RAW, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF for photos.
Update: With a photo update Connect360 now supports video as well. Check out the Connect360 website for more information.
If you have both a Mac and an Xbox 360 I suggest checking out the free demo. If you like it it’s $20 to unlock the ability to browse your full library rather than 1,000 items that the demo restricts you to.
Sadly for now Connect360 does not support transferring movies or iTunes store purchased content but hopefully that will be released in a future version. While waiting to check out Apple’s upcoming iTV it’s nice to have a good solution for getting my media from my Mac to my living room.
Technorati Tags: Connect360, Intel iMac, iPhoto, iTunes, Mactel, Media transfer, Xbox 360
New 360 gamertag
Friday, September 1st, 2006Changing the Windows Live ID associated with your gamertag on Xbox Live seems to be a sad impossibility. The only solution seems to be the creation of a new gamertag, which means losing all your save games, and associated profile data. I had switched primary Windows Live accounts shortly after I got my 360, so I’ve been digging for a solution to no avail.
Unfortunately because I’m a prissy bitch I demanded to switch gamertags and now am having to deal with getting all my Oblivion achievements again. It’s a hard life when you simply have to play another 200 hours of Oblivion to save face 
Add me as a friend if you interested - my new gamertag is Sparktography. Check out my new gamer badge and (hopefully) watch my achievements grow again!
My brief but torrid affair with a Q
Tuesday, June 13th, 2006
What can I say - I’m a sucker for a good sexy form factor. Luckily I’m not that much of a sucker and I won’t be keeping it for long. Recently Motorola announced their “Blackberry killer”, the Q. The Q shares a lot of the Blackberries features (nicely implemented scroll wheel, similar form factors) and according to their marketing is being aimed clearly at RIM’s sagging market. Being the true technology wh0re that I am (with a particular weakness for cell phones and their ilk) I had to rush out and buy one - but I’ll be returning it shortly now that I’ve had a chance to see it’s short list pros and rather extensive collection of cons.
Motorola has managed to capture a rather attractive RAZR like form factor in a QWERTY phone device. I have to say that as far as the hardware goes I wouldn’t mind keeping this one slid discreetly into my pocket - except for the fact that it’s sexy form factor is pretty much the only selling point the Q has.
The UI is simply bad - they chose to restrict Windows Mobile 5.0 to a horribly large font (for readability?) and thus sacrifice precious screen real estate that could be used to display more information to the user. The scroll wheel makes it a bit more tolerable due to the ease at which one can scroll through a mail, but it’s still cumbersome and takes at least twice as many “screen-fulls” of information to see the same email on the Q as it would take on my HTC Wizard.
The mail client has some strange restrictions on it which make it almost completely unusable for me. It won’t support automatic syncing of IMAP folders other than the root inbox folder, and won’t let me use IMAP IDLE, or set a polling frequency of less than 15 minutes. In this modern day and age of “now now NOW!” it’s strange to see a company trying to push a phone with an artificial limit on how quickly you can check your mail in it.
Next up is the lack of recent OS updates. Verizon and Motorola decided to ship with the base Windows Mobile 5.0 OS - not the newly released AKU2 with MSFP. AKU2 is the second service pack for the Windows Mobile operating system, and made some astonishing improvements including true push mail (and the Q lacking this really will prevent it from going toe to toe with the Blackberry) and significantly better memory management.
For being pushed as a “All in Wonder” data-centric device the Q manages to completely disappoint. With it’s difficult to navigate UI, and non-poweruser centric mentality it’s most likely not going to end up in the hands of tomorrow burgeoning enterprise customers who will instead be lured away from the HTC Hermes or Palm’s Treo 700w (also made by HTC)
Lastly I was hoping to be blown away with EVDO having come from Cingular’s aging EDGE network. I think the term underwhelmed comes to mind - it’s faster than EDGE, but not by much. For my money I would rather pay half as much for data service through Cingular and get 85% of the throughput.
The moral of this story? Never betray HTC! HTC makes the best Windows Mobile devices on the market (Wizard, Apache, Hermes, and Treo 700w) and knows how to create a truly positive user experience.
Technorati Tags: Cell Phone, Motorola, Microsoft, Technology, Motorola Q, Windows Mobile 5.0, WM5.0, Bad user experience
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