Posts Tagged iphone
Great iPhone vs Evo spoof
I have watched these iPhone vs Evo spoofs about 10 times now and they still have me laughing. So true!
For the record I had a free HTC Evo 4G from Google IO and sold it on eBay because the battery was crap, it can’t connect to my work’s wifi, email was clunky, the mainstream apps just weren’t as advanced as their App Store counterparts (news readers, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), and more importantly it was just too friggin’ big to carry around in my pocket. For any mobile device high resolution, battery life, and a seamless simple UI trump a big screen and power any day. I own a 13″ MacBook Pro instead of some ginormous Dell laptop for the same reason. Not to mention that I absolutely hate the dual and triple branding that makes it onto all the Androids: my Evo regularly assaulted me with Sprint, Nascar, HTC, and Google. How many annoying pop-ups do I need when I already bought the phone? You don’t notice this stuff until you’ve used Apple devices for several years and then it’s like wow, WTF.
As a consumer the iPhone wins me over hands-down for the reasons above, but it’s actually grown on me as a developer as well. I’ve written a lot of Java and not been a huge fan of Objective C, but the more I think about it HTML5 – not Flash or Java – really is the right open standard to back for great user interfaces across tons of platforms (mobile and desktop alike), and I’m really glad someone with Apple’s clout is making a statement there. I wish it was a little easier to make HTML5 apps feel as seamless as their native cousins on the iPhone, but it will get there.
I bought an iPhone 4 on launch day and it’s an amazing device that hasn’t had me miss the Evo one bit.
iPhone 4 pre-order is almost as fun as waiting in line
Yes I know I should expect a rush, but one of these days will Apple and AT&T get their shit together? I say AT&T because the main storefront is super fast, but as soon as it’s time to enter my phone number and have my account verified with AT&T the process grinds to a halt. You’d think it’s sending my account info through their 3G network. After a little over an hour of the five screens below I managed to get my first order through, and almost another hour later the second. Then the store went down again just after I got both confirmation emails. Guess I got lucky on this one.
Pandora gets even better
I’m a huge Pandora fan (thanks to my wife who discovered it for me!), and just noticed that they’ve revamped the premium side of the service to be even better. In case you haven’t used it, Pandora is an incredibly cool “custom radio” service that lets you seed it with a song, artiest, or other criteria, and then it spings off songs to your liking for hours on end. The only catch is that you can’t request a specific song to be played, and there are a limited number of “skips” per hour to conform to licensing agreements. It’s kind of like the iTunes Genius except that you obviously don’t have to own the music, and in my experience the “matching” logic in Pandora is by far the best out there. It literally plays all the music I love and finds new stuff for me, rarely coming up with anything annoying (which, when it does, is easy to correct via simple “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” controls).
As for the new changes, they’ve just unveiled Pandora One which for the same $36/year premium price, boasts even further relaxed restrictions and a handy desktop player (which incidentally, also appeals to my geek side because it uses Adobe AIR). Now I don’t have to worry about killing Pandora during my multitude of browser restarts during the day!
If you haven’t tried Pandora you should really check it out. Even the free version is phenemenal, and once you’re hooked you’ll see that $36/year for the extra bells and whistles is a steal. They also have a great iPhone app for music on the go and are starting to support some more conventional home audio systems as well.
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