ChiaTown» Reviews

12 Days With The iPhone 4S (from an Android user)

Chia — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:51:52 +0000

Alas, my time as an Android owner has ended. I want to get this post out while my brain is still fresh with Android usage and learning the ways of the iPhone.

Well…there’s not much to learn…in true Apple fashion everything is pretty damn simple. Here’s what I see.

Email Setup – Holy crap that was easy! Seriously…I’ve got numerous email accounts, some GMail, a .mac, a Mindspring (yeah, I keep it old school) and some other accounts from my hosting company. When I got my Samsung Moment, it was loads of configuring to set up every account, configure, blah blah blah. Then switching to the HTC Evo this summer and I had to do the same damn thing. Got my iPhone and was getting ready to set up all my email accounts and was completely surprised (in a good way) that they were already set up as they were matched up to all my accounts on my MacBook Air at home. This goes way beyond a score of an A+.
Apps – Two years ago when I got my first Android phone (Samsung Moment) I was a bit discouraged as there were so many apps for the iPhone that weren’t available for my Android. However I learned to live with it and by the time I got to the point I’m downloading apps for my iPhone I found everything I wanted except for three or four apps. (if anyone knows of a good PicSay, PDANet, or Hide It Pro substitute let me know)
Camera – Wow. Just wow. Yeah, I love the fact it’s a great camera, but the speed to fire that thing up is amazing. It’s what makes me want to take pictures while I’m out and about. I can’t tell you how many pics I’ve missed because it took forever for my Evo to get the camera up. By the time it was ready, my picture opportunity was gone. On the iPhone 4S you’re up and ready to shoot in no time. A favorite “feature” of mine.
Hardware Speed – With the dual-core A5 chip you can imagine it’s pretty damn fast. And it is. Not much else to say there except it’s fast.
Siri – Another favorite of mine. I haven’t fully explored all its features but sending a text message while my hands are full is awesome. Sending an email or a Twitter update with my voice is handy too. I’m looking forward to seeing what else I can do with it…especially as more apps start taking advantage of it.
Openness – I’m still on the fence about this one. I enjoyed some of the openness of my Evo, specifically the ability to tether to my laptop and use it as a modem when there was no wifi as well as installing some apps by bypassing the Android Market. However, I didn’t have the need to do either of those too often I doubt I’ll miss it too much. Time will tell.
Interface – Sweet mother it’s intuitive, easy, and beautiful. Yes, I’m a fan of that.
Data Speeds – I’m not sure who to blame for my slow-as-molasses data speeds. It’s a well-documented issue already (http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/26/8493848-sprint-trying-to-fix-iphone-4s-speed-issue) that it’s terribly slow. Since I don’t have my Evo anymore I can’t see if it’s just the phone or if Sprint’s network is being crushed by all the new iPhone users.
Form Factor – It’s smaller than my Evo. The screen is much smaller than my Evo. As I stood in the Sprint store comparing my soon-to-be iPhone with my Evo I thought “damn, that screen is tiny! Will I be able to see on it?” The answer? A resounding yes. The retina display makes everything quite easy to see (as well as a great interface). So now that the small screen “issue” is done, I can say I love the fact this smaller phone doesn’t fill my entire pocket with this giant mass of plastic and glass.
Accessories – I haven’t bought many yet but I know from experience by looking for accessories for my Moment and Evo that there are much more accessories available for the iPhone than there are for the various Android phones. That was something that always annoyed me about owning an Android and I’m looking forward to seeing what iPhone accessories I’ll end up snagging.
OS – As an ex-Android user I can quite easily say I was quite frustrated with the massive OS fragmentation amongst devices. “Great, Android 2.2 is out and I’m still running 1.6″ was something I was saying for a while. Not only that, there’s no guarantee that the next Android OS will actually be good for your phone. When the Moment was upgraded from 1.6 to 2.1 it in reality made my phone useless, slow, and horrifically frustrating (hence the urge to buy a used Evo on craigslist while waiting for my contract to run out so I could get a new phone).
Miscellaneous – I hated the fact carriers always installed their own apps on Android phones (with a few exceptions) that I really didn’t want and was not able to uninstall. I found myself unable to keep all the pics I wanted or download all the apps I wanted because I couldn’t get rid of NASCAR and a bunch of pre-installed uninstallable game demos. Thanks for keeping my phone clean Apple.
(bonus…wanted to leave this at 12 for my 12 days) Battery Life - I don’t have the actual numbers but I can say that the battery life is damn long. I tried to kill my battery last night after a day of use and nothing. Left wifi on all night, it still had power this morning. Fired up streaming radio and listened to that all morning while getting ready for work and then used GPS navigation on the way to work. It FINALLY died later in the morning. Gotta give it to Apple as they know how to optimize their hardware and software.

So, after 12 days with my iPhone I’m very pleased. The slow network annoys the crap out of me right now but I don’t know if that’s Apple’s fault or not. I love the integration with my Mac. I love the fact I’ll continue to get OS updates (unlike Android where you usually get one update per phone) to keep my phone on the cutting edge. I was a happy Android user for all these years (with a few gripes like when my Moment became useless or the non-smoothness of integrating with the rest of my Mac stuff) but I’m already in love with my iPhone and am glad I got it.

One final note…I have no idea why people would stay with AT&T or Verizon and spend so much more money for their plans when Sprint is so much cheaper. I’m just sayin’…

Quick addition to my Sprint plan note…One thing to note when comparing plan prices between the three major carriers is that Sprint’s non-peak hours are longer (start at 7pm instead of 9pm) and mobile-to-mobile is actually mobile to ANY mobile and not just same-carrier mobile. Thus I have a mere 500 mins/month plan and still have a hard time burning through them all.

UPDATE 1: (Oct 28 evening) So here are my data speed numbers. I knew it seemed slow, but this is ridiculous. Funny that I posted such a glowing review of the iPhone, and I generally love Sprint, but sadly the combination of the two (hm, two positives make a negative) suck donkey nards. Tomorrow is day 14 of “you have 14 days to return the phone” so I’ll be heading back to the Sprint store to see what they say and may be heading back to my Evo. I’ll keep you updated!

They abysmal speed of the iPhone on Sprint

Update 2: (Oct 29 morning) Returned from the Sprint store about an hour ago. I had some great discussions with the Assistant Manager there about various issues (the main one being the sluggish speed I’m experiencing). I even had my receipt and box in hand if I needed to go back to my Evo (why? I don’t really utilize streaming THAT often). Apple is working on a software update to help Sprint’s iPhone utilize Sprint’s network more efficiently and quickly. Also, while I was there I was pointed out a discount I’m eligible for and also worked up a plan to save a friend $25/month. Now that’s customer service! Yet another reason I’ve never wanted to leave Sprint.

So…I’ve got my iPhone, will deal with slow data for a couple weeks and will still be supremely pleased with my new toy.

iPad Review From a Non-Journalist

Chia — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:57:59 +0000

Get your iPad review here. That’s right folks! Read what a “normal” consumer thinks (rather than the journalists or other reviewers who have no clue what the common folk think) after one day with his new device.

Some background on the reviewer (it’s not me). He’s an artist/illustrator. The man, the reviewer, the Spencer Lindsay (you’ll see some of his goods on his blog).

Here’s what he’s got to say:
======begin Spencer iPad review=======

OK.

Full day and a half of using my iPad and I can’t get it away from my teenage daughters – hence the snappy title.

Battery Life:
- Absofuckinglutely unstoppable. I’ve had it on for the entire day today, playing movies, surfing the web – ooohhh… the web surfing… and drawing on it.
- As of 8:15pm, battery is at 65%
UI:It’s cooler than SJ made it look in his easychair rollout talk. Smooth, fast and responsive without even one hiccup so far.
- If you have an iPhone or a touch, you know what to do.
Apps:
- I bought iWork.
  - Pages: Pretty damn cool. Kinda hard to type fast on the slippery keyboard, but I think I can get used to it. Extremely intuitive interface with one exception: where are all the files kept and why are there multiple copies? Must look into it.
  - Numbers: Seems exactly as useable as pages – I’m going to mess with it tonight.
- iPhone apps sometimes crash.
- iPhone apps look a little yucky compared to the “HD” versions of the iPad apps.
- Google Maps app is shockingly fast and useable. The multitouch stuff really is amazing in this.
No Flash.
- I have yet to find this a problem. CBS even has a (FREE) iPad app that lets you watch their shows (FREE) and it acts just like Hulu. I’m guessing that all the networks are going to do this if they like money. 700,000 sold in one day… yoiks!
GPS, Compass, Accelerometer:
- All work flawlessly with most apps, though some of the app store purchases seem a little “rickety”… possibly the new API – I know there were some changes between iPhone and iPad.
Screen:
- Sharp, crisp and fast.
- Sticky fingers do leave some smudges though, I’ve had to clean it twice today but there’s been a ton of fingers on it.
Movies: Awesome. Clear and sharp and very fast to load.
Books:
- I’ve purchased one book: Dies the fire, and it’s very readable – The one thing I might add is a “lock scree rotation” button. Occasionally, while shifting positions, the screen rotated on me.
- There are a bazillion free downloads of all the classics. It felt funny loading Tolstoy and the collected works of Shakespear on it but I did it because I could.
Mail:
- Pretty much the same a iPhone mail with more room.
Safari:
- Holy mother of God this is where the iPad totally shines for me. The speed is fantastic, the refresh speed of the graphics is amazing and the multitouch to zoom in and out of pages at will is just so cool.

I had it with me at the aquarium today and the reactions were anything but ambivalent. I got one of two reactions:

1.) OMG is that an IPAD!! Want!
b.) Oh yeah, an iPad, I can’t believe you bought one. (editor’s note…it’s an inside joke with “b” following “1″ in our lists)

The naysayers usually say: But it’s just a big iPod Touch…

My question is: “is that a bad thing?”

Still trying to figure out if this will replace the MBP… it might.

=====end Spencer iPad Review======

Spencer then went on to ramble on about what happened on Day Two of his iPad experience.

=====Spencer’s iPad Thoughts Day Two====

Day two.

Left it on the kitchen counter.

In a half an hour, Clan Lindsay had looked up a map of Santa Cruz, checked housing listings, googled images of Lady Gaga all while listening to the new Black-Eyed Peas album.

It’s more of an appliance than I thought.

=====end Spencer’s iPad Thoughts Day Two====

And there you have it folks. An everyday consumer with a family seems to think “yes, I like this machine”. Forget all the “pundits” and “experts” who complain about the lack of a camera or that it doesn’t have a keyboard. This isn’t a laptop for crying out loud. It’s a new device. As I stated/asked in my last iPad piece with my predictions, it’s created a whole new category. I’ll admit I want one. It won’t replace my laptop but it will certainly be a nice device to have in the living room, bedroom, kitchen…

Kudos to you Apple for creating yet another winner and making countless millions craving to spend more money on your devices. Sheesh…anyone want to send me one to review?

Getting Back To The Grind

Chia — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:01:58 +0000

After a rather long hiatus (3 months or so since anything substantial?) I am about to get back to the grind. The past three months of my life have been spent spending as much time with my mother as possible after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Last week she passed away with dignity and grace and since then I’ve slowly been getting back to who I am…an entrepreneur, a tech freak, a business freak.

Here’s what we have to look forward to in the next few upcoming posts. I started a comparison of two different virtualization apps, Sun’s open source VirtualBox and the non-open source VMWare Fusion. I started testing these two side-by-side on a MacBook Pro with both Windows XP and the Ubuntu distro of Linux. My initial notes and thoughts will be posted and I’ll let you know what I eventually ended up using and why.

I’ll also be setting up a new social networking site or two. I had started to set up one site using BuddyPress but eventually nixed that. Stay tuned and you’ll see why. Next up will be me evaluating other social networking frameworks such as Elgg, Dolphin 6 from Boonex, and possibly PHPibazi. If anyone has any thoughts on those solutions or others let me know and I’ll take a look into them.

I’ve also picked up a few side projects toying around with concrete5. I had tried it out maybe a year or so ago but didn’t stick with it. However, after trying it out again a couple months ago I must admit I like what I see. Dubbed as CMS by some and a “website builder” by others (that’s how it is labeled by some ISPs and they even have SimpleScripts installations on various ISPs). I will of course report on my findings, likes, dislikes, and the such.

What’s going on with Sprint?!? I know, I know, you’re all used to me reporting and commenting on Sprint Nextel’s latest news. I will once again be getting back to my analysis of the number 3 cellular carrier in the US.

Can the Palm Pre survive? Who knows. It’s a pretty damn good phone but…where the hell are the apps? If Apple has taught us anything with the iPhone, it’s that apps are key to the next successful smartphone. There are plenty of smartphones out there. How many can you name? Coincidence? I think not.

My Take on Apple’s Safari 4 Public Beta

Chia — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:52:44 +0000

Being the dork that I am I just had to download Apple’s Safari 4 public beta release yesterday. I’ve already got a few “good for you Apple” and a couple “why…why would you do that?” items with just one day’s worth of use but my initial reaction is “I like it!”

First off, Apple claims that Safari 4 is the fastest browser on the planet. Maybe, maybe not. To be honest, I really haven’t noticed any blazing speed. I’m not in it for the speed though. I crave stability and features that make my life easier (I remember when tabbed browsing first came out. I couldn’t imagine why any browser WOULDN’T have it. I’m curious to see what this new iteration of Safari does) while browsing the wonderous world of the interweb.

Things I dig:
Top Sites - This page is just plain awesome. Awesome. I love having a list of all of the top sites I hit (sure, I could use a the menu bar, but this gives me yet another way to access my top pages). The graphical representation is pretty darn cool too. As previous stated, I can now hit my top sites this way and perhaps keep reminder links up in the menu.

Cover Flow - What was once a nifty way of sorting through your albums in iTunes is now a great way sift through your history and bookmarks. Once again, it’s the graphical representation of the page that makes it for me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bookmarked a bunch of pages on the same topic (ie, fantasy football stats) but then went through my list of bookmarks wondering “Is this the football page I’m looking for? Maybe this one? Crap…this one…” (I do have one gripe…that’ll go in the gripe section)

Developer Tools - This was a groovy feature (with some plug-ins) that I totally dug on Firefox. Being a pseudo-developer I can appreciate this feature (you’ve gotta turn it on in Safari’s Preferences) as I look at the sites I’m developing and yes…peeking at the code of other sites that I am admiring.

Things I don’t dig:
Tabs on Top - Apple touts this as a feature. I find it horrifically annoying. Let’s say I’ve got another app that I’m working in (Mail, TextEdit, etc) but have Safari open behind it. If I want to check on something in Safari I would click on the top of the browser and go to the page I intentionally left in front. Now I end up hitting a tab that I don’t want open or have to find some place on Safari’s page that does NOT have a link for fear of going to another page. Needless to say, it’s more of a hassle for me to switch back to the page I left open in Safari from another app than it was before. Maybe I’ll get used to it or find another way around this…maybe not.

Cover Flow issue - I dig the way Cover Flow puts up a picture of the page in your history but um, yeah, not so much for your bookmarks. Looks as if (at least in my experience) that you’ve got to click on each bookmark to index the picture so it’ll pop up in Cover Flow next time.

Facebook issue - Facebook is still agonizingly slow on Safari at times. Faster on Firefox for me. Granted it’s most definitely coding on Facebook’s site but the fact it runs faster on Firefox means it is possible to run faster on Safari. Right? Apple…it’s true, right?

Yahoo Finance issue – This has been annoying the crap out of me for a while. I track my stocks (why? to punish myself and see all that I lost? ugh) on Yahoo Finance and enjoy reading the news on various stocks. Generally I will command-click on the link to open a new tab for the article and voila, I’m good to go. Not so on Safari. It happened in 3 and it’s still happening in 4…the horrid oddity of me hitting the command key and Safari immediately sending me to the top of the page. It’s impossible for me to command-click on any tab in Yahoo…thus I gotta navigate away from Yahoo to read the story, go back, navigate away for another story, go back, lather, rinse, repeat. Bleehhhhhh…

Something I’ll probably dig:
Full History Search - I don’t feel like going through it all so I’ll just paste what Apple says about it on the Safari page. “Just type a word or phrase in the History Search field in Top Sites, and Safari quickly presents you with a list of possibilities. In fact, you can search for anything that was on a page you visited, even photo captions. To jog your memory, Safari presents the sites it finds in Cover Flow, giving you the opportunity to spot the right site on sight.” That looks pretty cool to me. Now to find some time to use it.

So those are my initial thoughts on Apple’s Safari 4 public beta for now. Even though my gripes list was longer than my kudos list, I’m most certainly giving Safari 4 a “two thumbs up” rating.

I shall continue to test and use and critique and report anything exciting, good or bad. I invite you all (it’s available for both PCs and Macs) to do the same and report back so that we can compile a list of pros and cons here for our readers and let them decide for themselves if they’d like to make the move to Safari 4 or not.

Apple Safari 3 Review

Chia — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:05:05 +0000

So I tried it. I wanted to like it. I wanted soooo so badly to like it. I just couldn’t.

Apple’s Safari came up lacking big time for me on a PC (Crappy old Dell running XP). It had some of the things I require in a browser (tabbed browsing being the main one) and is supposed to be kick ass under the hood with support for HTML v5, animated CSS, blazing speed, etc. I didn’t see the speed. Not only did I not see the speed, it moved like a herd of turtle stampeding through molasas on my machine. I finally got so frustrated with it today that I went back to Firefox 2 as my default browser.

There were other little quirks that annoyed me. One such quirk is how Safari didn’t seem to update what was on each tab. For example, I keep a number of tabs open at once…the intranet, GMail, another web-based email account, stocks on Yahoo, and one or two more things. In Firefox I know when I have a new message in GMail because the tab will update to “inbox (1)” (or however messages I’ve just received) and I know to check it. If I go to my GMail account, clear out the spam, go back to my inbox, the tab always reflects that. The story is much different in Safari. The tab sticks to whatever I was on two, five, eight clicks ago. It will say I’m in the spam folder when I’m not. It will say I’m on this one particular email when it’s been deleted an hour ago. It’s little things like this that kinda irk me as I try to be more efficient in my work day.

Let’s get back to that speed thing. I didn’t really notice a speed difference. What I DID notice was Safari taking up 99% of my computer resources and bringing my computer to a screeching halt. Not really a good thing when I’m trying to work. I was particularly irked this morning when I had opened a couple tabs to read different news articles and Safari again ate up my CPU. After seven to ten minutes I finally had to force quit Safari. I’d like to read those articles but now I have to do a search for them because I don’t have the source anymore. Again…who’s got time for that? I’ve got work to do.

It’s a shame…the press releases look soooo so good. The real world results for me were less than satisfying. Perhaps it’ll be more speedy and stable on my PowerBook at home…that still has yet to be seen. For work though…it’s me and Firefox 2 once again.