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I have never been as disappointed in Apple as I am with the new iPad.

Here’s why:

AT&T as the only carrier
AT&T SUCKS!  Need I say more?  Those Verizon commercials about AT&T are all 100% correct.  AT&T’s 3G coverage is sad, Verizon’s is amazing.  Until AT&T is gone, the only version I’ll ever get is the WiFi only and use my MiFi 2200 on Verizon for data on the move.

No front-facing camera
ALL of Apple’s computers and monitors come with webcams these days, even the iPhone has a camera in the back.  Why did they not do this? AT&T probably had some say in it, because they SUCK so badly, and wouldn’t be able to handle video conference over 3G.

No Multitasking
They touted this device as something “better” than a netbook, yet it cannot even multitask like a netbook.  ANY netbook is better than this device for this one simple feature.  This feature is “crucial” for a multi-function device like this for it to have any kind of usability outside of basic apps.

The iPhone’ish Operating System
I would’ve preferred something more of a hybrid between the iPhone OS and Mac OS X, I know that would’ve probably required more power and therefore shortened the battery life, but add only 1-2mm thickness and a lot more battery could fit in if shaped correctly.  Having a “fuller” OS probably would’ve solved the multitasking issue and would allow people to run more apps therefore making it that much more of a “usable” device.  Even with this robustness, it would most likely NOT cut into the Laptop market since it doesn’t have a mouse and sometimes you just need a mouse.

No Removable Memory Options
Apple should have simply created 2 versions, a WiFi Only and a WiFi+3G, have some onboard memory, maybe 16 or 32GB, then allow us to expand with it SD cards.  SD Cards are getting bigger all the time and would allow much greater flexibility for expansion.   Of course that would cut into Apple’s profit margins when they want everyone to buy the 128GB version coming out next year.

More Codecs
As much of a “media company” as Apple is, they still need to support the needs of the public as a whole.  Everyone, or at least most, has DiVX AVI or MKV movies that they’ve downloaded or gotten from friends.  It would be really nice if these videos could be natively viewed on this device.

Overall, complaints aside, it is still a nice device.  For the price, it’s still, in my opinion, a much better value than the Amazon Kindle line.  The Kindle is too “plain jane” and black and white while the iPad is the Kindle’s hot younger sister that still has some growing up to do. :-)

I will watch the iPad over the next year or so and if they do make some of these improvements, especially the carrier, multitasking and front-facing camera, I’ll buy 2-3 for me, the kids, and around the house.

Apple, Gadgets, General, Review, Software, Technical, Technology, iPad 1st gen, 3G, Amazon, Apple, AT&T sucks, AVI, complaints, ipad, iPhone, Kindle, Mac, MiFi 2200, MKV, Review, SD, Verizon, webcam, WiFi

Finally Apple’s tablet device has been officially announced. Steve Jobs just now got done with the presentation finished.

Here are some basic specs…
1/2 inch thin, 1.5 pounds, ~9.7 inch high rez display, 1ghz Apple A4 chip… New Apple chip that contain all the controllers. Accelerometer & compass, WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, speaker/mic and 30pin (standard) connector, 10 hours of battery life, 16 to 64gb Flash storage…

IPhone App compatible and can be scaled up to new screensize (pixel doubling)

More to come.

Apple, Cloud Computing, Gadgets, General, Software, Technical, Technology, Web Accelerometer, Apple, Apple A4 Chip, Bluetooth, compass, ipad, iPhone, islate, itablet, slate, steroids, tablet, WiFi

online casino netOutside of a few minor updates to the iPhone (3G) and updated laptop line, Apple has gotten pretty stale.  I think they put the hopes of “Apple Faithful” (I’m one I’ll admin) into overdrive and couldn’t keep it up.  Sure the economy is a little bad.  Well maybe a lot bad, but if they would put out another totally new item, like the iPhone was, I think it would sell like hotcakes.

I’m at the point now, technically, where I have all the desktops I need… Also have a 17” and a 12.1” laptop, a Mac Mini, an older G5 Tower and some Dell servers.  Due to the price of the iPhone data plan, it has mostly been used for a PDA (I don’t have 3G here).  The only thing that would fill the void in my book would be a mini tablet (see picture) or a home server/firewall type device with TBs of storage space + N router + other goodies.

With something like $14,000,000,000 cash in the bank, they should be putting out new stuff for people to spend their “stimulus” monies on. :-)

Apple, Gadgets, General, Technology, iPhone

Co-worker showed me this… Funny stuff…

Apple, Cool Stuff, Humor, Linux, Technical, Technology, YouTube blue screen, Linux, lockup, Mac, PC, PC vs. Mac vs. Linux, versus

Google released their new Chrome web browser shortly before the end of a video announcement about it at 11am PST.  I had the download page ready at the beginning of the video (http://www.google.com/chrome) and was only getting a “404 – not found” error.  At around 11:45a I hit refresh on it and there it was.  

The install was amazingly fast and simple.  Didn’t even require a file that needed downloaded to my HDD and run from there.  The install launched directly out of my Firefox and was done in less than 1 minute. 

It is very heavily based on Apple’s Safari Webkit engine.  Here is the HTTP_USER_AGENT from a test PHP page I made:

“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″

Overall, I’ve always sort of liked Safari, but always had issues with minor glitches and random lagginess.  I’ve not encountered any issues at all with Chrome so far.  Google has probably done massive internal testing to insure that there are no obvious glitches and/or bugs.  The GUI is very simple and seems fully functional and the memory usage is EXCELLENT compared to Firefox.  

I’ve had Firefox take up to 400-500mb RAM without much even going on.  Even just after starting Firefox is the Google homepage, it takes up 62mb RAM.  On my system, Chrome only consumed around 25mb.  

The only thing I’ve run into when it comes to rendering is my company’s Intranet.  It is only optimized for IE and Firefox and looks pretty bad with Chrome/Safari but is still usable.

All other sites I frequent are just fine, loading faster than ever.

UPDATE 5pm EST:

After running some memory tests, I opened up 4 tabs in Firefox, IE8, Chrome, Safari and Opera, which included logging into 2 of the sites and just displaying two others.

Tab 1: My company’s ticketing system
Tab 2: My personal GMail (Google Apps for Domains)
Tab 3: This blog’s admin section login page only
Tab 4: MSN Money Stock quotes with 6 stocks on it

Firefox 3.0.1: 124.5mb RAM (1 thread)
Firefox loaded everything pretty well, was a bit sluggish on GMail tab.

IE8 (version 8.0.6001.17184): 95.5mb RAM (2 threads)
IE8 loaded everything that it loaded pretty quick too, but completely failed to load GMail, getting stuck on the loading <Email adress> progress meter…  Rendering on the front page of my company’s site was screwed up, but was fine in all other browsers tested.

Chrome: 112.5mb RAM (6 threads)
Perfect loading of all tabs, very fast, no issues.

Safari 3.1.2 (Windows): 98mb RAM (1 thread)
Loaded all sites, a bit sluggish, but not as bad as Firefox. 

Opera 9.52: 75.5mb RAM (1 thread)
Loaded all sites, little slow on GMail, but it came up. All other sites where just as fast as Chrome.

In conclusion, I like the feel of Chrome the best.  Very simple and easy to use, I really like the multiple thread/tab paradigm.  Safari has that nice “Appley” interface I like.  Opera is Ok, but does have more rendering problems, on sites not tested above, than the others.  IE8… Bleh… no comment…  

And as for Firefox, and I thought I’d never say it, it falling behind on both memory usage and speed.  I’ve also encountered quite a few Firefox crashes when shutting down the browser.  This is happening occasionally on all my machines on all operating systems I use, Mac, Linux and Windows.

Apple, Cool Stuff, Review, Software, Technical, Technology browser, Chrome, Firefox, Gecko, Google, IE, Microsoft, Mozilla, Safari, Webkit

Later today Google is expected to release a new web browser based on Webkit (what Safari uses) and Firefox.   I feel that it will be a welcome addition to the browser wars.

I used Firefox, but have notice a lot more browser crashes with 3.x than previous versions and it feels quite laggy sometimes even on a Quad processor machine with 3gb RAM.  It gets to the point sometimes where I just load up Safari or Opera to surf sometimes.

IE just sucks.  I ONLY use IE for site testing during web development and for the “best” experience accessing my day job’s Outlook Web Access (OWA) for email.  Other than that, IE is not a part of my day to day browser use.

If this Google takes the best of Webkit and Firefox and makes it “better, faster, stronger”, then I will use it.  Of course I will be frank on my review of it and will do my best not to be biased since I use Google almost exclusive for my search needs, Email (Google Apps for Domains), Analytics for stats, etc.

I will post up a review once I get my hands on it and can put it through it’s paces.

I think Google will have more downloads of this browser in the first 24 hours than Firefox did on it’s 3.0 launch day if it posts up something on the front page of Google.  This could be huge.

Apple, Cool Stuff, General, Review, Software, Technical, Technology 3.0, Analytics, Apple, browser, Chrome, engine, Firefox, Google, Google Apps for Domains, IE, Laggy, Microsoft, Outlook web access, OWA, RAM, Safari, search, war, Webkit

What a complainer… Sure, there are going to be bugs, lots of them sometimes in the case of a new product of this type… People should almost expect them.

We all knew it was coming, it was just a matter of time. A lawsuit has been filed against Apple over what the plaintiff is referring to as the “Defective iPhone 3G,” which she hopes will become a class-action complaint. Alabama resident Jessica Alena Smith filed the complaint yesterday against the iPhone maker, alleging that the new iPhone’s 3G performance and reliability has been subpar, despite the claims made by Apple’s aggressive marketing campaign. Considering that a true fix has yet to be issued for users’ 3G problems, this could just be the tip of the iPhone lawsuit iceberg. More >>

But now, this woman wants to file a class action lawsuit against Apple due to 3G not living up to her expectations.  Even though the Infineon 3G chipset may be a bit flawed, it’s still not completely Apple’s fault.  AT&T is the provider and that can cause the dropcalls, coverage (or lack of) issues and so on.

I live in Kentucky and don’t even have 3G where I live, so I cannot really vouche for the quality, but I did get a chance to travel to Lexington KY this past week and had NO problems whatsoever… Actually my 3G was much faster on my phone that one of my friend’s tethered BlackBerry.  I brought up pages much faster on my phone than he did on his laptop.

Some people just don’t have anything better to do… Just ask for a refund and get a different phone… geesh.

Asinine, Cell Phones, Gadgets, Review, Technical, iPhone 3G, Apple, Blackberry, Class action, coverage, Defective, dropped calls, Infineon, iPhone, Jessica Alena Smith, Kentucky, KY, Lawsuit, Lexington

I got my new 3G today after waiting for two weeks for Apple to get more in.  Went down to the AT&T Store and sat there and waited while the silly customer service reps sat there and explained EVERY little feature of the phones to the customers… Geeesh.  Took about 25 minutes for just one person ahead of me in at each of the 3 reps… Amazing.

Finally, I got to the desk and the girl went back and got it for me and started chatting up a storm about it… I told her I already had the 2G and already knew everything about it, if I don’t, I’ll read the manual.  I also voiced my disappointment with having to pay $10 more for 3G in an area that doesn’t even have 3G service.  Isn’t that “illegal” to charge more for a service that isn’t even offered?   They tried saying, and it must be the official AT&T stance, that the higher price was to be “more competitive with the other data plans”, not because of the faster 3G speeds.  Competitive?  By raising the price higher towards the crackberry plan?  COME ON!  I’ll admit that I knew I would have to pay $10 more a month, so I didn’t make that big of a stink.

THEN, she asked if I wanted SMS messaging…  Prior to ordering, I didn’t realize they stripped out the 200 SMS messages that came with the 2G plan… This is getting silly.  Apple and AT&T are really letting this iPhone thing go to their heads. So I had to pay $5/mo for just 200 SMS messages.

So basically, due to the lack of my area’s 3G coverage, I am paying $15/mo more just to have the same level of service that I had on my 2G.  They better be investing on getting 3G in my area and loosen up on the SMS.  SMS is probably the most efficient use of the network and they charge the MOST for it!  COME ON!

I ended up calling and making a stink about the SMS and got 5 free months of SMS + 1000 extra rollover, which I’ll never use.

They activated it in the store and synced up my contacts with MobileME via WiFi before leaving.  Once I got home, this is where the waiting started…

Syncing with iTunes took about 60 minutes.

It had to:

1. Restore from yesterday’s backup of my 2G. (20 minutes)
2. Backup the new 3G config. (20 minutes)
3. Then it did some iTune maintenance (5 minutes)
4. Then proceeded to sync up my measly 3.5gb of music and apps. (15 minutes)

The backup thing runs like ALL the time now instead of being manual and although I appreciate the backups, I don’t feel like I need it EVERY time I add or change something.  Especially when it takes as long as it does.  The other day, after not syncing for a week or so, it took 30 minutes or so to just do the backup.

THEN, I couldn’t use any of the 3 cradles that I have for my phone due to the physical differences between 2G and 3G… A Dremel tool easily solved this, but again… This is a negative for Apple.  At least they didn’t decide to change the actual connection layout of the plug.

Overall, the audio is much better in the earpiece, the external speaker is louder… Some things seem a bit zippier and the keyboard seems a bit “tappier” and faster to type on.  Maybe it’s the more comfortable feel, I dunno.

I am going to do my best to get this “$15/mo more for nothing” thing remedied, but most likely, I’ll just have to eat it.

I’m actually what you could consider a recent Apple “fanboy” but I am starting to feel the euphoria I felt about Apple for the last few years starting to fade.  If they get any worse, they are going to lose me and my evangelism about Apple and surely, I am not alone in these feelings.

Apple, Cell Phones, Review, Technology 2G, 3G, Apple, Cradle, Dremel, iPhone, iTunes, MobileME, Syncing, WiFi

I had a HDD crash back in 2005 and was fortunate enough to run across QueTek File Scavenger and was able to recover most everything.

Well, last night, my Western Digital MyBook 500gb drive went kablooey right in the middle of watching a movie off of it.  This drive was hooked to my Mac file storage machine and was idle most of the time, so I was curious as to why it would die all of a sudden.  I felt the drive and it was quite warm to the touch, and my office is quite warm to boot, so I am going to attribute this problem to heat. It was also on the bottom of the stack of 2 other WD MyBook 500gb drives.

Everytime I tried restarting the bad drive, it reported itself as a 1.6TB partition and was not able to be read.  I tried a few misc utilities on it, but none could read or recover anything.  This drive ONCE was a part of a three drive RAID-0 (stripped) and I think somehow it went back to thinking it was since the partition name was “disk3″. Weird…

I ran across one called Nucleus Kernel Macintosh for HFS & HFS+ (Mac) formats, and thought I’d give it a try.  It was able to immediately and quickly scan the drive and I could see all the files that were “lost”… I called up a buddy of mine who is a BIG mac guru and he happened to have a full copy of it, so he brought it over and it is recovering now.  (The demo version cannot recover much)

It should be finished sometime tomorrow and I’ll be sure to make duplicates in the future.  I should have learned my lesson by now.

I may end up getting a true RAID SAN/NAS device that has total failover in case of single drive failure.  There’s no feeling worse than thinking you lost years of work due to a stupid hard drive crapping out on you.

Apple, Software, Technical, Technology Disk Failure, Essential, Failure, File Recovery, HDD, HFS, Mac, Macintosh, MyBook, NAS, Nucleus Kernel, Quetek File Scavenger, RAID, SAN, WD, Western Digital

The new Apple iPhone 3G was announced today (6/9/2009) at WWDC 2008 in San Francisco. The new price is only $199 (8gb) and $299 (16gb) due to carrier subsidies. It has tons of new features built into it, notably GPS and 3G (of course) and will definitely make inroads not only into the corporate market with the new MS Exchange functionality, but also into the more frugal consumer market. $199 makes this phone very competitive with the higher end blackberries and cheaper than most of the Microsoft Smartphones.

Most of the base features are the same, like the flash storage capacity, but Apple did take suggestions from the community and improve the design, such as making the headphone jack flush as to not require a special adaptor to use non-Apple headphones.

The 16GB model also has a white backed version as well as the new Black backed and the front of the phone is wholly unchanged…

Included accessories, everything is pretty much the same:

• iPhone 3G
• Stereo Headset with mic
• Dock Connector to USB Cable
• SB Power Adapter (A bit smaller now)
• Documentation
• Cleaning/polishing cloth
• SIM ejector tool (a paperclip!)

Look for the new iPhone to reach stores around July 11th. Hopefully supply will be able to hit the demand that I anticipate. I plan on getting ahold of one for myself.

Apple, Cell Phones, Cool Stuff, Gadgets, Software, Technical, Technology 16gb, 199, 2008, 299, 3G, 8gb, Apple, Black iPhone, Exchange, iPhone, me.com, Mobile ME, San Francisco, White iPhone, WWDC