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Having spent a couple of days now with the iphone I think that I’ve seen most of what it has to offer and where it hits the mark or hits the hair. (Follow the link and you should get the joke).
As I am sure all of you know that the iphone is a touch screen mobile, with all the bells and whistles one could want and enough DRM that blends magically together giving you a beautiful marriage of S&M and IBS.
Now you are able to buy a cover for your iphone, but I unfortunately don’t have one. Thus the iphone’s screen quickly becomes a greasy mess of finger prints… much like my first girlfriend. Sorry, sorry I’ll stop with the cheap jokes.
So buying a cover is a must, protecting your ridiculously expensive investment should be of major concern to you.
As one reader pointed out,
“You are wrong about us not having the itunes store.
apple has opened the itunes store for south Africa.
the only trick is that in the itunes store the only thing we can buy is applications.
so they have opened it, but no music, tv shows or movies.
still, its cool that we can buy apps”
Thank you for commenting on the blog Matthew. I always enjoy getting feed back from loyal readers. However as you stated in your comment, that we do in fact have an itunes store, I would disagree. Heres why.
In order for it to be a store, it would have to be somewhere a transaction would take place. According to Google a store is ‘a mercantile establishment for the retail sale of goods or services’
Our itunes store does none of that. All we are able to do is download free applications. We aren’t able to purchase music, videos, ring tones or even applications. Its more that we have idownload than a itunes store. I thank you again Matthew, I always enjoy hearing other opinions on topics, even when they are wrong, so wrong in fact that I am sending someone to take your keyboard away from you.
Vodacom, are you listening? We need a itunes store for South Africa. You brought us the most wanted phone in the world, but now we need what made it so wanted. The applications, music and other stuff.
You see, we want to get the most out of our iphones. Where is the support? Where are the ringtones, music, videos, applications? We don’t have it, and doesn’t look like we will for a long time.
Vodacom or anyone, please somehow open an itunes store for South Africa. According to Wikipedia, Apple has opened an itunes store in New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta. And these aren’t even important countries and they get an itunes store. South African’s have more than enough disposable income than people living in Malta. Where the bloody hell is Malta anyway?
See Vodacom, I take my hat off to you from bringing the iphone to South Africa. Let me keep the phone and I’ll take my pants off for you. Bring an itunes store, and Apple product owners around SA will throw money, children, the elderly and vital internal organs at you to get hold of itune’s content. Consumers are waiting, wallets open, cash in hand, so what are you going to do about it?
One the reasons we need an itunes store for South Africa is that, it is only with songs purchased from itunes are you able to make ring tones for your self. Don’t like the stupid ring tones that come with your R7000 phone, well sorry you’re stuck with it.
Want to be able to watch a TV series or movie on your iphone? To bad, because you have to rent it through itunes. Which as you know, we don’t have
I guess its time to jailbreak this baby then?
At idownload (note: not itunes store, as we established it is not in fact a store), you are able to download a number of free applications. It will take a while going through all of the crap trying to find the diamond. But if you look hard enough and long enough. You should be able to find one or two free applications that rock.
Stanza is a great free app, allowing you to download ebooks that you are then able to read on your iphone. Another that I enjoy is Twittelator, enabling you to twitter from your phone. You are also able to take a snap shot of your current GPS location and send that through to Twitter. Your friends and family will be able to then use Google Maps to see were you are. Some times it gets it right, other times your in the middle of the ocean. Its a hit or miss affair.
Also recommend downloading a application called Fring, its skype on your Iphone. No need to try to sell this to you. I think we all know how awesome thats going to be.
Vodacom’s data blundes, packaged with its contracts is strangely enough, large enough for the average user out there. Checking your email and chatting online doesn’t eat up bandwidth to quickly. However, with the iphone in my hands I was able to eat through 64.9MB in five days. I think that maybe Vodacom needs to up the bandwidth, for its iphone packages. But lets wait and see how this thing rides out. Maybe Vodacom’s bandwidth packages is enough, but only time will tell.
If you’ve been watching any of the tech sites lately, there is a lot of talk about the latest offering from the google gods. CHROME… its a web browser that according to Google is going to revolutionize internet browsing the world over.
Being a Firefox user I, scoff and severely doubt this however I will give it a try for the shake of the readers.
Here goes.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD CHROME.
Download is simple, simply follow the link and it will take you to the window above.
From here a simple download, that should take no longer than a couple of seconds. So where ready to begin Chrome.
Ah, now you see here comes the second part of the download. Once you begin Chromes setup, it will begin downloading the rest of the software.
UP AND RUNNING
With everything installed and running properly, its time to have a look at what this thing can do.
Chrome’s interface is simple and uncluttered.Google seems to have seen fit to remove the options that usually sit at the top of your browser. Which reminds me a little to much of Internet Explorer 7… So its already off to a bad start.
Chrome imports all of your user names and passwords from Firefox and Internet Explorer. Which is useful,but should be standard with all browsers.
Most people use their scroll wheel on their mouse to navigate around web pages… Personally I like to hold the scroll wheel button down and navigate around a page, as it makes for faster movement around pages. However Chrome doesn’t support this. Minus one point to Chrome.
As stated in the previous post, I love my 3rd party applications. Where else am I going to Twitter or get my weather updates from? 3rd party apps don’t seem to be support as of yet. But the that wont take to long before those start coming out.
CRT+T, first revolutionized by the Mozilla team. Is still available in Chrome.
A nice little feature is that when you open a new tab, the new tab will show you a some of the resent web pages you’ve visited. Google maybe onto something, time will tell.
Visually its impressive. But I need to spend more time with it. Will keep readers up to date.
If you have any views or opinion on Chrome feel free to email me at
mccabejj@avusa.co.za
Though your high school English teachers’ toes may twist, the vein on her forehead might pulsate and her blood pressure rise, its now globally accepted that where once Google was a noun it is now a more often than not used as a verb.
Need to find out the air speed velocity of a unladen swallow, Google it.
Need to find out the what the capital of Assyria is, Google it.
Supreme executive power derived from a mandate of the masses or from some farcical aquatic ceremony? Google it.
However, it seems that as days go by and technology makes ever increasing leaps towards judgment day (Not referring to those wacky fire and brimstone revelations ), I’m thinking more along the lines of Skynet.
It seems that most people do not know how to search correctly or should I dare say efficiently. Though Google does generally find what you are looking for somewhere between the first and third page of search results, being able to refine and prioritize your searches is a must in todays information overload.
Allow Tech Noir to show you the ropes.
To get a better understanding on what you are doing, I have hyper linked some the examples, so that you can see what difference the tips make.
Search for a phrase.
Add “ “ to search for an exact phrase, using quotation marks around the text you are looking for.
Example: “In the town where I was born”.
This is good for people’s names, quotations, song lyrics and other situations where you want to ensure that words appear next to each other on the page.
Search including a word
+ use a plus sign for words that must be included in you search results.
Example: Nascar Car + Ricky Bobby
Search excluding a word
- Use a minus sign for words that MUST NOT be included in the results.
Example: Nelson Mandela Metro -university
This would give you a list of websites about the Nelson Mandela Metro but remove all the sites about the university.
Domain searches
domain: Use this term to search only within a particular website, or type of website
Example 1: Appletart :iol.co.za
This will return pages offering appletart recipes on the iol.co.za
Example 2: Reservists:saps.gov.za
This will return pages offering pension information from government websites.
-domain: Use a minus sign to exclude a domain from your search.
Example: iraq -domain:www.bbcnews.co.uk
This will return information about Iraq, but exclude any information from the BBC site.
Regional searches
There are nine geographic regions you can use to narrow your search:
-
Africa
-
Centralamerica
-
Downunder
-
Europe
-
Mediterranean
-
Mideast
-
Northamerica
-
Southamerica
- Southeastasia
region: Use this to search for a document from a particular geographic area.
Example: Springboks region:New Zealand
This will return sites from the Middle East offering information about Tony Blair
-region: Add the minus sign to exclude documents from a particular region.
Example: Bull Blues -region:New Zealand
This will return sites about Tony Blair, excluding those from the Middle East.
“OR” search
To find pages that include either of two search terms, add an uppercase OR between the terms.
For example, here’s how to search for a vacation in either London or Paris. Vacation London or Paris
Convert currency, metrics, bytes, and more
Google’s powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out whether you’re cooking dinner, traveling abroad, or building a PC. Find out how many teaspoons are in a quarter cup (quarter cup in teaspoons) or how many seconds there are in a year (seconds in a year) or how many euros there are to five hundred thousand Rand (500000 rand in euro). For the geekier set, bits in kilobytes (155473 bytes in kilobytes) and numbers in hex or binary (19 in binary) are also pretty useful.
Make Google recognize faces
If you’re doing an image search for Paris Hilton and don’t want any of the French city, a special URL parameter in Google’s Image search will do the trick. Add &imgtype=face to the end of your image search to just get images of faces, without any inanimate objects. Try it out with a search for rose (which returns many photos of flowers) versus rose with the face parameter.
For the best results, I would recommend using a number of these techniques together.
Now you didn’t get this from me, but… CLICK CLICK
Tell next time, this is Tech Noir.
