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I hate going back on my word, even more so when I’ve spent two blog posts slagging off the i-phone. I hate to admit it, but Apples i-phone is good… nay, great… awesome even.
For what it does, its with out par in todays cellphone market. Nothing I’ve seen comes close to it. That doesn’t mean it wont happen. But at this current juncture its an awesome piece of hardware that brings the mobility a cellphone with the versatility and functionality of a PDA. Blending it together in something that has set the benchmark for all other cellphone manufactures.
So lets begin a week long look at what the i-phone is, isn’t and where it misses the mark.
The i-phone 3G, out of the box and plugged into either a wall socket or a USB port takes about an hour and a half to be fully charge. I am unsure if Apple intended to make the battery quick charging, but none the less it is. So its only a short amount of time before your are ready to start playing with your i-phone. A single charge can last up to one whole day, depending on how much you use it and weather you have updated the firmware to 2.1. Updating to 2.1 is something I recommend doing as soon as you have your i-phone fully charged. It not only increases the battery life of the phone but also fixes a number of issues that people have been having with the phone.
During my firmware update, the phone thought my desire to upgrade it foolish and decided to bomb out on me. Apples tag line of, It just works, seems to be more of a marketing slogan than a reality.
After much screaming and gnashing of teeth, I got it working again. Only to find that all my contacts that I had so lovingly put in were now gone…its just working on my nerves. I sync up the Ii-phone with i-tunes, which to my luck had backed up my contacts. This was a double edged sword, I got all my contacts back, however there were now two of everyone…its just working my my blood pressure.
The i-phone as I am sure you know, is a totally touch screen cellphone. The touch screen is simple to use, and doesn’t take to much to master. If you’ve used an I-pod touch you should be right at home with the i-phone. However with all touch screen items, the screen quickly has more finger prints on it than the girl I took the my Matric Dance. Tomorrows look at the i-phone i will explain the various figure commands for the i-phone.
I-tunes, as with all Apple products is a must. Enabling you to upload music, pictures and video onto your i-phone. You are also able to download a couple of free applications from the “App store”.
The App store is a clever little shop where you can purchase third party applications that can run on your phone. From games to navigation to even budgeting software. Seeing as we do not have an i-tunes store for South Africa, most of us will have to be content with the free applications.
You are able to access the App store from you i-phone, but it is a waste of valuable bandwidth. So rather do it on your computer. Talking about a massive waste of bandwidth, getting the i-phone up and running and working at its finest requires a massive 300meg download. I-tunes and the 2.1 firmware upgrade take a massive bite out of your monthly cap. You’ve been warned, its something you’re gonna have to just grim and bear through.
One nice little feature with the i-phone is that I was able to import all my gmail contacts, right onto the phone. All it asked for was a username and password, and I have total access to my gmail account. If you are not using gmail and prefer outlook, that to is supported, but no Thunderbird support. So even the technologically illiterate are able to have their email on the go.
I also, much to my surprise, able to access google maps and with the I-phones GPRS I am able to have an accurate to the metre of where I am standing. You are able to purchase navigation software from the app store, but seeing as we dont have an i-tunes store for South Africa… we are bum out of luck with that. None the less, you are still have access to google maps navigation, but this only has major roads in South Africa. So no finding your way around Durban once you get there.
After Day 1 with the I-phone, I can already see that Vodacom is going to have to pry this phone from my cold dead hands… I don’t want to give it back. Get it in your hands, and you will quickly see that its just want you want.
Add Tech Noir to your RSS Feed, so that you can see what the rest of my time playing with the i-phone brings.
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:
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Africa
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Centralamerica
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Downunder
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Europe
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Mediterranean
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Mideast
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Northamerica
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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.
