Posts Tagged ‘iphone’
Posting from my phone
Posted by david | Filed under Cool
mainly because it’s a geeky thing to do.
It’s gonna take a long time to make a single post.
iPhone Buzzing
Posted by david | Filed under Technical Tidbits
Ever since I got the iPhone, I’ve noticed that it causes nearby speakers (radios, desk phones, etc) to emit a buzzing noise.
The odd thing is, my boss Brian’s Blackberry does the same thing.
I finally found the reason why:
The cause of this buzzing has to do with GSM’s “time division” nature. The ever-knowledgeable Keith Nowak, spokesperson for Nokia, explains it as follows: “[[With GSM]] the RF transmitter is turned on/off at a fast rate, and that ‘pulsing’ is often picked up by nearby devices that don’t have good RF shielding. In the case of GSM the pulse rate is 217 Hz, which can be easily heard.”
When I put my iPhone in the clock radio / iPhone dock that Ginny got me for the holidays, it does the same thing. Luckily the dock isn’t recognized as being 100% iPhone compatible, so the iPhone offers to shut off the radio (go into Airplane mode) whenever I dock it. This eliminates the buzzing (mostly) because the phone isn’t transmitting.
iPhone
Posted by david | Filed under Life, Technology
We bit the bullet … we got iPhones. Our Verizon cell phone contract has been up for quite a while and they’ve been bugging us to re-up for a new two year contract … but I haven’t been super happy with the service and phones, so we started thinking about what other provider and phone’s would be a suitable substitute.
My co-worker Jerome has the iPhone and is very happy to show it off. Even on the first release I have to admit, it was pretty cool. The interface was nice, the features were nice, and the sound quality wasn’t bad at all.
The only things I really didn’t like at the get go was the fact that you were tied to AT&T and the battery wasn’t replaceable.
After mulling our alternatives, we decided to go for it. Both Ginny and I got the 8gb model. We were originally thinking about the 16gb model, but the Apple store didn’t have any in stock and we figured, since we only used a fraction of our 4gb iPods, it wasn’t that big a deal.
A few observations …
- It doesn’t like the fact that I use self signed certs on my mail server. I’ll probably have to bite the bullet and get a proper cert.
- I haven’t found any ability to select which folders I show in my IMAP mail account. Wish I could, as I really only care about a handful on an ongoing basis.
- One feature that’s missing, and was almost a deal breaker, was the lack of voice command dialing. On my old moto phone I could just tell it “Call James Rich Mobile” and it would call James Rich’s cell phone (in my address book). Nice for talking while driving.
- As one would expect from an Apple product, the user interface is slick. The screen is a bit over sensitive though. I suspect it’s just something to get used to.
- The pseudo GPS functionality is very cool … I really want to figure out how they do it, because it was able to figure out where was I better than my GPS can.
- Porting of both the phone numbers on my Verizon account was smooth and fast. It only took 30 minutes to complete. I’m going to verify that Verizon cancels my account just in case.
One annoyance, unrelated to the iPhone itself, was the fact that it seems kind of hard to find accessories at stores that don’t actually sell the iPhone. Woodfield mall, and the Apple store, were both very crowded … and both Ginny and I were in a hurry to escape (yeah, so we could play with the new toys) … so we skipped getting protective skins for the new phones. We stopped at Best Buy on the way home, but they only had 2 or 3 skins & cases for the iPhone. I’ll probably stop at Frys on my way home tomorrow to pick something up.
I’m kind of interested to see what the SDK is all about … I’ve got some ideas for apps that could be fun.