Just saw this and thought it was spot on.  Thanks to csection

After being on dingy pay-as-you-go phones for the past decade, I finally caved into a smartphone. I hope Google Android continues to blossom, but as for now the iPhone 4 is where I’ve landed. Some thoughts so far.

I stuck with Virgin Mobile for my carrier. I ordered online and got in about a week. Virgin’s known in Canada as the rock bottom low end brand in Canada with no retention plans and negotiating – but let me just say officially that I was able to swing some things my way.

Antennagate – If I try hard I can make a couple signal bars drop, but never to the point of dropping a call.

I ordered a free 3rd party bumper through Apple (Speck PixelSkin HD) – but it’s taking forever to ship.

In the meantime I’ve got a Wrapsol fully body shield that’s taking a beating. It works fairly well, though I think I over-stretched bits of it, so it wasn’t a perfect install.

The screen is unreal. I notice every pixel on my old iPod touch now.

Being my first smartphone/iphone I can’t tell what good battery life is. I generally have a full 2-day charge with 8 hours of real usage consistently.

I’ve got a gripe with the headphone jack, I think they ought to design it on the bottom.

The ringer also ought to have a separate volume control. I want to be able to hear my calls without people knowing i’m playing some dorky game.

It could use a stronger vibrate/buzz on silent mode

Although it’s gmail specific, I wish the mail app had the ability to ‘star’ items

I have no idea why they would cripple youtube on 3G when it’s crystal clear over wifi

Facetime would be 10x better if they released clients for macs and windows.

The new HDR photos on iOS 4.1 really makes a difference, but it takes an extra 2 seconds to compile so you really need to know the shot you want to get.

Camera-roll photos and videos needs better syncing integration

Needs jailbroken SBS settings like quick toggling of WiFi, 3G, bluetooth and brightness primarily

Apple also needs to kiss and make up with Google and bring Google Navigate and Voice to the iPhone.

The appstore just rocks. I know it’s just Steve Jobs personal ATM, but they really is an app to do just about anything.

My top non-native apps Remember the milk, simplenote, dropbox, youversion, twitter, facebook, foursquare, huffingtonpost, instapaper, Fieldrunners, and Carcassone (i’ll take suggestions as well)

Besides these minor issues mentioned – I love the tethering, multitasking, video/camera and constant connectivity – plus it’s snappy and sexy. No buyers remorse here, I’m quite happy with the purchase!

Star Defense game app by ngmoco has been my latest time killer – ie. waiting in the checkout line at the supermarket. I had no idea i liked defense games until I tried them. StarDefense ranks up there with Fieldrunners, if not even better.

It’s a lot less time consuming, and it didn’t take me too long to finish the game on ‘normal’ mode.

Some tips for those of you looking…because I sure couldn’t find any online.

- Third planet in was the hardest for me
- I use everything except the electric tower thing
- On slight occasions the electric coil was used in a tight space where it covered at least 3 sides of damage since it’s so slow
- a healthy balance of the rest of the arsenal is needed
- it staggers, but i tend to use the plasma blasters more, then the cannons, the slow guns in good spots just before there’s heavy artillery, and the quantum canon laser thing more and more towards the end – it’s got excellent coverage – and is needed more for the viceroy that show up in the last half of a round.

good luck!

Flight Control is a hot new app that’s addictive but also easy to put down. The game only lasts for a few minutes and all you simply do is help guide airplanes down a track. It makes great use of the iphone/ipod touch screen interface.

Search for it on the app store. Here’s my top score… I haven’t been able to topple a hundred again for quite a while now.

I use a lot of different apps, I figure i’ll start doing some occasional reviews.

Tweetie for Iphone/Ipod touch.  Get it.

I still don’t understand people who are on twitter and strictly use it from the web.

People who use it, rave about it.

One of my favorite features is the multiple user integration, i find it slicker than seesmic’s desktop app.

Here’s my peeves about it though.

The default bubble theme, is horrible.  I know some people love it, but I think it just wastes screen space.

Landscape mode should be automatic, not manually turned on or off.

offline reading/tweeting – for us disconnected ipod touch users – what I liked about twitterific was being able to just grab the latest tweets, and catch up as I was on the bus.

Groups – this has to be somewhere in the development pipeline, I can’t always be scanning through everyone I follow.

Overall a great product and worth the price.

The google android phone just launched today.  As a dedicated google fan boy, I’ve been waiting for it for like 4 years, since the rumors started.

Once again, Canada gets passed over, and it doesn’t appear to be coming any time soon.

I’ve been on a crappy virgin mobile handset for ages, and it looks like i’ll be renewing it today for another year.  It’s hard to beat for $8 a month… and I can’t cave on an iphone since I’ve had my heart set on a google-fied phone for so many years…

Since I’ve joined facebook, I’ve been horrible with making the most of the connections I’ve established through it. I’m backlogged in replies, and friends I haven’t spoken to in fifteen years, well, I still haven’t connected with them, though we’re now ‘official’ as friends.

I declare this Sunday December 30th International Facebook Day. I’m going to dedicate a chunk of my time on it and see where it goes. It’s long overdue and I don’t exactly have pressing deadlines at the moment. Maybe you should do the same!

hey folks, fyi – comments appear to have been down for quite a while if you’re using internet explorer on this site.  I have no clue when it will be fixed, so if you’d like to comment here use firefox instead, it should work fine.

Otherwise you could try commenting on my other site at solarcrash, sometimes i dual post between the blogs.

and for all you lurkers out there, this might be your chance to de-lurk.

I don’t really use stumbleupon but I was procrastinating 10 minutes ago, and decided to login and checked to see if others I knew were also already registered on the website.

It cross-referenced my gmail account, and I added a few friends.  To my dismay I didn’t realize that it checked to spam everyone else who wasn’t on stumbleupon in my address book as well by default!

Now in one instant, I’ve spammed well over a thousand people in my address book with a stupid stumbleupon registration request!  This includes people I haven’t emailed in 4-5 years, and other distant acquaintances.  How awkward.

If you’re one of them, I’m so sorry.  I tried deleting my account in embarrassment, and supposedly stumbleupon can take as much as 2 weeks before the deletion can take place.  This is just ridiculous.

Again, my apologies.  What a horrible way to hear from me after all this time.

Blogrush just upgraded to v2, and I just added it to the sidebar here. I’ve been using it on my other blog, SolarCrash, and it’s had a bit of traction, though it’s still hard to gauge.  You can give it a try with my referral here.

Regarding Google adsense, it’s been almost a year I’ve had their ads on my site and I’ve made maybe sixty or so dollars. This is fantastic being not employed and all, but once I hit the $100 payout, I think I might drop the ads altogether, we’ll see.

I just noticed I was quoted on the frontpage of ricebowljournals regarding my last post, cool eh?

What’s weird, to be honest, is I love having people I don’t know from all over the world reading my blogs, but sometimes I’m a bit hesitant about sharing it with those I know right in my community. With networks like facebook, and google’s coming opensocial, it’s becoming harder and harder to hide!

On another note, I keep a running list of all the things I want to blog on, but I just can’t seem to find the time to turn them all into posts.

Thanks so much to all you readers for staying tuned!

Continuing the technology series on how I get things done… For me, Google Picasa is the only way to go in terms of photo management. I’ve got about 22,000 photos right now and Picasa handles it all with style and ease.

1. You can organize through folders or albums or search via tags and descriptions. Photos are instantly discovered and added to picasa.

2. In the tray, you can do batch editing and incredibly easy photo touch ups. My wife couldn’t care less for this geeky computer stuff, but she loves the ability to easily manipulate an image through this (ie. red eye removal, cropping, soft-focus, etc.). You can also email, blog, geotag, or send these photos easily to an online web album as well.

3. You can easily scale the albums and photos to your liking. Scrolling through photos is incredibly slick. Pictures can also be integrated easily into a slideshow or a screensaver.

Picasaweb albums is really the online counterpart to Picasa’s desktop software. It doesn’t quite have the community that Flickr offers, but it’s simple and free. ie. Check out the album for my latest trip to Boston. I like how it doesn’t scale down photos to tiny grainy shots like many other free photo sharing sites do.

What’s also fantastic that I’ve recently discovered is that there are plugins that have been developed for it, so that you can upload directly to other photo communities like flickr and facebook!

Google has also recently added additional shared storage between picasa and gmail you can purchase for a decent price. But the free space will be plenty enough for me for quite a while.

Overall, definitely one of the best free desktop applications that have helped enhance my productivity, period.