Links for June 14, 2009

I heard you can use Bing to search for airfare so I decided to give it a whirl since I have 2 trips out to the LA area in the next two months. The cheapest airfare it found was like 429 bucks for next month which is crazy high compared to Expedia which found something in the 330 range. But what’s funny is that Bing pointed out other sites and I find a ticket in the 240 range at cheapoair which is totally awesome! I’m now in love with this cheapoair.com.

Also, Bing hijacked my Firefox default search. I’m not pleased with this.

0 Comments

Filed under: Tech

Links for June 9, 2009

Posted by Timothy

Jun 9

From my Google Reader shares

0 Comments

Filed under: GReader Shares

Palm Pre Day 3

Posted by Timothy

Jun 9

Something that’s really great about the Pre is that it comes with a slipcase that doubles as a screen wipe. I was considering getting a nice leather case or a belt clip thing, but they can’t be used as screen wipes. This thing is a total magnet for greasy fingers which sucks but is made all better because it is nearly autocleaned when put in and pulled out of said case. Totally great.

So one thing that really sucks I’ve discovered is that there is no 3G in Lubbock on Sprint. So I’m relegated to just wifi, which is somewhat fine but the University wifi is awful. It connects and disconnects constantly which is a huge drain so it’s not even worth using. Twitter/Email worked ok on just the towers, but Pandora was really slow loading up (fine once a song started playing) and something else also was dreadfully slow. Using the Pre on non EV-DO or wifi is not recommended. Hopefully one day I’ll get it between now and 2 years from now or I just move to a place that will. San Antonio fortunately does have 3G coverage so I’m good when I visit the family.

Speaking of wifi, I wish there was a hardware switch for on/off. It is cumbersome to flip to the wifi setup page just to turn it off, which is what I have to do now when I leave my apt. Ah well.

The battery made it today with a bit over 60%. Took a few calls, sent a generous amount of texts, read some emails, played Pandora on the way to work and some mp3s on the way home. I noted that I got a call from my apt. complex and it was unknown. I added it as a contact and when I went back to look at my call history it didn’t retroactively change that number to my contact. Ah well.

So far my main concern is battery life. I’m mostly adjusted to how to work the phone quickly and pretty efficiently as well. It feels totally great. I’ve dropped my old cell phones many times. They get pretty dinged up. If I had an iPhone I’d be very very concerned about this, but the Pre kind of feels like it can handle it. I wonder how much force it would take to do serious damage. I hope I never find out.

2 Comments

Filed under: Tech

Links for June 8, 2009

Posted by Timothy

Jun 8

From my Google Reader shares

0 Comments

Filed under: GReader Shares

Palm Pre Day 2!

Posted by Timothy

Jun 8

Yesterday while playing with the phone I exhausted the battery twice. It came half charged and amid all the attempts at online activation and just toying with it, I wore it out which I totally expected. Then while very aggressively playing with settings and multitasking and doing tons of stuff I wore it out again. I wouldn’t say I’d ever actually use it for as much as I did in a normal day though. I basically was fiddling with it from 2PM to about 10PM. So how would it do on a normal day?

Today was my first general day of use and it still have about 40% of charge left. I made a few phone calls and sent a generous amount of text messages out. Overall not bad. I imagine making it 3-4 weekdays before charging it which is great. I haven’t tried using it as an iPod replacement yet where I’m listening to music on it all the time yet but I love my iPod so I don’t know if I can ever really replace it with the phone. I only now notice how great the battery life of the iPhones continues to get with each iteration. If I’m really desperate though I can always buy a spare battery but there wasn’t an accessory that would charge the battery by itself last I checked unless you can drop a battery onto the touchstone.

Alright so I’m using the phone for an actual call and I need to put it up to my shoulder so I can use my hands and I realize just how crazy thin the device is. It actually pains me to do such a gesture since I have to tilt my head all the way to my shoulder. The iPhone is probably thinner so this kind of sucks. It’s a great market for bluetooth headsets. I’m thinking about getting one now just for the car at least. However I hate talking and driving so maybe I won’t bother.

I’ve heard the processor is one of the faster ones of this class of phones, but occasionally things take a bit to load. It’s random it feels like as well. Sometimes an app opens quickly, sometimes slowly. I’m hoping this can be resolved with software updates but otherwise some apps feel like I should just leave them open all the time. If I do that however I don’t get to see my great Domo wallpaper.

I got a few phone calls. One while working with an app and it felt slow to actually answer. So slow in fact I had to do a double take to see if it even answered. One I got while the phone was not active and it required me to basically unlock the phone to answer it. It felt uncomfortable for that to be the action as opposed to pressing something that says answer phone. It’s just something to get used to though coming from the era of flipping the phone open and hitting talk.

I heard the Pre was going to charge via USB but it’s not the micro USB connection I imagined it to be. It’s a thin tiny USB connection as opposed to the tiny u shaped connection. The cover was initially very difficult to open, but as I open it more frequently it has gotten significantly easier. However I kind of wish connections like these had an auto-fold away door like some laptops have for their PCMCIA slots. It could also have been nice if it was on the bottom so you could have some kind of standing dock peripheral, but it’s on the side which makes talking while it’s charging kind of annoying unless you’re left handed.

When I went to Blizzcon last year, texting was definately the way to go. Calling people was poor due to reception and the ambient volume. So being able to read the message quickly was helpful. One problem was, even on the iPhone, there was no way to send messages to lots of people quickly. On the Pre I have to go through my contacts, which can be fairly fast with the keyboard search, but I went through all this trouble in my Google contacts to group people up. So I would be fantastic to actually take advantage of that and be able to designate groups for which you can send messages to. Want to send a text to my family? Send it to the family group instead of picking out each individual family member. Again, hopefully a suggestion that will make it into future software updates.

I tried putting some of the battle reports from Starcraft 2 onto the phone to see if they’d play natively but they unfortunately do not. I just used the drag and drop interface but it looks like if I want to toss video on it either has to be in the accepted formats or at the very least in my iTunes video library for quick syncing. The transfer felt really slow moving at a sluggish 1-2MB/sec. I don’t intend to really use it as a big time media player though and if anything I’ll probably just be fine streaming Pandora on it.

0 Comments

Filed under: Tech