tsuehpsyde.com

It’s been about five months, so about time I posted another comment on here. As always, follow me on twitter or add me on Facebook. That’s really the best way to follow what I am up to (if you’re into that sort of thing).

So, I figured I’d focus this post on the new iPhone so as to free up my twitter account a bit. I already have a few extensive posts about my cell phone stuff since I moved to San Antonio, and you can read this here if you’d like: http://www.tsuehpsyde.com/?cat=3&paged=2

The general consensus is:

So, to date, I have been with AT&T and my iPhone 3GS for a year. Thoughts?

So, things were good. Then AT&T/Apple decided to offer full subsidy on the next iPhone if you were eligible for an upgrade any time in 2010. Interesting enough, I was set for an upgrade in November of 2010, and a week before pre-order, showed that I was able to upgrade at the new customer price on release day by only extending my contract a year (throwing away the current one and starting a fresh 2 year). 1 year for $400 off a new phone that will clearly hold me out for two years? Yes please.

So I wake up on pre-order morning around 7:30AM (somewhat normal wake up time) to find Apple’s site dying under the load. Big surprise. I get ready for work and periodically check the site, see if I can punch through and sneak a “ship to me” pre-order. I try without results until I get to work, and I try at work for maybe an hour on and off. No dice. I leave for an early lunch break and head to the same place I went to get my iPhone 3GS: Best Buy. Show up, pay $50 for a gift card, and I am on my way. Fast forward a week and a half, and I drive to Best Buy in the morning, get there at 8:50AM to no lines. Two guys are getting checked out at the two registers for Best Buy mobile, and that’s it. I check my Facebook/Twitter/Emails/News Sites and before I know it (maybe 5 mins), I am seated and getting myself this: http://yfrog.com/5na60oj

Just like last year, there were no lines at all, and activation was a snap. In fact, I had just been handed that phone and took that pic and attempted to upload to twitter only to have my cell service already be cut off. Had to upload it a few hours later, heh. Meanwhile, the line at the Apple store across the street was easily 2-3 hours long, if not longer to get into the store. So my tip to you is, if you want to avoid the rabid fanboys and simply get a great phone, go to Best Buy and avoid the crazy. Two years running and it’s been good for me.

Okay, so the back story out of the way, now what? Well, as I said above, I felt this phone was much better suited to keep me for two years than my current phone. Those reasons are (in no particular order):

There are other cool things, like the speaker phone being better, and the mute toggle switch not being so easy to be abused like in the previous phones, but those were the big winners for me. I’ll try to address these in the same order as listed. The first one alone deserves mention, but it ties into the other two after it as well: the iPhone’s interface is just amazing. It’s beautiful, it’s smooth, and it feels well packaged. I’ve used both the Android platform and the WebOS platform, and I have to say, the 3D acceleration (or if not that, just the UI programming itself) just simply is not there. Apple’s rubber banding, as well as smooth scrolling, is still #1. And at this point, WebOS is about to die (HP bought out Palm and has openly said they have no intention to keep after the phone market ), so that only leaves Android (Droid is a specific brand of Android by Motorola/Verizon, FYI) to fight with Apple, imo. Nokia’s stuff isn’t in the same league, and BlackBerry users are a different type of user, though BlackBerry is working on a web browser using Apple’s WebKit, heh.

All that said, the mix of more memory and faster processor makes for a very nice experience. Mix that with HSUPA and the maps application on 3G is outstanding. I show people how fast it refreshes the panels of the map (as long as Google’s servers are playing nice) and it’s unreal how fast it works. The HSUPA just makes the entire thing smooth sailing. And for an example of the speed I’m seeing, check it out here: http://www.speedtest.net/iphone/43602317.png

Note that is 2x faster than any EVO 4G tests on Sprint I have seen to date. In theory, 4G is faster. In real world usage? Not so much. (at least in San Antonio) Also, hooking into Wireless N is quite nice at home. The WiFi performance on the iPhone 4 is notably more stable than on the 3GS. For some reason, the signal bounced everywhere on my 3GS.

That leaves us with the antennas. Ahh yes, this one has exposure EVERYWHERE. As you may or may not have read, holding the phone on the lower left side can bridge the two antennas (the outside band is two, one for the phone stuff, and one for everything else) causing reception to drop by about 20 db. The more amazing thing is when you see the phone go visually from 5 bars to searching. Kind of scary. Me personally? I’ve only seen it a few times. I can make it happen (if I am in a lower reception area), but it’s usually not a problem. It’s more of a problem when using the phone as an “internet communications device” than as a phone. I also saw one of the students @ the church trying to read iBooks and the data dropped off completely until I grabbed it to look and it worked instantly. I laughed, and thought it was funny. Thus far, I can count 2 calls that have dropped or failed to call because I held it in a way that caused this.

So, what’s my verdict? I’m personally okay with it. I think Apple should have laminated the outside to avoid this, but I have no idea why they didn’t. All phones have this issue to some degree (Nexus one being a popular Android phone with it), but this one is super duper easy to replicate based on the black line of the phone. I like the idea of the antenna being on the outside, probably since I’m a geek. I’m cool with slapping a bumper on it (though I think at this point, Apple should be giving them out for free) and calling it a day. I think Apple is fumbling the ball HARD on this issue right now (recently admitting to fudging the bars to make things look better), but I’m ultimately fine with it. I’m curious to see if Apple’s software update also handling the bridging scenario on the baseband software (some sort of compensation on that side for the antenna changing characteristics) or if they truly are just fiddling with the bars. Also, if the software cannot fix this issue, I am curious to see if iPhone 5 (or 4G or whatever they call it) has a laminate around it, or if they change the design again, or do nothing. But as shown in my above speed test, the phone has the fastest 3G performance I’ve ever had, so I’m cool with it. Also, I’ve had two phones (first one had a stuck pixel), and both had the issue, so I don’t see this being a manufacturing defect. This is a design flaw/deficiency/feature.

So, now that I covered that, what do I think the next iPhone (call it iPhone 5?) will have? Let me take a stab at it. Let’s see if I am even close.

So we’ll see how that goes. As always, I’ll try to update this blog with the longer thoughts that are too big for Facebook or twitter.

Figured I’d share a post about the technical whosamawhatsits I’ve been working on lately for those curious. I used to do these more often, and I was thinking about it tonight, so here we are.

So, I did something pretty bone headed the other day. I was using my laptop, and I had been dumping lots of random stuff on it, like stuff from my camera (videos, pictures) and various applications and other things. Nothing vital, but *stuff* none the less. Since my fileserver’s at like 90% capacity or so, I’m in a bit of a storage crunch. Anyway, so I pulled everything off my new digital camera I got for Christmas (thanks Barb! Best girlfriend evar) and was doing something else.

*pop up* You are out of space. Fix it!

Hmm, well that’s weird. I know I had a lot of random “crap” on there, but not tons. So I delete 4GB of files off my my home folder. Nothing shows up. Huhwut? Curious, I log out, then log in, thinking FileVault my be the culprit. Nope. Reboot? Nope. Run the ‘sync’ command a few times? Nope.

Perplexed, I find a GUI program to traverse the filesystem (aka look around the hard drive) and show me a graphical representation of all of the files/folders, so I can find where the problem is. After a few minutes, a ginormous 120GB file was found (mind you, I only have a 200GB drive, and Windows is on there in boot camp) called a spare bundle. Curious, and I do some Googling. I read that it’s used for diffs of backup files by Time Machine, which to my dismay, is turned on with no disk configured (I remember turning it off at some point). I figure maybe it’s some bug from upgrading to Snow Leopard or who knows what. I also read it’s used for FileVault somehow, so I figured it *must* be duplication of the data that’s overwritten when filevault does it’s thing.

Oh how wrong was I.

I deleted the folder, and that’s when it all went wrong. My home folder/documents folder was completely annihilated. Even though the spare bundle didn’t point to my files, somehow they were linked (and using up 2x the space, no idea why). Then, when I rebooted, I couldn’t log back in. Fail. A co-worker had something similar happen to him, and he couldn’t fix it and ended up re-installing. Snow Leopard bug, or PEBKAC? Maybe a bit of both? Who knows.

I hadn’t lost personal data from a client machine in some time. Let me tell you, it sucked. I’m still trying to restore the images off of the disk (since I wiped them after transfer) and it’s slow going. Not sure why, but I’ll figure it out. It was only a months worth of pics, and none were super important. Still, annoying.

So, I decided to make lemons out of lemonade. My stock config for my Macbook Pro came with 2GB of RAM and a 200GB 5400RPM HDD. Long ago I had upgraded to 4GB of RAM, and I had been yearning for a 7200rpm disk for some time with more space, but kept putting it off. Now seemed like a good time. So I figure I’ll go Seagate (all drive companies are about the same with failures, it’s really a crapshoot to be honest) Momentus. So my co-worker mentioned he got his drive at Best Buy and the price was actually good. Here comes another adventure, lol.

So I check online, sure enough the drive was $119.99 retail, boxed, 5 year warranty and I think it had built-in drop protection (which I don’t need since the Macbook comes with it, but that’s a different story). NewEgg wanted $129.99 + shipping for the same drive. Might as well just suck it up and buy it from them. Heck, I got my iPhone 3G S (that’s what it was called when I got it) there, as well as my 24″ LG monitor, and my Escort 9500i. Even though I don’t really like them, I have had good success up to this point. I check online and the one that’s up by 281 and 1604 has them in stock. So I drive over.

I get there and there are two problems:

Great. So I ask the closets blue shirt I can find for help. He claims that it must be by the Geek Squad. I also asked about the price and he claimed something about prices not updating in stores fast enough (yeah I believe that) but that they price match. He goes off to discover that they used it (not sure I believe this, more on that later) and their inventory isn’t up to date. He goes to check other stores (when I see his inventory list 2 at his location) and says to have customer service call another store by the mall and check if they have it. Annoying since the website has failed me thus far, but okay.

So I walk up, they call, I wait uncomfortably long and try to make conversation with someone who’s nice, but I have nothing to say to since I honestly can’t connect with their situation at all (apparently bad management shenanigans involving people being moved around depts to cover shifts who know nothing about it). I’m sympathetic, but I can’t really relate. After a long while, they finally confirm they have the drive in hand and they’re going to save it for me. Yey! I drive down.

Can’t find the drive, no one knows who talked to them, etc. I go check the shelf, nothing there. Their inventory says they have 1. As a matter of fact, multiple stores show “only one” but I guess you’re allowed to lose/steal one drive and be good, or something. I don’t know. Frustrated, I do some Googling on my iPhone to find out the following things about in-store pick-up (since I could have bought it this way):

These are the EXACT sleazy sales tactics that keep me out of these damn stores. I cannot stand when businesses won’t give you a straight forward “here’s what we have and here’s what you can buy it for” deal. Wal-Mart does this too, where they will show one price online, but sell it at another in store, and they WILL NOT price match. Same with Target.

They do it to compete with stuff online, but then you can’t get it in the store, they mail it to you. AND you still pay sales tax. What kind of crap is that? At least Best Buy uses that to their advantage (buy online, pick it up now!) which I think is great, if they’d get their act together and get the stores to play nicely instead of this crap. I called every other store to double check, and even drove to another that wouldn’t pick up, but no one in town has one. 7th biggest city in the country and I can’t find a top-of-the-line (aka most expensive) drive from Best Buy.

Frustrated, I give up and start looking online. I figure that a 3 year warranty is probably just fine, and if I’m buying online, I might as well go OEM with it since I don’t need a big fancy box. However, that’s still $107 shipped from NewEgg since the G-Shock model isn’t needed. The Macbook Pro already has that built-in and does it for you, so if you do get a G-Shock protected drive, you have to disable it in OS X. I figure I’ll save the hassle and my money. I was debating ordering, but at this point it’ll be shipping on Wednesday, which means it’ll get here on Monday via 3 day. The worst day to ship ever. I him haw about it, and then go to bed.

I wake up in the AM and debate ordering. Nah, I’ll wait. Talk to co-workers who laugh at Best Buy sucking, then tell me to order it. Caleb offers to bring in his screwdriver set to crack open the laptop. I debate some more and get back to work. Around my lunch break, I’m browsing all the drives and notice the same model for $97.99 shipped. Where did this come from? I look and, sure enough, that morning the price on that particular drive dropped $8. What luck! I ordered and was pretty content. It shipped out the same day, and the ETA was Friday. Yey! First time UPS has EVER provided 2 day delivery time from a 3 day shipment.

So all that to say, I backed up what I did have, yanked out the drive on Friday and re-installed Snow Leopard from scratch. Must say, between a fresh install (had been using the same one since April of 08, which was upgraded to 10.6) and a 500GB 7200RPM upgrade, it’s much snappier now. Heck, transferring stuff over 802.11n between the lappy and fileserver is even faster on this new drive. Can handle sustained reads/writes much better. Also, I can finally put all of my games on my Windows bootcamp for LAN parties. Woot!

As for the install, it wasn’t too bad. Lots of screws, and the front clip is a real pain to get off. But once opened, the process was real easy. The hardest part was getting the data cable off of the top of the original drive. It was on there good. Even waking up from sleep is faster now. Not sure how that works. I almost want to say that’s a fresh OS install.

Other cool things going on: Studying for my VCP (two more days….wish me luck!), and a buddy of mine David sent me his 1st gen iPhone 8GB. It’s not here yet, but it should be here tomorrow, or Friday at the latest. Looking forward to playing with that more care-free than I do my 3GS, since the 1st gen is jailbreakable/unlockable 10 ways from Sunday. The baseband can be switched willy nilly, and the OS is easily jailbreakable on all versions. Plus, being as I’ve been fiddling a lot lately, it’ll be nice to have a testing platform. Also, a backup phone in case I want to sell my early bootrom 3GS which has the 04.26.08 baseband and get whatever new hotness Apple releases this summer. Though I would love to get my hands on a good condition iPhone 3G with the 5.08 bootloader so I could complete the collection, heh. Don’t want to spend the money though.

So that’s about it for now. Looking forward to whatever iPhone OS 4.0 holds, and whatever new iPhone comes out. As for the iPad? If it had OS X on it I’d think it was cool. But it’s a huge iPod Touch. No flash? Fail. I’ll stick with my iPad nano that can make phone calls and take pictures/videos.

It’s been some time coming, and I honestly have been meaning to blog (or as Sluggy would say, blob) more, but between work, life, and everything else, I haven’t had a time to do much of a brain dump into a blog post (mini dumps go into Facebook nowadays). However, tonight has provided me with a long enough story that warrants using the blog to tell it. Here’s my story.

So today (Superbowl Sunday), I got to church, get out, get breakfast, then go home. I get my stuff together and me and Barbara go to Starbucks to cash in our free drink coupons we got with our new gold cards (they changed the system on them this year, but that’s another story). So we get there and I have my study materials for my VCP that I’m working on, as well as my laptop so I can take my mock tests as well as read various materials. I’m taking my test on Friday (God help me!). Barbara brought her study materials, a book she’s been reading, and a dark chocolate bar to snack on with the coffee. We were there for roughly 3 hours, give or take, then we headed back.

I go home, do what I needed to do, then we walked the dogs after I ran to get some ink for my printer. For those that don’t know, me and Barbara both have a dog (her is Pecas, a female dachshund mix, and mine is Max, a pug), thought Barbara watches them most of the time since he doesn’t like being alone, so he stays with Pecas during the work days and such. She’a also sort of adopted him for staying over as well. What can I say, Max is a great dog and she loves him. Anyway, so we walk them, and by this time I’m hungry, so we decided to go to dinner. Being as the game has started (it’s in the 2nd quarter by this point), I offered up the suggestion to go to Wingstop to get some Wings, cold beverages, and watch the game (surely they’re playing it). So we take the dogs upstairs, put everything away, and head over to get some wings.

It’s at this point that we order our food and realize we have to wait like 45 minutes to get our food. Boooooo. I know that professional football isn’t Barbara’s thing (she’s a Texas Tech kinda gal), so I recommend that she go get her book to read it. She wasn’t sure, so I offered to get it, then she finally decided to go get it. I was watching our spot and waiting for the food (place was packed).

This is where the trouble starts. She lets me know that when she got home, someone had gotten up onto a chair/table, untangled and pulled down her bag with books in it, and yanked out the chocolate bar and ate it, wrapper and all. A little bit of chocolate is okay, but an entire bar is a serious problem. I look it up online, and it turns out that dark chocolate is 10x worse than milk chocolate (but it’s better for us humans, which is why we try to eat that instead). Well crap. This is a problem. We have no idea if only one dog ate it or two. I’m freaking out, so we drive back home and Barbara’s recommending we go to the emergency vet. I figure well, I’ll call my personal vet first, and see what they say. If I can’t get ahold of them, then we’ll go.

I call, and the vet on-call basically says to call the Animal Poison Control (APC) and gives me their number. So I call them up, and I get some level 1 support guy who sounds like he’s from India. Great. I’m excited already. I give him the info and of course they want my credit card # for the consultation. I give them all the info (type of chocolate, amount, size of both dogs, etc) and they give me the steps to get them to throw up:

Well, first time, no dice. So I call back, they say it’s safe to go for a second dose. Neither dog enjoyed this, and neither did we, but it was a necessary evil. So still 10 minutes later, nothing. I call, and while on the phone, Pecas finally lets loose, but she has no chocolate in her’s at all. Holy crap. This is a problem (max is 10lbs smaller). So they basically tell me to go to a vet so they can get him to throw up since he’s being stubborn and it’s probably not a great idea to give him more hydrogen peroxide. $65 later and I should have just went to the emergency vent in the first place. Though in hindsight, I will admit, having them both admitted/induced vomiting at the emergency clinic would have costed more, so I guess Pecas puking made up for that.

So anyway, we drive like stuntmen over to the emergency hospital. The people there were very friendly, and they gave him some sort of medication to get him to finally throw up. He finally does (and quickly I might add, so he was definitely on the verge) and he threw up buckets. Poor little guy. But you could see all the chocolate. They had to run some tests on him and of course his blood sugar was through the roof, but everything else seemed okay. They talked to the toxicology person, and based on the type of bar he ate, the 60% cocoa content was extra strong (on top of being dark chocolate), so the estimates were higher than they thought, as were the caffeine and such, so they recommended overnight care to be sure. They had to give little guy charcoal to suck up anything left hiding in there, either in his belly or his other parts.

Max is okay, but he’s staying the night with the emergency vets. I’m glad he’s okay, but holy crap did that scare me. My wallet is crying right now too. But stuff happens, and all in all I’m honestly glad he’s okay. I’ll just be eating ramen for awhile to recover. :p Mainly since I’ve been saving for a house, so he decided to get into stuff at the best possible time. Gotta love that dog.

Now, let’s rewind for a moment. You may be wondering about dinner. Yeah, I basically left, I told the people there that I had to run and I’d be back, and 3 hours later I call them to tell them what happened. I told them I had to leave, but I guess I didn’t make it clear I wouldn’t be back ASAP, so they left the order as “for here”, as in, on the tray waiting for me to pick it up. It eventually got cold, and they had to throw it away. But I called back and explained the situation, and they were kind enough to remake our order. Way to go, Wingstop.

Things that bothered me though:

So the poison control people made a bad call imo, and in the future, I plan on running him straight to the vet hospital, no point in calling them. And the manager was a bit of a tard. Other than that though, I’m glad Max is okay. Barbara is picking him up really early in the morning and is taking the day off to watch him (it’s recommended you watch for any signs of problems the next day). I would, but the VCP is on Friday and I really, really need to get this knocked out. VCP, how I hate thee (mainly since you ask esoteric vmware knowledge, but at least you throw in some sysadmin freebies).

Hopefully my next blog will be more uplifting. I’m closing on a house in 10 days, so maybe I’ll blog about that.

I often find myself running whois against a domain here or there. However, it’s much easier when I’m on a Linux desktop than when I’m on Windows. Sure, there are lots of webpages out there that can provide me this info, but then I have to:

1. Search for it.
2. See if the result I chose is right
3. Look at ads.
4. Sometimes wait for a slow response.

Maybe I’m just picky. But just like my IP Checker script I wrote with a few lines of PHP, I like things to be fast, clean, and easy to get to. And for simple things, I do not want to look at ads.

So I wrote whois.py this afternoon using mod_python. Took a lot longer than I expected it to, but I also have very little exposure in web development in general.

Here’s the Source:
http://github.com/tsuehpsyde/modpy_projects/blob/master/whois.py

Link to page directly:
http://www.tsuehpsyde.com/whois.py

This was my first attempt to use mod_python as well. Still, it’s about as clean as you can get with trying to generate HTML. It’s linked to the right under “Handy Utilites” It’s in the top right side bar, along with the aforementioned IP Address script. I find the IP one helpful for verifying if I’m behind the VPN when trying to work from home, as well as seeing what IP/hostname I’m on when I’m traveling (yes, I’m a geek even when I’m on the road).

Haven’t updated the blog in a few months. Been very busy at work lately, plus I use Facebook a lot more now. Currently debating if I should pay for Flickr Pro or start hosting my images again. I like Flickr’s integrability with other places, like Facebook, but I’m not keen on paying money to host pictures. But I’m also not feeling like maintaining another Gallery again, and I’d rather keep my personal images separated from SourceKills. The need to decide is coming soon though, as Barbara got me a pretty boss digital camera for Christmas. I needed one bad, and I’m glad I finally have a decent one. Pretty sad that my iPhone was about the same quality as my previous P&S.

Hope everyone had a good Christmas.

For those of you who look at hacking as a ‘bad word’ with ‘illegal’ connotations, you may want to try and re-learn the phrase. The mainstream media loves using the phrase as an evil group of shady individuals who steal credit card info and threaten you with phone calls. People the break into systems are called crackers. If they are using tools someone else wrote to break into the system for whatever gain (power, financially or systems wise) those are called script kiddies, or skiddies. Hackers are people who look at a problem and find creative solutions. They create/design a solution, and tend to look ‘outside of the box’ to get things done, generally in a very ethical manner (similar to the phrase ethical hacker). This can blend into gray areas (look at what Jobs and Woz did with their phone dialer), but still, for the most park, hackers are great people.

I could get into a huge debate about it, but I’m doing my best not to. =)

To that end, there are some really intelligent iPhone/iPod hackers out there. As a great example, look at what Saurik’s done to resolve the issue with Apple not signing images anymore after new updates are released. His solution works for both jailbroken users via Cydia (auto caching of sigs) or with non-jailbroken phones, simply using him as your gateway to the Apple server (he acts as the proxy, grabs the signatures, passes them to you, then saves them if needed later). And once you’re in the system, he will retrieve all new signatures as they come out.

Now, I know some of you reading this are going “Huh….”. Let me put this in simpler terms. Say you bought your iPhone. All shiny and new. Works great! Well, a new version of the OS comes out, and Apple asks you to upgrade (from 3.0 to 3.1, for example). You upgrade, and holy crap! Disaster! Some application you DEPEND on no longer works! Or maybe something else has gone awry…battery life has worsened, sporadically won’t wake up from sleep, your cellular service randomly restarts, things like that. Well, you could either downgrade to the old version and wait for fixes, or “hang in there” until Apple fixes it.

Well, not anymore. Thanks to Apple now adding signatures based on your phone’s unique ECID fingerprint, Apple has to “sign” the package before it will install. So when they release 3.1, guess what happens to 3.0? Yep, iTunes will no longer install that version of the OS.

But, if you tell Windows/OS X that Apple’s IP address is Saurik’s, his server will go to Apple, pass it the needed info, and pass it back to you. Then, it stores those files for you, so if a new version is released, you can still downgrade if you wish (but only for the versions you have on-file). Also, if your phone is already jailbroken (allowed to run 3rd party applications not approved by Apple), Saurik has also written Cydia, which is a nice GUI based version of apt that Debian uses. This can fetch your ECID and send it directly to his server without needing to restore, so you don’t have to wipe your phone with a restore to save the files “just in case”.

I mean, from so many angles, it’s such an elegant and well thought out solution for the good of “everyone”. And as he pointed out via an email, it doesn’t break any rules. Neither does jailbreaking, but that’s another story altogether.

I say this because, ever since I got an iPhone (finally), I’ve been closely following the iPhone hacking community. Heck, I signed up for Twitter specifically to follow these guys’ work. Lots of smart people that know lots of things I have no idea about (I typically enjoy hanging out with people like this, always good to learn new things). And this small rag-tag group of hackers, from the polished (Dev Team) to the scrappy (geohot), all pull the attentions of millions of users. And to that, I give them mad respect because, quite simply, the end user community and the posts I read from people are down right frightening. No one wants to read or understand anything, they simply post ANYWHERE they can, ranting and raving about how their FREE TOOLS (yes, thus far, all tools to open your phone cost $0) don’t work. Just simply blows my mind. This is why, as I can, I try to donate to these guys for the stuff they do.

I guess I decided to write this out because:

1. I’ve been meaning to post something about it for awhile, and I actually have the time today, and
2. geohot (George Hotz) released blackra1n, which jailbreaks all iDevices running 3.1.2 (latest OS).

A few times I wanted to write something about what it all means, but truthfully, there are hundreds if not thousands of resources that point out what everything is. If anything, the 2 main take aways are:

1. Jailbreaking means running any applications you want on the phone
2. Unlocking means using any carrier you want on the phone (swapping out SIM cards)

Neither of those is illegal to do, regardless of what Apple/AT&T wants you to think. For what it’s worth, I’m running a 16GB iPhone 3GS running OS 3.0, jailbroken, with tethering and carrier unlocked. I’m holding out on 3.1.2 since PwnageTool (custom IPSW builder) needs updated, and there’s still no *fix* for tethering. I don’t use it often, but when I travel, it’s sort of a necessity. I may end up just purchasing a 3rd party tethering app via Cydia, but trying to avoid that. I find it amazing that companies give you “unlimited” internet on your mobile device, but then want to charge extra to use it on a second device (no additional data or bandwidth, just using the existing “unlimited” on an easier to use device). As In Living Color taught us, “Homey don’t play that”.

With AT&T, I have the basic iPhone plan. 450 minutes with all the AT&T goodies (5,000 night time/weekends, rollover minutes, etc) and I pay $5/mo for text messages, since I do occasionally text (mainly with Barbara). Some months, I use maybe 50. Other months, I go up to and over 200…but that’s usually when either Barbara or myself are out of town and can’t talk on the phone for one reason or another.

Now, the next level from AT&T is $15 (no $10 option? Booo) and you get 1500 texts. Yikes. However, I can go up to 299 text messages a month and still save money, since I’d have to use 300 texts (that’s 100 “over” at 10 cents a piece) to get to the same price point as the 1500 plan. Since I’ve never gone over say, 215 texts, there’s no point in paying for the next plan.

All that to say, I find it odd that AT&T offers rollover minutes (which I only really use when I work from home and dial into meetings), but not rollover text messages. I mean, text messages cost AT&T almost nothing, whereas rollover minutes most definitely cost the carrier $$$.

So I emailed AT&T about it.

To whom it may concern,

I was wondering why AT&T offers roll-over “minutes”, but does not offer roll-over “text messages”? The tag line of “They’re your minutes, keep them!” should, I believe, also apply to text messages. Not to mention how much less text messages cost AT&T compared to actual peak usage cellular minutes.

It sure would be nice as some months I use all 200+, and others I use 50. Just like my normal cellular minutes.

Please be my hero and offer this! =)

Thanks!

Here is their response:

Dear Mr. Bair,

Thank you for taking the time to e-mail AT&T regarding your inquiry about rollover text messages. My name is Katherine Russell, and I am happy to help you with your inquiry.

We would be glad to forward your request regarding rollover text messages to our marketing department. Thank you for your recommendation.

Not very promising, but at least they responded back with a tad more than a cookie-cutter response. Sure would be nice to have, that’s for sure. I mean, why not? It seems like a double standard to sell you minutes and roll those over, but to sell you text messages and they go poof. I mean, honestly, SMS/MMS is far cheaper to provide and would just make AT&T a better provider all around.

Here’s to hoping.

Web 2.0 has sort of changed how a lot of us have been “doing business”. And by doing business, I mean using the internet as our personal playground. Let me explain.

Back when I first got into hosting my own stuff (be it from home or via an actual server in a DC), you had to host EVERYTHING. There were no good places to share pictures or videos. So you had to upload your own videos and use GPL’d projects such as Gallery to host your stuff. And anyone that offered anything had gaudy ads that ruined the experience (at least for me). So for as long as I can remember, I’ve always hosted my own “stuff” minus email, since email was never easy to setup on Gentoo. It’s really my Achilles heel of system administration.

But there’s a reason for that, and it rolls into what I’m getting at.

Nowadays, there really isn’t much “need” for the stuff I’ve done over the years for my personal enjoyment or need. Image hosting? Take your pick with little to no ads and very lenient storage and bandwidth restrictions. Not to mention open APIs so everything can talk together. Videos? Use YouTube (again, which can be linked to other mediums via APIs and such). Email? Use GMail. Heck, use your own domain FOR FREE with GMail. Not only do you get TONS of space, but the uptime and security is far better and a whole lot less work than what you can do on your own time. You want to blog? Use Blogger or WordPress (or one of the many others). Again, minimal ads and what ads they have are targeted based on content, and very tasteful and unobtrusive.

Have a huge file that’s too big to email that you want to share? Places like SendSpace and countless others cover this as well. If you need to share it with 100 people then yes, you need a hosted solution (or BitTorrent).

I mean, to be honest, my *need* to host my own stuff has almost gone away entirely. The only real reason I keep this blog going is because of habit more so than necessity. And as you can tell, my posts have dwindled. Why? Because as I have a fleeting thought, I can update my Facebook status, which connects to any and all people I know that have Facebook. It’s kind of nice and gets more exposure than this blog ever did. And those fleeting thoughts were usually what started long blog posts.

What’s even more amusing is that Facebook can tie into my blog via RSS, but it pulls the content and saves it as a “note”. So the only thing that I am personally hosting doesn’t tie into Facebook properly, heh. But I can use Flickr for pics, YouTube for videos, I can tie in my Digg’d articles into Facebook…..Facebook (for me) has become a central aggregation point for all things “internetz”. Not to mention Facebook itself can host images and videos, as can most other “2.0″ services.

I say all this because I find it interesting how often I get approached because people want their own “website”. And really, with everything available, the need for a focal point-of-contact outside of business is really moot at this point. At best, you should have a “blog” or just a simple contact page on your domain (myname.com) which points to all of your contact points as well as your resume, and a stand alone blog such as this if you please (which is what I’m doing, sans the resume).

And since everything *ties together*, you don’t have to bind yourself to one provider. This is why I use one for each thing and tie them in (so I’m not dependent on just one). It’s a free and seamless system of checks and balances. If one service goes down, everything else is still up. And since I use mainstream providers, APIs are available, or at least ways of tracking updates.

All in all, I’m happy with where things have gone. But the *need* for kids coming into the up-and-up with technology, I fear, are going to lose out on a crucial part of what it is to be a techno-wizard. While you may be able to replace these things, tying them all together in a central location (or even over multiple sets of hardware) brought up lots of interesting and headache-inducing situations that, all in all, helped you grow in your sysadmin/scripting/programming skills. The fun of your first working email system (feels like victory), your first configuration or virtual hosts on apache. Tweaking configs to allow/disallow indexing and other various options. Setting up CGIs in Apache, securing SSH, updating GPL’d packages by hand or via your package manager if supported. The first time you nuked your apache config by some simple line that drove you nuts for hours….these are the things that help you out in the ‘real world’, and I’m afraid these are things that a lot of kids won’t get/see. However, I’m sure there will still be plenty of upcoming scrappy hackers (and by hackers, I don’t mean evil system breaker-inners) out there that will prevail is the same trials that many of us did. One thing kids of today know nothing about is configuring X11 by hand without any type of auto config. Yikes….those were the days.

Now I’m off to get some rest and get some personal stuff done tomorrow, as well as continue studying for my VCP. I probably wouldn’t be so nervous if it wasn’t for the whole “this course only covers 60% of the test, find the rest on your own” style that VMWare gives you. Either way, I’m excited about getting VCP Certified. Just a bit nervous about the test, is all. And I still need to finish porting over the CSSDM server as well. Blah, so much to do and yet so little time.

Okay, so it only seems appropriate that I post about this directly after my previous post. Almost directly after I posted my post, purplera1n was released for Mac, and I admit I jumped on to give it a shot (it’s almost impossible to brick an iPhone and it’s easy to restore). What can I say, I had to play with it and see what it was all about. Figured I could try it out and see what the fuss was about.

Wow. There was a lot of stuff I did not take into consideration. Some of which happened in the last week. Let me go over some of that.

First and foremost, I wanted to wait until I was comfortable with my jailbreak before posting about it. I’ve been using it for about 3-4 weeks now, but I didn’t want to repy back and say “ZOMG I USED IT NOW ITS AWESOME”. I wanted to fiddle, see what worked, if stuff crashed/broke, etc. I’ve used both purplera1n as well as redsn0w (both of which can jailbreak an iPhone 3GS). purplera1n was WAY easier (plug in your phone, click a button, and wait….that’s it), but redsn0w gets better support; not only for multiple devices, but also for updates and bug fixes. George Hotz admittedly likes hacking open the phones, but hates supporting the bugs. But since Cydia is the main secondary application repository (there’s icy, but it’s not really the ‘main’ one) and is maintained by one of the dev team members (saurik), you’re better off to keep it all in the family, imo. And if you have a 2G/3G iPhone, you have to use redsn0w.

So, first thing. Have I had any problems? A few. My first jailbreak broke Cydia due to most of the packages being 2G/3G-only the first few days, and having some compatibility issues due to the hardware changes. And I vaguely remember an app crashing, but on second thought I Think that may have been an official app. Still, not that bad. And since I can SSH directly into my phone to edit and/or copy files as needed, troubleshooting is a breeze (did some fiddling with cydia at one point later down the road).

So what’s my take? As long as you’re ethical, it’s a good thing. Ethical? How! You’re breaking EUA’s and such by breaking in! First off, it’s 100% legal to jailbreak (let you install your own apps) and unlock (use other carriers). Look it up. That said, Apple locks a ALOT of things down to how “they” like it.

That said, some of the stuff Apple does is kind of ridiculous, imo. Such as, the iPhone has the same hardware *and* a bigger battery than the Palm Pre, yet they don’t allow multi-tasking (except for their apps like iPod, Safari and Mail, of course). They don’t let you put up a background on the phone, except for the lock screen. Really? Both of those are remedied via a jailbroken iPhone, but of course background apps are running like they’re in the foreground, which sucks. Why? Well, if multitasking was supported, they could run a 2nd “level” on the applications. Basically a “background” mode which uses less power, but stays connected to services and notifies you when you need to bring it to the foreground and enable all the features.

Also, Apple is a bit of…no, they are overbearing about what’s allowed or not allowed in the App Store. It’s gotten kind of ridiculous.

For example: Google, even though it has it’s own mobile OS (Android), has been working with Apple on lots of things since day one. YouTube app, anyone? Maps app? Those are pretty core features and are both content served up by Google. Yet, when Google tries to offer Google Latitude and Google Voice, Apple shoots them both down. For no good reason. Google Voice is less of a threat than say, Skype. Google requires you to use your cellular line to make calls, unlike Skype which uses your Wifi. Of course, jailbroken apps can allow you to use Skype over 3G/EDGE. So yet, they allow Skype (which has messaging and calls), yet they disallow Google Voice. Or the countless SMS apps on the App Store for FREE which advertise FREE SMS, just like Google. And their excuse for nixing Latitude is even more ridiculous.

The best part? After they denied Google, they went back and REMOVED all of the PREVIOUSLY APPROVED apps from the app store, like GV Mobile….that was an unofficial Google Voice app. I’m sorry, but that’s completely unacceptable to me. Luckily, GV Mobile is now in Cydia and 100% free. If I start using GV Mobile how I want to, I plan on donating to the developer.

If you haven’t read into it, read into the whole Amazon Kindle book deleting fiasco. While Apple isn’t going into phones and removing bad apps (some people still have NetShare), they basically kill any updates or anyone else buying it, so in an essence they might as well. And what’s worse is, there are no clear cut guidelines for what’s acceptable and what’s not, and as you can plainly see, they will go BACK and UNAPPROVE an app as they see fit. Sometimes, without so much as an explanation (look at the excuses for GV Mobile and Latitude, pretty lame). Basically it’s become a stance of “this is my sandbox, and if I don’t like you, you can go home. Nyah.” and I’m sorry, that’s completely unacceptable. Both Blackberry AND Android (well okay, Android is an obvious one) have native Google Voice apps, yet Apple does not and apparently never will. It appears you’ll have to use jailbroken software or Safari apps (lame).

And other really, really cool apps that are disapproved due to whatever reason is stuff like iBlacklist. This kind of thing is nothing but innovation that’s been stifled by Apple, for no other reason than to say “Nope, you’re not allowed. Because we said so”. That’s so frustrating, especially since I consider the iPhone to be the best mobile platform hands down.

If Apple would at least have public guidelines for say,

1. What is not allowed.
2. What is allowed.
3. What can get your app removed.
4. What can’t get your app removed.

I think people would be a lot less uneasy about the whole situation. As it stands now, someone could quit their job, develop an application and get $$$ rolling in, just to have Apple pull the rug out from under them and basically say “sorry”. Not to mention if they DO that and customers want refunds, apparently the developer has to pay back the $$$. Seriously ridiculous.

I personally think this is going to stifle any real, honest to goodness development on the iPhone. Look at the Commodore emulator someone spent a ton of time writing, only to have it DENIED. All that gone to waste.

But at least the GV Mobile dev moved his app over to Cydia. I hope more devs do the same thing as silly rules come into play. And Cydia allows for purchasing of apps as well, just like the App Store, but without silly regulations. I admit, some regulations are fine and have their place, but what they’ve done in regards to Google Voice is downright slimy.

So my solution to deal with this nonsense is to jailbreak my phone. I like the versatility a jailbroken iPhone gives me. I feel like a computer person again when I use it. I mean, I get a terminal with OS X, with not with my iPhone? Steve Jobs even said it’s built on OS X. Why the lack of using it like OS X? I don’t get that….

Either way, the fiddling I’ve had to do with my phone has been minimal, and all self inflicted. The fact that I can check both the App Store and Cydia for updates (and I can just background Cydia and do something else while it runs) is perfect. I was worried that jailbreaking would stop the app store from working, but it works just fine.

All in all, it turns out jailbreaking gives me a lot more than the console I thought it was. I can check running processes, SCP files in directly, use sbsettings to find process as well as toggle services. I can use blank icons to format my pages how I want. I removed the dots @ the bottom of the page which always annoyed me. I have free turn-by-turn GPS via xGPS (legally free) for when I need it. I have a custom background AND custom sounds for SMS, email, etc (you can set custom ringtones on a normal iPhone, but that’s it). I can use my phone on T-Mobile if I’m so inclined (I’m not) or other GSM carriers if I went to Europe (would be cool, but unlikely). And of course, I can run 20 apps at once, just like a Palm Pre, and I can run GV Mobile as well, legit via Cydia.

All in all, I like jailbreaking. Right now, I’m looking into incorporating Prowl into GV Mobile so I can get instant push notifications of new SMS messages (the main reason I don’t use Google Voice for SMS). There’s a pretty cool article about it here. Yey Python! I could save $$$ by using my Google Voice account for SMS if I get it working how I want. Again, this is something that, if Apple would let Google do it, they would. For free. And easily supported/maintained. But someone (either Apple or AT&T…Apple still decided to do it, so they can take the blame) decided that giving a consumer a choice was a bad idea, so they stopped it. Luckily, I can get around that.

Apple, please let go of your choke hold on the App Store. My only guess is you don’t want people getting comfy with Google apps, since they have their own platform and they may transition over more easily. That’s the only reason I see you doing what you’ve done. It’s childish and while I like the level of service I get from you, I have to admit this is rather annoying. While it won’t stop me from buying anything anytime soon, I also don’t have to buy anything anytime soon Apple-related. Had someone came in offering similar stuff, I’d stay loyal. But at this point, I don’t think I will with all the shenanigans going on.

More blogging to come. Oh, and I just realized, I forgot to mention…I totally got an invite to Google Voice via one of my co-workers. You can call me on it below!

Ever since I got my iPhone, I’ve been ready to jailbreak it wide open. Before I go further, let me take a few steps back…

When you get an iPhone, Apple locks it down so you can’t get in there and fiddle with things. Even though iPhone OS is built on OS X, which comes with a terminal and an SSH client, you don’t get that in the iPhone. Something that’s touted as being very “desktop like” with it’s desktop-like browser and such, you can’t use a terminal. Presumably so you can’t hack the phone open to install new firmware, bypass the carrier lock, etc. Not that it’s stopped anyone from doing it, but I can only assume that’s why you get no terminal out-of-the-box on it.

Now, you can do what’s called “Jailbreak” your phone. This breaks it “free” from the “jail”, or “Apple death grip” on the phone. What does this let you do? Well for starters, you get a terminal, but you also can use a modified version of apt (the package manager Debian and all other variants, such as Ubuntu use) to install your own, unapproved, 3rd party apps. Like game emulators (emulators are banned from the App Store), for example.

Also, once you jailbreak the phone, you can install a package (currently ultrasn0w, previously yellowsn0w) on the phone that “unlocks” it. This lets you use any carrier you want (as far as I know, here in the US, that means you can use T-Mobile instead of AT&T…not sure of any other providers on the same platform, albeit T-Mobile’s 3G is on a different frequency so you can’t use 3G with them), so again, this is another reason they lock it down, so you can’t do that. However, once you’re in, you can fiddle around as you please.

Back to my 1st paragraph. I’ve been looking forward to jailbreaking my phone, but at this point, I’m not sure I need to anymore. Why? Well, it comes around to the guys who do the jailbreaking. I won’t link to their site for sheer laziness, but they’re called the “iPhone Dev Team”, which is just an awesome name altogether. Working with George Hotz (geohot, as it were), who was the 1st person to ever unlock an iPhone, they figured out how to crack open the iPhone 3GS. Gotta give them credit, that’s pretty awesome. I don’t have the time or patience to learn everything they’ve learned to get that far, but I’m sure it’s good fun and would be enjoyable to do if I had the time to hack on it and risk bricking phones. But, I do want SSH on my iPhone. It’s really the only reason I want to break it open, since I didn’t want to “pay” for an open and free standard. You can buy SSH applications in the App Store, but they cost $$$. The prospect of emulators seems cool, but I question how well they’d play since they weren’t designed specifically for the platform. Still, it could be great fun. Sadly, they’re waiting to release the jailbreak so that more people can have it available to them (since the new iPhone has extra security measures, which means once they fix the hack, all new phones can’t use it due to some certificate signing constraints).

Well, I went to get my oil changed here on Tuesday at the dealer (paying the “Dealer Tax” for now while I still have a CPO with Volvo) and I forgot/lost/misplaced my coupon for like $15 off the price of the oil change. I remembered the coupon when I saw him write up my ticket, and I ran out to my car to get it. Puzzled, I couldn’t find it and assumed I must have left it at the apartment. Fantastic. I asked him about it and he claims ignorance on the issue, so I’m screwed paying full price. Great. I printed the thing out days in advance and I swore I put it in the car as to not forget it. Yargh.

So as I sit in the waiting room, I’m thinking of how to get into my TWC webmail to get this coupon out to save me my money. At this point, the car is in the shop so even if it’s in there, there’s no finding it now. I was going to IM a friend to SSH into my server and get me the password, but AIM wasn’t working properly (fixed it later), so I was on my own. I realized I would save more than $5 (didn’t know it was $15 at the time), so I just caved and bought iSSH from the App Store. It had the best reviews of all the available apps (the lack of a free app is rather irritating), they had JUST released a new version of the app on Monday which added support for things I needed, like non-standard ports, etc, and the developer(s) for it have a group on Google which is somewhat active and they reply to pretty much everything.

So I login via my newly purchased SSH client (based on PuTTy, apparently) get the password, copy it into my email, login, find the email, and show the service manager. Saved myself $15, so I saved $15, but paid $5 for an app I sorta wanted, but was trying to avoid paying for (what can I say, I’m cheap). I was pretty happy with myself until I hit a “Doh!” moment driving to work when I realized I had some friends in the car and tossed stuff in the trunk. I did in fact check the trunk before sending off my car to be worked on, but I only quickly looked over it. Upon further inspection, I found it farther back. Grrrrrr. Figures.

Still, I’m only out the price of the app, which I sorta wanted to buy anyway but couldn’t justify. And by the time I bought the app, it was already do or die. I would have lost the $15 anyway had I not done it. The app is great, btw. Very fast and responsive, and there’s already an update submitted for the app to include the Copy and Paste API from iPhone OS 3.0, which will be really, really cool. Not to mention this app also has VNC and X11 support, so for $5, you get a LOT of great remote administration functionality, all of which I can use.

So, to swing back full circle, what’s the point? The point is, I now have my SSH application I wanted. I’ve used the terminal on a jailbroken iPhone 3G with OS 3.0, and while it works, I can honestly say it’s nowhere near as polished as iSSH. I also used the 99 cent SSH client on another phone and again, worked but wasn’t that great. The jailbroken one even had some crazy screen-flipping going on where it worked upside down, but landscaped fine. Kinda strange. iSSH also has some keys you need that aren’t part of the keyboard API like tab, esc, ctrl, and so on. Still, that said, a physical console with apt would be nice…

However, in all honesty, I enjoy Apple products for the support. Heck, I have AppleCare on both my iPhone and on my Mac. I also signed up for MobileMe to try it out (there are cheaper alternatives for the disk storage, like dropbox, but I only really want it for contact/calendar syncing and the remote iPhone services), but I dunno if I’ll be keeping that or not. Still, I enjoy being able to take my products in and just say “It’s not working, fix it.”. I can’t think of many things I’ve bought over the years where you can get this kind of service. Usually it’s a whole fiasco to even attempt to get a replacement on faulty hardware. It’s just nice not having to worry about it, and quite frankly, I find the interface for all Apple products very intuitive and genuinely enjoyable to use. The iPhone is no exception. If I jailbreak, I’ll be losing support (unless I do a restore on the phone before taking it in, which is easy enough). But I’ve read about lots of stability issues with 3rd party apps (no surprise), as well as the fact that if I do jailbreak my phone, I then have to start babysitting it. I have to watch for updates, be careful about syncing to iTunes when new updates are out to avoid any upgrades on top of the hacked phone so it’s not broken, which means if any security bugs are fixed, my phone is vulnerable in the meantime, etc.

I hate to say it, but I think I’m starting to get a little too old to deal with the “arrows in the ass” from pioneering my own path, as my father once put it. It’s fun, but I question whether I want to do this on something I require to use daily (cell phone has been and probably always will be my only phone). I used to do it more like 4-5 years ago and even before that because I couldn’t afford much, and my inquisitive mind demanded I tinker. Now, I’m better off, but still paying down credit cards (I can’t wait until I can say that I’m done with them, hopefully by year’s end). So really, I can’t afford to bork my phone of my own doing at this point, and I don’t believe in/support getting a company to replace something you break because of what you did when it violates the AUP/EUA and/or voids the warranty. I dunno, I’ve just never been a fan of “sticking it to the man”, even when I was barely making ends meet. Some people live for that kinda stuff, I dunno. Call me weird.

So the question remains, will I jailbreak my phone? I’m leaning towards probably not. I may do it just to check it out, see what apps are available, see how the terminal is, and so on. But I’ve also been reading that some apps in Cydia/Icy (the apt ports) are actually pay to use as well. Well that sorta ruins the point, doesn’t it? Also, I have no desire to “unlock” my phone either. I have a 2 year contract with Ma Bell, and I plan to ride that out fully. So short of emulators or some cool free apps that aren’t supported (or themes, that’s kinda cool to do), I’m not sure if it’s worth it to ditch my nice, supported iPhone.

Time will tell.

Well, I’ve had my new phone (and carrier) for a week now. So what do I think after a week of my new combo that I’m stuck with for the next two years?

Well, so far, still lovin’ it. The web interface used by AT&T is a lot nicer than the one Sprint uses. That said, I think the splash screen could be better (why split the voice/data into two different tabs? There’s plenty of room to put both up together…), but all in all it’s a definite improvement. I can alias phone numbers inside my account, so instead of looking at usage with tons of numbers and only recognizing one or two numbers, I can now quickly see who all I’ve talked to. Makes auditing your bill a LOT easier.

Also worth noting, now that I’m on AT&T, most of the people I talk to are also on AT&T, so my used mins are barely getting used. Most everyone in my office uses AT&T. Mainly for iPhones, but some people use AT&T with normal phones since they’re anti-iphone (like Nate). Barbara is on AT&T, so I can talk to her whenever I want as well. In addition, CellularOne got bought out by AT&T, so everyone with cell phones back in Greenville uses AT&T (for the most part). I mean, anyone from my generation doesn’t own a house phone. Cellular coverage nowadays (in most areas, back in Greenville it’s kinda sketch) is so good that you don’t need a home phone. I mean, I know I haven’t ever had a landline phone since I moved out on my own. Even if I did, I’d still use VoIP, so I’d be cheating anyway. So basically, if my friends have an AT&T cell, I can basically call them whenever I want. I had free Sprint-to-Sprint before, but seriously, I only had one friend that worked with. Now, I’m like surrounded with people I can call for free. It’s really nice. So my roll over mins should get ridiculous in a few months.

That said, I’m a bit perplexed as to why AT&T has rollover minutes, but NOT rollover texts. I mean come on, seriously? It’s bad enough AT&T tries to shoehorn you into the $15 text plan (no $10 plan? lame) and that when the iPhone first came out, the data plan cost $20/mo and 200 texts were free, and now with 3G/3GS it’s $30/mo for data and $5 for 200 texts. Now, I usually use <200 txts a month (I checked my usage on Sprint before the big switch), but I do bump over a little bit now and then. And this was on Sprint with UNLIMITED texts. Plus it just rubs me the wrong way since text msgs cost the carrier nothing to transmit (part of the network infrastructure that has to be there, texts or not) and they charge us money. But if you're going to rollover mins, why not texts? This is seriously my only real gripe so far, and I'd be pretty smitten if AT&T would do this.

Another cool thing about AT&T was, when I signed up for their online portal, they immediately asked if I wanted to do e-bills (yes! I hate paperwork), so I set that up. I mean, my experience with their user portal has been pretty good. Their App Store application for account management works okay, but it's really, really slow. Slower than it should be, that's for sure. So I just manage it via my normal computers.

As for the AT&T store itself, I hadn't been to that until sometime this past week. I needed to get an iGo charger tip so I could have a charger at my desk. While I did have to wait awhile to get serviced, once I did, the girl was very nice and personable. Then, I went back a few days later to find something out. You see, when Barbara got her iPhone 3G last summer, the AT&T rep in the mall said that she had to "add GPS" to her account. I didn't think much about it until I read that if you paid AT&T for GPS, you were paying for their turn-by-turn application. Now that didn't come out for the iPhone until this past week. So I went to ask if they had been falsely charging her for GPS (something that gets Jim pretty upset quickly...not a fan of people ripping off customers). The rep I talked to told me that they must have been mistaken, and that it wasn't even possible to add it to the account before that day. I talked to Barbara and confirmed that they had not been charging her (whew). Even then, the guy I talked to was nice. So far, so good with AT&T.

Now, the phone. What do I think of it? I love it! It's so much more responsive than my old phone was (Treo 700wx), and is just so much more functional. The lack of MMS (which is AT&T's fault, boooo) is sort of a bummer, but it'll be here before too long I have a feeling. The Apps make the phone so amazing, it's really hard to describe. It's so useful for so many things, it's just quite astounding. The oleophobic coating on the screen definitely helps too (compared to the 3G phones I've used). Update: Use iPhoto to yank these out! iTunes woulda made more sense, in my opinion. My only real gripe at this point is I haven’t figured out how to get videos off of my phone in their raw .mov format. I uploaded a test video to YouTube yesterday, and it’s decent quality, but the video itself prior to the phone compressing/sending it to youtube is better. Also, I see people taking the raw files off and uploading those. Not sure if I’m missing something, but there’s nothing in iTunes. The pains of using a proprietary platform in both hardware and software. Still that aside, I have yet to have any sort of reliability issues (and I’m on page 4 with apps). And I’m still having “fun” with my phone. The contacts are very intelligent (even though I had to port my stuff over by hand, ugh, you suck WinMo). It auto-created my contact in the phone, so it auto fills out stuff on web forms for me, which is nice. Also, if I tie an email addy to a contact, it auto fills that as I start typing to to send emails (regardless if it’s web or in-phone app).

Although, a big failure I see so far on the phone is something missing from the search/spotlight feature. You can’t start searching for a phone # to see who it belongs to. THIS, imo is a BIG failure. My freakin’ 3 year old Treo did this without issue, and it couldn’t do crap in comparison. To find a number on this phone, I call the # and see if a contact pops up. Seriously Apple? This is a pretty awful “swing and a miss” on usability on your end. Considering you search email content, you can’t search through contacts? Oh, but you did find the time/resources to rename the phone from “iPhone 3G S” to “iPhone 3GS”. As much as I prefer the new name, it is kinda silly.

Still, I love the phone. I’m paying the exact same monthly charge I was on Sprint, but now I have way more free minutes and a far better phone. I’m not paying for a warranty anymore monthly (since no one offers a good one, that includes SquareTrade), but since I pay for txts now, it’s a wash. I did buy an AppleCare just in case, since I’ll have the phone for 2 years and I’m not worried about dropping/losing it as much as I am the phone just crapping itself.

So in summary, after the honeymoon period, am I still happy with AT&T and my iPhone? Absolutely. I still want a GSM Palm Pre to play with once they release them (assuming they’re not carrier locked, they’ll be coming from Europe), but even then, I think I made the better choice of the two. I’m curious to see how Palm Pre improves in the next year or two. The lack of an open SDK right now is a failure on Palm’s part, one that hopefully they’ll remedy soon. Apple needs some competition.