I’ve been busy this week and am working on a CallWave review.Meanwhile, you can find my opinions on AppleInsider forums. I’ve been writing in the “Future Hardware” section and have been expressing my dissatisfaction with the current Apple notebook lineup. You can find the topics I’ve posted to here (future MacBook Pro) and here (future MacBook – non Pro).If you’re not familiar with AppleInsider, it’s a really great Apple community site that reports Apple news and has pre-announced many Apple stories accurately. They also have a great review staff and awesome forums – ones that are heavily-trafficed and where one can actually go to discuss all things Apple (and tech) with others who use their heads. (Of note: AppleInsider is in no way approved, rejected, or supported by Apple Co.) I’m aiming to have the CallWave review up on Saturday December 1st.
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As you might have heard, Apple on Wednesday announced an official Apple-unlocked iPhone for “legitimate” sale in Germany on Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile network. This announcement was set forth to “comply with a court injunction issued after Vodafone challenged its [T-Mobile's] exclusive lock on the device,” Aude Lagorce reports for MarketWatch. “T-Mobile will start selling the phone without a contract for 999 euros ($1,480) and continue to offer it at 399 euros when purchased with a two-year commitment, the company said in a press release,” Lagorce reports.Whatever you may think of the iPhone, $1500 (or $1480, to be exact), is a heck of a lot of “greenies” to shell over for a generation one product just to use it with other networks. Moreover, it’s not clear whether the phone will work as well on other networks as it does on T-Mobile’s network. For instance, will EDGE connectivity be functional on other carrier’s networks and will visual voice-mail work, since it’s a very carrier-specific feature that needs to be implemented on the provider’s end. (A little side note: I recommend using CallWave for voicemail even over the iPhone’s visual voicemail. I use it and have become addicted to the ability to check my voice messages not only in the order I choose to but to do so from any web-connected computer/device through a browser. I will be posting my review of CallWave later on in the week/end).The iPhone unlocking community, however, has been sucked dry of a simple unlock for iPhone firmware version 1.1.2 (the current version). I am attributing the lack of unlock availability to the hackers beginning to make economic sense of their work. As of this writing on November 22, 2007, unlocked iPhones are selling on eBay for about $100 over retail price. Seeing as to how the iPhone unlockers are first and foremost people who need to put food on the table (and all those testing iPhones don’t come free, you know?), they might be more inclined to buy a bunch of these iPhones, unlock them themselves, and sell the unlocked product for a profit. Sure, they would love to provide the rest of us with a simple and easy set of tools and instructions for iPhone unlocking, but not when they can make some money from their hard work. Is it wrong? In one word: no. In two words: heck no.While on the topic of right and wrong, here’s a mini-rant: it’s ridiculous enough that Apple has tied their phone to one carrier and is gauging the consumer for as much as a downpayment on a car for an unlocked version. The hackers (and the consumers) have every right to stick it to Apple by unlocking their phones and have them receive no recurring revenues from partnerships Apple made with the carriers. Sure, Apple is a business and they currently have a unique, top-tier product. But what will happen to those new 5-year contracts with the cell carriers when other hardware competitors announce similar phones? Heard of RIM’s announcement of late? No? How about that of Nokia? Of course, Apple is the innovator here and as always, pushes the innovation envelope. But when this innovation limits their potential market because of price (or is it snobbishness?), it’s just bad business. Not only does Apple run the risk of simply not being considered an option for a potential purchase next time, it’s also being challenged by such project as Google’s Android. What’s that, you ask? Well, if you’ve been under water or in an airplane with no internet access for the last two weeks, you wouldn’t know that Google has recently announced a plan to provide an open mobile O.S. for many different handsets. Perhaps the key word here is open. This means that anybody, anywhere can develop for the Android system. It also makes the hardware manufacturers competitive, providing incentives to bring their devices to market at a lower cost to the consumer.In an unexpected turn of events, however, we could be faced with completely opposite outcomes come next year. Why? Well, when other device manufacturers (like the ones mentioned above as well as those who partnered with Google to roll out the Android platform on their hardware – namely HTC) release their products, they might want to strike similar types of deals with the carriers that Apple has struck. For example, they might request a subscriber revenue-sharing model and then, for better or for worse of the market, lock their own devices to the network for exclusivity purposes. This won’t be good for the consumer in the short run. In the long run, however, it might not be so bad. Let me just throw this out here and see what you all think: as our needs evolve, our technology choices will become more specified to what we want to do. One of the types of devices that we depend most on, and we expect flawless reliability from, are our mobile communicators. To ensure this reliability, manufacturers will lock them down to the carrier and perhaps the carriers will evolve from being a simple utility to a life-style choice. This would be difficult to accomplish from the carriers’ side, but no so difficult from that of the hardware manufacturers.
In the Future:
In any way, there will come a time when Apple’s JesusPhone iPhone is faced with stiff competition. At that time, Apple better have its phone available to as many consumers as possible and make the entry to purchasing this phone as easy as they can. When will that be? I’m thinking in about a year, maybe two. This will give Apple enough time to make a second and possibly a third iteration of the phone (and maybe even make a few model lines) and add the needed features that the current version is missing (3G, Flash support, official 3rd-party apps). As for the competition, they will be on their first-generation products but will most likely be within reach of many more consumers because of their lower prices and not being locked to one carrier. And in any way this plays out, the end user is always the one to benefit. Don’t you love competition? I do.
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I’ve finally settled on blogging software for the Mac (drumroll please)… It’s ecto 3 – beta software by the way. For only $20, I get the best blogging software for the Mac along with lifetime free support and lifetime free upgrades. Here’s the “register ecto” excerpt from the developers:
Here’s why ecto is perfect for me:
- It integrates perfectly with my WordPress blog. I host TechNest on some servers I rent. Besides carrying over all of the formatting of text in my posts (something MacJournal didn’t do as you can see a few posts down), it handles images perfectly. As I add an image to a post I’m writing, ecto pops up a dialog box with settings for the image – how and where I want it uploaded on my site as well as any allignement settings I want to apply to it. I then just hit “Upload to TechNest” and ecto does the rest. Did I already mention that it carries formatting over precisely?
- It has very easy and intuitive editing features. This is what separates ecto from MarsEdit, which got the formatting part correct, but wasn’t as user-friendly when it came to simple editing: bolding, making new paragraphs, or inserting numbers. I’m not saying these editing features weren’t present in MarsEdit, it’s just that they were presented in a less user-friendly way. For example, when I wanted to bold a piece of highlighted text, it sprung up editing code (the strong + brackets approach: <strong></strong>). I don’t like to see that as part of my post when I’m proof-reading it. There might have been a way to turn it off, but I don’t want to work for my software – I want my software to work for me.
- Finally, the entire user-interface of ecto flows very intuitively from other Apple apps. Here’s a screenshot of the editing as I’m writing this post:
- Another great “feature” of ecto is that it also runs on Windows. There isn’t yet version 3 for Windows yet, however. It will be an interesting shootout between ecto 3 for Windows and the newly-announced Microsoft Live Writer (seeing that it’s free). For $19.95 it’s less expensive then other Mac blogging software too! The Windows version, if you buy the Mac version, is $8.98 (regular price: $17.95). Other software by infiniti-sushi is also discounted if you purchase one of their products.
Let me know how it goes, Alex.
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After unsuccessful attempts to test MacJournal (which is now off my list of blogging software), I’m now testing Ecto 3 by Adriaan Tijsseling from Infinite-Sushi.com. Ecto 3 is in beta and as far as I know – it’s been rewritten from the ground up. Besides being available for the Mac, Ecto is also available for Windows-based systems. The mutli-platform, non-beta version is 2.xxx.Anyway, I hope this works and it doesn’t insert question marks into the place of apostrophes like MacJournal does.I will post very brief reviews of Mac blogging apps as I work with them. Look for it in the end of the week.
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This is another MacJournal test. As you can see, the last post?s characters didn?t come out correctly. The apostrophes were ? (question) marks. I?ve since then downloaded and installed a beta version of MacJournal (4.135b) and am evaluating it now. Let?s see what will happen as soon as I upload this. Just as a test, I?ll include some more apostrophes; apostrophes? or apostrophe?s?
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I?m currently testing several Mac blogging applications, including MacJournal (using to write this post) and MarsEdit (used to write last post and upload image).It?s really interesting that I like both applications but each has their unique features. I?d like to see if this time around MacJournal will format the entry according to my blog settings as opposed to how it wants to format it. Another ?feature? is that there is no option to configure MacJournal for a WordPress blog – which mine definitely is. However, the developer says to let the application automatically detect the settings. I?ll insert a screenshot just for testing purposes.
We?ll see.
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If you’re an iBook or PowerBook user whose Mac was not so lucky to receive the 2-finger scrolling and 2-finger right-click options, there is a solution for you! The great people over at sourceforge.net have had a tool to enable this feature. It’s called iScroll (and it works perfectly with Leopard, on my iBook G4 1.2GHZ). There is a supported hardware page and the only thing you need to do to have some two-finger scrolling goodness on your “unscrollable” Mac is to run an install wizard and reboot. Then enable two-finger scrolling in the “Mouse & Keyboard” pane of System Preferences and you’re ready to go!
Make sure you grab the latest version (0.32 as of this writing on 11/18/2007) from the downloads page.I’ve become absolutely dependent on this little utility and can’t imagine using the aging iBook without it. On a side note and possibly a side rant (how can we be here at TechNest without one?) – shouldn’t it have been up to Apple to provide us with a software update to enable these features? Sure, they have a business to run and profits to make and the two-finger scrolling is a feature of the new notebooks, but we – the hardcore Apple/Mac fanboys/fangirls stuck with Macs when Apple wasn’t the coolest company on the block! They should have at least given us this feature to show their appreciation and respect! Here’s another one hoping that Apple isn’t becoming a Microsoft with a pretty face! (Microsoft, by the way, has gotten better about their practices. Apple: are you listening?).
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I’ve been researching notebooks (since I’m in the market for one) and haven’t been discriminating between brands – PC or Mac, Dell or HP, etc. (My gripes with certain manufacturers’ product lines will be up later.) One of my feature requirements of a notebook is to have gigabit ethernet. Why would I need that?
Well, I need it to back up my 100GB media collection (that’s currently stored on an external drive) to a NAS. When I get my new notebook, I expect to place my entire media collection on it. And it so happens that my NAS has gigabit ethernet and makes these backups – which are performed daily (by the night) – much more speedy, leaving time in the night to back up my local system. In total, I’m looking at about 150GB to back up every night. I also expect this number to grow about 20GB per year.
How surprised was I when I found that none – let me repeat that none – of the major pc vendors (read: Dell, HP) have gigabit ethernet hardware in their consumer notebooks? Very. What’s even more surprising to me is that one of Microsoft’s first hardware Windows Home Servers (WHS) – the HP MediaSmart series – has gigabit! Now for those who haven’t done their reading: gigabit transfer rates require that both ends of the transfer have Gigabit hardware.
I would file this under the “one more negative point in having another company be in charge of the hardware your software runs on.” It’s obvious that Microsoft intended for WHS hardware to have 10/100/1000 networking. It might not seem crucial at first, but when one considers the WHS in a family environment with multiple computers – all doing backups at night in a limited 8-hour timeframe – speed becomes very important. Thus, data that will be transferred won’t be in the gigabytes; it will be in the terabytes. Think about it. Example: 3 users, each with 300GB of media plus 50GB of other files. That’s just over 1TB each night!
But what baffles me even more is that HP – the maker of the MediaSmart line of WHS hasn’t added Gigabit to their consumer notebook line (yes, consumer, since the Windows Home Server has the word “HOME” in it). Ironically, Apple is currently the only PC manufacturer to have Gigabit ethernet across their entire lineup. Yep, you read that right: every Apple Mac has Gigabit – from the $600 Mac Mini to the $3000 Mac Pro! (Read that with emphasis on the Mac Mini).
Just to compare how long it would take me to transfer all of my data using 10/100 and 10/100/1000. Keep in mind that these calculations are just for my data. In my household, I’m the one with the most data. But for families with more than one child (who has a 60GB iPod full of music), and with parents who have amassed large media collections, a problem will be seen in backups due to the limited time frame. I’ve included the theoretical speeds and cut them down in half since we all know that theory doesn’t always carry over to reality – especially when it comes to bandwidth.
It’s best if companies – especially close partners who depend on one another for product creation (read: Microsoft, HP, Dell) – have a closer relationship and plan accordingly. I can’t believe that none of the bright people at either company realized or foresaw this issue. Again, this is one of those cases that shows the benefits and efficiency of a vertically integrated company – like Apple. Personally, Gigabit networking is a must-have feature for me and thus I will be waiting out for a new lappie from the PC vendors.
I understand that it might not be in HPs best interest from a manufacturing perspective to include a gigabit networking chip. But that’s what separates great companies who care about the consumer from those that have bottom-line pickers make the ultimate decisions. How large of a price increase do you think it would cost HP to change its current networking chips to ones with gigabit speeds in terms of production changes and materials costs? I’ll leave it at that.
Coming tomorrow: my Apple predictions for MacWorld 2008 and my current gripe with Apple’s notebook line-up. Stay tuned and I’ll see you all next time.d
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