I used to work for TSC / Computer Warehouse 10 years ago.. basically maybe 1 of the 2 of the UK's biggest mac resellers perhaps. They are owned by another company now..
it was cult of apple for me EVERY DAY!!... I used to have to remind them that their service engineer was from a pc background AND that some of the parts inside the machine were the same as pc. e.g. hard drives etc etc
if you use both pc and mac, you do get why people do go a bit evangelistic about them , BUT that's mainly to do with setting up and the operating system itself.
I do like some of the apps on the iphone, the where you are one, and it pinpoints you is nifty.. BUT I do dislike how people think if you don't have the phone your a 2nd class citizen or something.
I own a nokia with a radio on , thats all I want really , I sometimes use it for ebay the odd time.
design wise apple are nice on the eye , but well thats it really..
it's a closed shop with all their stuff, which is what I dislike about them..
2 killer apps on mac only are logic / final cut pro.. the ONLY reason I'd buy one
apple ARE milking people for money.. e.g. the different versions of phone..1 had the arial bit in the previous model.. just it wasn't fitted , but the pcb did have the place for it
so they try to squeeze people with revisions , every 2 years?
dunno if the rest of you know.. now in the US texting walking on the street, in some cities like NY is $100 fine.
I fixed / upgrade / installed mac's of all sorts.. but this is the one I probably remember the best >
It's great to hear that there are at least two other people out there in the world without mobiles.
Actually, I estimate that there might be as many as four people in Great Britain who don't have mobile phones, though that figure does seem very optimistic, given how everyone I know seems to have one.
Not me though, and I'm not on Facebook or Twitter either.
My big question is this - where do you guys keep your phone numbers?
The few numbers I do ring regularly I remember. An outdated concept now, I know, as mobile phone owners rarley seem able to recall even their own numbers now that the phones themselves are used to store the numbers. Mobile phones make their owners lazy, and the owners don't bother to memorize the important numbers any more.
Not that I can moralize here - my maths ability is terrible, since if I need to work something out I just call up the Windows Calculator. When I'm away from a PC, and I'm presented with a basic maths problem that I should be able to do in my head without much thought, I now struggle over it mentaly, and usually have to resort to writing it down, as I've lost the ability to visualize the amounts in my head due to decades of using a computer or calculator, and I always do the calculations a second time, with the numbers in reverse order, to check that my totals are right.
I was anti Facebook and twitter but i've been converted. Facebook i use to keep in touch with friends who seem to be anti-email (but are fine writing a PM on facebook ? Still odd). But none of this fun-wall crap or 'i had a sandwich today...' updates.
Twitter i do find very good, just to tell me sports news, or when a comedian is touring, when a website is updated with reviews or other stuff. Just easier than searching through my same old 20 websites for the same information.
Anyway but back to phones/Apple. Apple to me are like any other company, keep milking everyone with a new version every year or so but again its not that bad.
I only use a mobile for if i'm out or driving somewhere far. Apart from that i dont use it much but still think a cheap pay as you talk phone is very very useful nowadays.
Only ever bought one Apple item which was just recently and i love it. Love Apple even more when they gave me a brand new replacement for free when 'ahem' 4 days after getting my ipod i dropped it on a concrete floor !
Sure, but be honest now. You could have had a smartphone years ago from the likes of Nokia, Palm or Blackberry that would have done most, if not all, of that. Few people did, and of those not so many made a big song and dance about it.
Yes, most or all of that *badly*. The difference with the iPhone is that it does all those things *well* without getting in my way.
I've used some of those smart phones and the GPS performance generally ranged between awful and poor on the devices that had it (the iPhone 3G's GPS was only mediocre, I thought. The iPhone 4 however has excellent GPS performance, I have found so far). and the user interfaces were terrible. Nokia was particularly bad, I had a smart-ish phone from them for around 5 years and it was ghastly to use, as such I only ever used it for calls and texts so it was a bit of a waste of money (about the only worthwhile feature it had over a super cheap phone was being tri-band). Blackberry devices are pretty nice but they don't work very well with standard IMAP mail servers (to make you use BES, the IMAP support is extremely limited). So really, the Blackberry will never be an option for me since to get decent use out of one you need BES.
The Apple iPhone for all its closed-ness actually interoperates very well with random stuff on the internet, it works perfectly with my mailserver (which uses authorized SMTP over TLS and IMAPS). Android would of course work well with that server, but I've not been all that impressed with the user interface or reliability (and I would normally prefer an Android device since it's actually running Linux).
Don't get me started on WinCE based devices. We have a load of them at work, awful things. Yes, they can do all of that but they just aren't nice to use.
The thing is I think the iPhone is the first smart phone I've actually liked using. I want my phone to not get in my way, I don't want a "user experience", I just want it to work. The iPhone just works and doesn't get in my way. I'm willing to pay a little extra for that.
I did try asking in couple of the big phone shops but they said I'd need a contract really 'cos GPS uses a lot of data.
GPS uses no data at all. The only mobile data GPS _needs_ is some initial help for getting a fix (which I believe it does not via downloading things, it's via local data held by the cell towers). It's called AGPS (Assisted GPS), the "assisted" bit means it gets its almanac data by some method other than waiting to download it all from the GPS satellites (which can take up to 15 minutes).
What _does_ use data are things like Google Maps, because the Google Maps applications will download the data they need on the fly, i.e. mapping graphics. It's not an obscene amount of data, so if your pay and go data rates are sufficiently low it's not going to be a big concern. If you're paying an extortionate ?1.50/meg though you might think twice.
Mapping software such as TomTom (which is available on the iPhone and I suspect Android also) keeps the map database on the phone so it doesn't need data except if you've signed up to their traffic alert service.
You should work in Carphone Warehouse, Winston.
You'd obviously never sell any phones because of your preference for facts over sales but the world would be a better place.
I don't need google earth- just the gps data and some kind of directions so I'm gonna look into getting a cheap android phone this weekend.
Probably saved me a few hundred quid there unless I give in get the garmin. :)
Ovi Maps on my Nokia N8 is great, I use it a lot. You can download map data for many countries, and many different voices, all for free. There's no data usage, apart from the optional traffic info. updates, which only use a few dozen Kb or so.
It's a superb sat nav system, whether you're driving or walking. I also had it on my recently sold Nokia X6, worked fine on that too. No Nokia phone from recent years should be without it!
Comments
Anyway a big mac meal for a couple and 7 chavvy kids is only about ?15 at McDonalds
(runs) ;)
it was cult of apple for me EVERY DAY!!... I used to have to remind them that their service engineer was from a pc background AND that some of the parts inside the machine were the same as pc. e.g. hard drives etc etc
if you use both pc and mac, you do get why people do go a bit evangelistic about them , BUT that's mainly to do with setting up and the operating system itself.
I do like some of the apps on the iphone, the where you are one, and it pinpoints you is nifty.. BUT I do dislike how people think if you don't have the phone your a 2nd class citizen or something.
I own a nokia with a radio on , thats all I want really , I sometimes use it for ebay the odd time.
design wise apple are nice on the eye , but well thats it really..
it's a closed shop with all their stuff, which is what I dislike about them..
2 killer apps on mac only are logic / final cut pro.. the ONLY reason I'd buy one
apple ARE milking people for money.. e.g. the different versions of phone..1 had the arial bit in the previous model.. just it wasn't fitted , but the pcb did have the place for it
so they try to squeeze people with revisions , every 2 years?
dunno if the rest of you know.. now in the US texting walking on the street, in some cities like NY is $100 fine.
I fixed / upgrade / installed mac's of all sorts.. but this is the one I probably remember the best >
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh
Actually, I estimate that there might be as many as four people in Great Britain who don't have mobile phones, though that figure does seem very optimistic, given how everyone I know seems to have one.
Not me though, and I'm not on Facebook or Twitter either.
The few numbers I do ring regularly I remember. An outdated concept now, I know, as mobile phone owners rarley seem able to recall even their own numbers now that the phones themselves are used to store the numbers. Mobile phones make their owners lazy, and the owners don't bother to memorize the important numbers any more.
Not that I can moralize here - my maths ability is terrible, since if I need to work something out I just call up the Windows Calculator. When I'm away from a PC, and I'm presented with a basic maths problem that I should be able to do in my head without much thought, I now struggle over it mentaly, and usually have to resort to writing it down, as I've lost the ability to visualize the amounts in my head due to decades of using a computer or calculator, and I always do the calculations a second time, with the numbers in reverse order, to check that my totals are right.
Twitter i do find very good, just to tell me sports news, or when a comedian is touring, when a website is updated with reviews or other stuff. Just easier than searching through my same old 20 websites for the same information.
Anyway but back to phones/Apple. Apple to me are like any other company, keep milking everyone with a new version every year or so but again its not that bad.
I only use a mobile for if i'm out or driving somewhere far. Apart from that i dont use it much but still think a cheap pay as you talk phone is very very useful nowadays.
Very clever company,their copyright controls are very tight,so making a fortune for them,and rightly so.
Yes, most or all of that *badly*. The difference with the iPhone is that it does all those things *well* without getting in my way.
I've used some of those smart phones and the GPS performance generally ranged between awful and poor on the devices that had it (the iPhone 3G's GPS was only mediocre, I thought. The iPhone 4 however has excellent GPS performance, I have found so far). and the user interfaces were terrible. Nokia was particularly bad, I had a smart-ish phone from them for around 5 years and it was ghastly to use, as such I only ever used it for calls and texts so it was a bit of a waste of money (about the only worthwhile feature it had over a super cheap phone was being tri-band). Blackberry devices are pretty nice but they don't work very well with standard IMAP mail servers (to make you use BES, the IMAP support is extremely limited). So really, the Blackberry will never be an option for me since to get decent use out of one you need BES.
The Apple iPhone for all its closed-ness actually interoperates very well with random stuff on the internet, it works perfectly with my mailserver (which uses authorized SMTP over TLS and IMAPS). Android would of course work well with that server, but I've not been all that impressed with the user interface or reliability (and I would normally prefer an Android device since it's actually running Linux).
Don't get me started on WinCE based devices. We have a load of them at work, awful things. Yes, they can do all of that but they just aren't nice to use.
The thing is I think the iPhone is the first smart phone I've actually liked using. I want my phone to not get in my way, I don't want a "user experience", I just want it to work. The iPhone just works and doesn't get in my way. I'm willing to pay a little extra for that.
GPS uses no data at all. The only mobile data GPS _needs_ is some initial help for getting a fix (which I believe it does not via downloading things, it's via local data held by the cell towers). It's called AGPS (Assisted GPS), the "assisted" bit means it gets its almanac data by some method other than waiting to download it all from the GPS satellites (which can take up to 15 minutes).
What _does_ use data are things like Google Maps, because the Google Maps applications will download the data they need on the fly, i.e. mapping graphics. It's not an obscene amount of data, so if your pay and go data rates are sufficiently low it's not going to be a big concern. If you're paying an extortionate ?1.50/meg though you might think twice.
Mapping software such as TomTom (which is available on the iPhone and I suspect Android also) keeps the map database on the phone so it doesn't need data except if you've signed up to their traffic alert service.
You'd obviously never sell any phones because of your preference for facts over sales but the world would be a better place.
I don't need google earth- just the gps data and some kind of directions so I'm gonna look into getting a cheap android phone this weekend.
Probably saved me a few hundred quid there unless I give in get the garmin. :)
It's a superb sat nav system, whether you're driving or walking. I also had it on my recently sold Nokia X6, worked fine on that too. No Nokia phone from recent years should be without it!
Here's how hip and funky it is!