I was waiting this morning and checked the web then finally I plugged in my iPhone and viola iOS 4 ready to rock and roll!!!

Will update blog to see how it all works out, but for now Download & Install!!!

Have Fun….

iCurious.me

Yesterday, I walked in to a Bell Store and they have slashed their iPhone 3G & 3GS models as well. The price for the iPhone 3G 8GB model is going for $49, iPhone 3GS 16GB for $99 & iPhone 3GS 32GB models for $149 all on a new 36 month term!!!! Awesome, just Awesome!!! Watching Bell as the major sponsor for the 2010 Winter Olympics that is the company I can trust. They have proven their reliability and after hearing they will be getting the iPhone 4 when it is first released in Canada proves they have the buying power. It has been Rogers competitive advantage to get the iPhone first in the past, but guess they are losing exclusivity rights as well.

For us Canadians this is great news!!!!

So, I reviewed the Palm Pre and was supposed to return it … but I really didn’t want too.  I ended up purchasing a brand new Palm Pre from Bell and cancelled my iPhone 3G from Rogers.  In the midst of my purchase I also bought the Palm Touchstone for $69.99 CAN.  After reading on various blogs I thought this would be a great accessory to match my new Palm Pre.

What came in the box:

- (1) Palm Touchstone

- (1) Matte finish backing

- Thats it

First Impressions:

I installed the new backing and love the new matte finish.  It doesn’t seem to attract finger prints and has a really good feel in your palm.  I first charged my new Palm Pre directly to the micro USB.  I had to decide where the new home for my touchstone would be.  I ended up deciding on my bed side table.  The touchstone has an angled face with a nice aesthetic look.  The bottom of the touchstone is a material that helps keep it still on the surface it is attached too.  The material is what the palm rep called “gecko technology” which works remarkably well to keep the touchstone secure.

The first time I charged my Palm Pre on the touchstone it was seamless and charged roughly the same amount of time when it was directly into the micro USB charger.  Cool little features that worked well, is when you are on a call and put the Pre on the touchstone it automatically puts into speakerphone to continue the call.  When attached to the touchstone the Pre is set automatically into landscape or portrait mode with the clock showing depending on the orientation of  the Pre.  In addition, when the Pre rings and taken off the touchstone it automatically answers the call.

Overall:

I am happy with the purchase, works well and great design.  If it wasn’t for the price I probably would purchase 2 more for the car and office.

My rating is 7 out of 10 due to price.

First Impressions:

The Palm Pre finally has come to Canada through Bell on August 27, 2009!!!  It was exciting to see the Palm Pre in action.  In most Bell stores they have a live demo unit waiting for everyone to try.  My first impressions was quite positive and pretty close living up to the hype.  It is a touch screen slider phone with a full QWERTY keyboard and a brand new Web OS by Palm.  It was announced that this New OS will be the new platform for every new palm mobile device.  This means no more Palm OS and Windows Mobile!!!

I have been a Palm fan since the first Palm Treo 650.  What made me fall in love with my old Palm Treo is it’s basic OS and compatibility to my Apple Computers.  This Palm Pre device definitely caught my eye and has a pleasing interface.  The touchscreen was very responsive, and felt very good in my hand.  Voice calls were very clear and enjoyed the multi-tasking and clever “touch gestures” to navigate through the system.  First Impression was A+!!!

Design:

As I said before the phone looks absolutely gorgeous, its a slider and has a full QWERTY keyboard.  The design was most likely the response to people that critiqued and critiqued the “iPhone”.  One of the things people talked about was not having that physical keyboard, and Palm has delivered … but the keyboard design is very cramped.  I have smaller hands and didn’t mind, but can tell this can be a major issues for a majority of people.  The keys are made of rubber buttons that increases some tackiness to the keys that do make it easier to type in such a cramp space.  If you have ever used the Palm Centro it is exactly the same and will know what I mean.   The slider was something to bring a different spin and thought it was great and “cool” to attract the younger generation.  I could foresee over a couple of months or a couple years this mechanism could be a problem as I had a slider phone before (sometimes you slide just because your bored LOL which can wear out the slide part faster).

I was told from the Palm Rep, that was available at the store I was at, is that the design was to replicate a river stone and when the phone screen was off it blends to the phone not knowing where the screen starts or stops.  Very neat and bought into it for sure.  The phone is made of plastic and doesn’t feel as solid as a Blackberry, but the phone really is light and has a good feel.

Overall design I would give a 7 out of 10.

Performance:

Palm’s Web OS is the driving force for this phone.  It uses a technology they call “Synergy” to make everything simple and easy all in one place.  Brilliant idea, as it will pull all  your contacts and calendars from various sources such as Microsoft Exchange, Google, and social networks such as Facebook.  This “Synergy” makes sure that all my information is synced from my phone to the web which means if anything happens to my Pre, when I get a new one it zaps all my info to the new phone.  Very cool.

The phone didn’t lag to much from program to program, and the web experience was amazing.  I have to say vs. the iPhone the web is pretty on par if not better.  My favourite feature about the Pre is “Universal Search”, which means at the home screen I just start typing. It starts searching that word in the phone, and if it doesn’t find it in the phone it directs me to where I can … google.  I love how they integrated this search feature so you don’t have to open a bunch of apps, when your in hurry, you just type, find, select and done.

The phone was pretty fast and couldn’t argue how nice the screen was to play with, but the performance of the battery wasn’t so great.  In the Palm Pre’s defence I was using it to the max and added 3 different e-mails, surfed the web, and downloaded some pretty cool apps and died within an hour and a half.  In an average day though I think it would become an issue.

Overall Performance 8 out of 10.

Product Summary

The Good:

Nice design & feel, great features like built in WiFi and takes advantage of what we use most … the internet.  Great call quality, touch gestures, and full physical QWERTY keyboard.  Multi-tasker, simple to use and integrates with everything google.  On Bell the largest 3G network in Canada.

The Bad:

Battery life is horrible compared to other “Smartphones”.  No video recording.  No landscape mode other than web mode, which is a big issue if you read a lot of emails (Landscape mode a must).  Escaping from the old Palm OS means NO infrared (sorry to Realtors that really use that feature as a necessity).  The App Catalog is still in beta, which means very few apps compared to apple and blackberry.  It’s the first version of Web OS, so will have a few bugs which future updates should resolve.

Bottom Line:

For a 1st Gen phone, it is not too bad.  Great features, very nice internet experience.  The app catalog will make it worth wild to keep this phone fun and interesting.  For your average consumer I would rate this phone a 9 out of 10 for sure.  However, for the business power user I would rate this phone 6 out of 10.

With future updates improving battery life and a few other small issues I would most likely give the business power user a higher rating.

Things I noticed right off the start is my Macbook seems to run a little bit faster, Expose is even better and stacks is more user friendly.  I will admit I didn’t have high expectations after reviewing the upgrade information on apple’s website.  A few cool features that I truly like and haven’t played to its full potential which include screen recording!!!  I tried it last night it is really cool, especially for “how to videos” for podcasts and friends.

Overall, easy upgrade process from leopard and great little adjustments to the OS for quicker performance and great useful tweaks to quicktime, Expose and stacks.  If you are looking for a drastic change to the overall look of the OS, that is not going to be the case.  If you were thinking about upgrading, for only $35, it’s worth every penny

I used Boot Camp 2.0 to start this journey. But before we get into the install and the performance, lets answer the most common question I got from my friends and family…..WHY? I installed Vista for a couple reasons. One of the reasons I installed Vista on my MacBook is that I needed to use a windows OS to run Simply Accounting which I need for my small business. I had a dedicated custom built desktop to run Simply Accounting and then the windows XP failed and was forced to pay a book keeper. Then I was reading online about how Vista was running smoother and faster on Mac hardware. That got me thinking about running Windows on my MacBook and call it a day. I put the idea aside as I couldn’t justify installing a full installation of Windows for one program.

In the last couple of months my father-in-law asked me to help him purchase a couple PC’s, and of course I was like go get a Mac you can’t go wrong. But unfortantely, he needed PC’s because of work and future endeavors for compatibility issues. Enough said I was going to do my best to help him out. I used to be a huge PC fan till I was introduced to the apple family. In any case we got my father-in-law up and running with a brand new HP desktop running Vista Premium and a new Toshiba laptop running Vista Basic for his wife. Everything was fine and changed most of the settings to be more similar to XP. So, here comes the other reason of adding Vista to my laptop. I became the dedicated Vista help desk for my father-in-law. Trust me I love computers and love helping out, but it made it difficult because I was not used to the OS. So, I wanted to be the best son-in-law I could be and made the plunge to install Vista to get famililar with the OS, do my book keeping and help my in-laws have the best experience with Vista.

So, back to the install. It was fairly easy and painless compared to the days upgrading my old machines to XP (compatibility issues a major thing with my older programs back then). Luckily, I was starting off fresh and wasn’t worried about old programs working except my Simply Accounting which I doubled checked before installation. I partitioned my 120GB HD, and left 20GB available for Vista. Vista OS alone is roughly 8-10 GB and knew that I wouldn’t use that many programs. I installed the 32-bit version as I have a MacBook and not a Pro or I would have installed the 64-bit version. That being said if you decide to install the 64-bit version I would partition your drive to the max of 32GB and have 4GB or RAM installed on your machine as the 64-bit requires more resources and memory. In any case, the installation was successful and started installing bootcamp drivers and had bootcamp 2.1 update on a USB key to install after the reboot. After the 2.1 bootcamp update everything seemed to work great.

Windows Vista in general has had a pretty bad rep for being the twin of Windows ME, but with my experience thus far it works fine for what I am using it for. I have found a few bugs, but nothing major. One thing that I don’t like is that some settings are never saved and have to change them everytime I boot into Vista Ultimate. If you are wanting the need to use Vista for whatever reason it will work fine on your Mac.

Overall, this solves my problems without purchasing a separate laptop or desktop to run windows only programs. Boot camp is fairly easy to set-up and install and everything you need for help is only a google click away. Vista runs smooth and seems to run pretty fast. Will I ever use Vista more than my OS X, probably during tax time, but not on a regular basis. I still love my Mac OS, but time will tell if Vista will cause me excessive problems in the future or none at all.

When I purchased my iPhone I knew I was going to buy something to protect my new toy.  I wanted to have a case that still showed the beauty and functionality of the iPhone.  I ran across this case by Griffin and have been fully satisfied after using it for the last couple of weeks.  I purchased the black translucent version and the white translucent version.  The box included the wave case, lint cloth, plastic screen protector and simple instructions to apply the case.  

The case is an interlocking system which fits the iPhone 3G perfectly!!!  I love the feel of the case and the plastic screen protector is a nice touch.  The case is made of a durable polycarbonate case.  

Pros:

Nice simple protection.  Adds a nice grip to the phone and don’t have to worry about scratching the phone when in your pocket.  Available in different colors.  Full access to the function keys, dock and touch screen.  

Cons:

Will not protect the screen if hit directly by an object.  The supplied plastic protector often creates air pockets that may not look appealing.  

Overall:

Well designed case, fits well and perfect if you put your phone in your pocket.  The air gaps did bother me however, and purchased a film screen protector in combination with the wave case.  I use this on an everyday basis as I usually have my phone in my pocket.  For special occasions I will be purchasing a leather hip case…for a later posting.  I read some comments before I purchased this case about the edges scratching the silver bezel.  I have used this case regularly and have not noticed any scratches or marks on my outside bezel.  However, I can see how the scratches can occur from installing the case.  I would suggest being delegate and do not force your iPhone into place when installing.  I highly recommend this case and will update further down the road as to the durability and protection over time.

Wow!!!  I am just posting about the new iPod Nano that was introduced.  I was amazed to see the design is much more eye-appealing than its predecessor.  Looks like Apple is going back to the formula that worked in the 1st & 2nd generation models and realized…if it isn’t broke don’t fix it.  It looks really thin and super light, I like the wide screen factor by using the built in accelerometer, and the choice of colors is absolutely great.  The price point is on target to be affordable which make it easier to upgrade from previous models.  I hope to see a real one soon and have better comments based on the actual look and feel of this new beautiful Nano iPod.  

As for purchasing one right now will have to wait. I still own a 1st generation Nano which I used to use specifically for the gym but have put aside for my 2nd generation iPod shuffle.  As for trips and casual walks my iPhone fits the bill with all the multimedia I need.  

My wife and I recently purchased 2 apple iPhone’s through Rogers Wireless here in Canada.  I am a huge apple fan since my wife and I switched to the mac by purchasing 2 original Macbooks back in 2006 and still are working great.  The apple products are in my opinion top notch.  

I used to work for a cellular company and have owned almost every top model phone and smartphone on the market.  I was pretty savvy with my Blackberries, which I gave up to get this device, and compared many attributes that focus on my daily life.  

I really wanted to get the first generation iPhone, but never came up to Canada.  I am glad I waited as the anticipation was exciting.  

First thing I saw was the box which was very attractive and nicely packaged.  The phone itself was absolutely gorgeous.  I immediately purchased a case.  The store only had a hard-shell case called the “Wave” made by Griffin (will talk more about that case in another post).  

Everything you would expect from apple, great aesthetics  and very easy to use.  I set-up my Mobile Me account and all my contacts, e-mails and calendars were downloaded and set-up with ease.  I synced my Macbook for my music and photos which synced like my ipod.  No, stress or worries everything went smoothly.  

I made my first call to my wife and the voice quality was good, but I think could be better compared to my Blackberry.  I liked that there was a sensor that turns off the screen when the phone is by your ear eliminating accidentally hanging up when the touch screen touches the cheek.  I had many problems with that when I used to own a Treo 650.  In any case next up was texting.  I made a few texts to various people and at first glance thought my Blackberry was much better.  After a week I started to trust the suggested words and type faster on my new iPhone than any other cellular device I previously owned.  

The internet is a great experience on this device compared to any smartphone on the market.  The iPhone has a full safari browser that works just like a real safari browser on your mac.  The speeds are really fast with 3G, and with built-in wifi makes the experience even more so impressive.  

The multimedia features on the iPhone work amazing.  I downloaded a song, movie and created my own ringtones.  The built in accelerometer and cover flow make the device a perfect companion on long trips.  

Overall, my experience with the iPhone has been great.  On the other hand my experience with Rogers Wireless not so much…another story.  

iPhone Summary:

The Good

The Apple iPhone 3G is a beautiful device with a bright vibrant screen with a natural touch-screen interface. With the additional support for high-speed 3G networks, and the introduction of the apps store and Microsoft exchange make this a complete smart phone that can now enter the business market in a serious way.  Excellent multimedia functions such as music and video playback.  

The Not So good

The iPhone 3G still does not have video recording compared to even the free phones cellular companies offer.  Battery life not as long compared to other previous phones I have owned.  Call quality can be improved.  

Bottom Line

Compared to other cellular phones on the market the iPhone by far is the most complete phone.  The support of the app store and 3G give the iPhone limitless additional add-ons and features.  Even though the battery life is so so, for what you get is a better pay-off.  This is a phone that a person can utilize over 60% of its features compared to other phones that people cannot even figure out.  In one word the iPhone is “Solid”, and happy with our purchase.