Synapse Phones

Posted: Tue 26 October, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Advertising, Business, Geeky, iPhone, Technology | Leave a comment »

If you’re tired of run-of-the-mill “standard” smartphones, it looks like this may be something that’s of interest.

Synapse Phones will take your order for a customised smartphone (running Android 2.2) and ship it in Q1 of 2011

Think about for what you use your smartphone and what you will do with it. For example if you are someone who loves to take thousands of pictures, you can choose the 12MP camera and a xenon flash for taking pictures at night or under bad lighting conditions or if you want to store your whole music collection on your smartphone just choose a high amount of memory.

Seems like a good idea – and the prices aren’t epically unreasonable either. I hope it works out as a good business.

Loss of Sync

Posted: Wed 15 September, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky, iPhone, Technology, Thoughts | 4 Comments »

When I got the iPhone (and on previous phones before that) one of the best things I used was a service called Zyb.com, which allowed you to synchronise contacts to their online database from your old phone, and then pull them down to the new phone. It made life *so* much easier, allowing you to do in ten minutes what otherwise turned into a dragged out and nightmarish process of copying contacts across one by one.

When Herself’s mother got an iPhone recently, I planned to do the same thing using Zyb, but I couldn’t. Because Zyb.com is no more.

A couple of years back now, Vodafone bought out Zyb, because it was such a good service. At the time they said it would carry on being available, and they’d got no plans to shut it down. Now though, they’ve closed down Zyb, and relaunched it (kind of) as part of Vodafone 360°. It’s nowhere near as good, fast or useful as it was as Zyb.

I’m really annoyed by this – despite having been a subscribed/signed-up user to Zyb, I didn’t get any notifications about the service closing down. It’s only having done other research about it that I find Zyb closed on 31st July.

As yet I haven’t found a decent replacement for Zyb that was as smooth and painless (and fast) as Zyb. Vodafone 360 took nearly three hours to sync things, and even then it’s not as good. Any suggestions?

Scrabble

Posted: Sun 5 September, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, iPhone, Literacy, Sweary | 6 Comments »

One of the addictions I do have with the iPhone at the moment is the Scrabble® App. It’s not perfect – it cheats, and uses some really dodgy Americanised (sorry, Americanized) words which drive me barmy. But it’s fun, and I’m playing it way too much.

Today though I had a small dollop of success – allbeit in a silly and sweary way.

Cunt in Scrabble

Yep, I got to swear properly in Scrabble. Aces.

Yes, the word ‘cunt’ in scrabble. And it was allowed! (Scored OK too…)

The full board here…

Can you tell what it is yet?

App-Less

Posted: Tue 6 July, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky, iPhone, Technology, Thoughts, Weirdness, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Since getting the iPhone a while back, while I’ve been surprised by some of the apps that are available, I’m also occasionally surprised by the apps that aren’t available, particularly when it seems like such a good idea.

Among those have been :

  1. National Lottery.  You’d have thought that an app for sending out the numbers to iPhones (and other phones) every week would be a no-brainer. Particularly if you could also put in the numbers you regularly use, so it could check automatically for whether you’ve got any matches. I don’t think it even needs the ability to buy numbers etc., as there are plenty of other avenues for doing this already.
  2. Eurodisney. Herself’s off to Eurodisney soon, and we both thought that an app would be really useful for this. Being able to (for example) have a map – including “You are here” through the GPS, and a list of the rides/attractions you really want to see, plus being able to see what’s closest to your current position. Again, that seems like a no-brainer. (The really cool version would include ‘augmented reality’, and let you use the phone to see what’s around you, along with labels, routes etc.)

They’re the main two that surprise me. There’s a few others too that I haven’t totally thought through yet, but I’m sure I’ll write about those as and when I get round to it.

iPhone v4

Posted: Fri 11 June, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Geeky, iPhone, Thoughts | 3 Comments »

As regular readers know, I’ve now had my iPhone 3GS for a couple of months. I’ve been surprised by how well I do get on with it in a lot of ways (although it does have some epic frustrations as well, mainly based around the keyboard) and how much more I use it than I expected to.

But I’m still not an evangelist on the thing. I’m not addicted to it or obsessed with it, and if something better came along, I’d have no problem with moving away from the iPhone.

So – as someone asked yesterday – would I want the newly announced iPhone 4 ? Am I envious of the people who will have one? Do I feel the need to upgrade as soon as possible?

In short, no.  There’s nothing really on the new iPhone that is a deal-breaker for me. In fact the only thing that I’d like from it is the more advanced/powerful battery.  I don’t need/want any of the other little doohickeys. I don’t make video calls anyway – never have – and the rest of it was all a bit underwhelming, really.

So if this one breaks, I wouldn’t have an issue with replacing it with a v4 iPhone. But I’m not going to go out and upgrade for the hell of it, or to have the latest/greatest. It’ll be updated again in 6-12 months anyway.

iPhone + D4D

Posted: Wed 9 June, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, iPhone, Photography, Thoughts | 2 Comments »

Since getting the iPhone a couple of months back, one development has surprised me more than any other. And that’s been the difference in how I use the phone and how D4D™ has changed since I got it.

Despite it’s comparatively crappy camera (bearing in mind that the previous phone had an 8Mp camera compared to this one’s 3Mp-ish) I’m using the camera part of the phone far more than on any other mobile I’ve had, and that has really surprised me. Some of it is, I suppose, the ease of taking photos off it – I primarily just email them to myself, and it’s a painless process, as opposed to that on the previous Sony-Ericsson phones. I don’t really know what the rest of the reasoning is, but whatever it is, it looks like D4D™ is becoming more photographic in nature.

That’s no bad thing of course. It’s just surprising (to me, anyway) that I’ve gone from pretty much all-written to having a noticeable portion of the posts having photos in them.  Strange the way things work out, isn’t it?  I don’t plan for D4D to turn into a full-on photoblog – I’ve got other plans on that score, thanks – but it’s just another change in the evolution of D4D™, I think.

Succumbed

Posted: Fri 30 April, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, iPhone, Media | 4 Comments »

Of all the temptations on iPhone, my downfall has been Angry Birds. It got recommended a while back in the Guardian, so I got it on Herself’s phone – and damn it’s addictive.

I did complete all of the first release, which was the first time I’d played to completion since the eighties.

Anyway, I’d done really well and not got it on my own iPhone – after all, I’d completed it on Herself’s phone, so I didn’t need to do it again on mine.

This week though Angry Birds has had an update, new levels and all. So I’ve had to get it on my own phone.

Of course, this also means I’ve got to get through the first bits (again) in order to get to the new levels.

So that’s my Bank Holiday weekend sorted then.

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