iDay

Yes, it is iDay. I am very excited, and a little depressed. I am very excited because the coolest thing ever, or at least in a long time came out today. The Belkin Mini Jack Converter for that one thing from Apple. Is it the iFoam? Some packing material I heard. Anyway, I want an iPhone very badly. Fortunately, I am going to get one. I just have to wait like 8 months. And if I am at all lucky, there will be 3G by then. I am OK with all of its "flaws" except for the 3G. That should be better. I have to say I am a little surprised it is not there. There have been reports of people noticing that their Cingular EDGE networks have seemed a little faster and one guy even took a snap shot of his screen on his phone of the results of a speed test. He got 200k or something. And the normal for EDGE is like 150-180k. This could mean that AT&T is doing some work to make their EDGE network a little ore bearable. But still, 200, even 250k if they managed to get their EDGE speeds that high, would not be much of an improvement. If Apple were to put a 3G chip in the iPhone, and who's to say they didn't already and it is a software update away, you would have speeds of 400k-700k anywhere you had AT&T coverage. Not just in that lame little wi-fi hot spots. When I saw the keynote and saw Steve introduce mobile safari that was the "Real Safari" I was excited thinking that omg, the iPhone is going to be the Internet in your pocket. But no, not exactly, he comes along not to long later to tell us that it is only 2G. He had better be glad he is Apple, and that there are still some VERY cool features on the iPhone, because that would have been enough to loose my interest if they were say . . .Sony. I think Apple would make tons if they didn’t get into the phone market. They just had a wi-fi safari browser and a touch screen iPod, and sold it for $299.99, or even $249.99. I would go out and buy it that day. The whole phone thing, I just don’t know. If they had left that market alone, things could have gone well. Or if they had less mobile features and it was more focused on being an iPod and internet device. If it were unlocked, and you didn’t need a new contract, you just needed to take it to your Verizon store, your T-Mobile store, and they would activate it for you, that would in my opinion sell just as well without the carrier lock in. My reasoning I personally think that people are all hyped up about this iPhone is this. People at this point in time, are pissed off at their cell phones. This may be true more or less, but on average people are not 100% satisfied with their phones. But carriers are different. Carriers, people are not only pissed off at, most people hate their carriers, carriers, and their phones. People think of Apple as the company that does things right, the company that makes things beautiful, simple, and easy to use. Now when such a company announces that they will be producing a mobile phone, this is what makes people so excited. Apple technically is going to have their iPhones running on the AT&T network, but is going to keep the interference between AT&T, and their iPhone buyers, to a minimal. For example, the activation of the iPhone is done in iTunes. This basically says to AT&T, “We want our costumers to have the easy of use that they have grown accustom to when activating their iPhones, so you are obviously not in the equation, kay?” AT&T agreeing to this is not a bad idea. Although AT&T might not have much control, they are going to make huge profits. For those of you who did not know this, Apple originally went to Verizon, a much stronger and more reliable network (sorry AT&T fan boys if there is such a thing) and Verizon did not agree to the terms Apple was proposing. Now I don’t blame Verizon entirely, they had no idea what this phone was going to be capable of; they didn’t really get to know anything about it. All that Verizon was told is that Apple would have full control over advertising, and control rate plans, but it would be fair. Naturally, Verizon did not want anything to do with that. AT&T (then Cingular) knew about Apple, and what they were capable of doing. AT&T was able to see that giving up control of one of their phones could bring in large amounts of profits. AT&T eventually agreed, and we are going to see how things play out over the next few months. But for now, we are going to have to just wait. More about me though, I am going to Great America on Sunday, and tomorrow I will be doing iPhone stuff and homework all day. Hopefully I will get to touch one and do a short write off of the multi touch system tomorrow as well. Let’s move slightly away from the iPhone, and on to networking. Out of the box, Macs are fully open to talking to other Macs, I print to other Mac’s printers in my house, and I save files on another Mac’s drive. But I have never actually tried to network my Gateway laptop to any of the Macs. I only wanted to today because I do not have a printer in my room, and needed to print something. I only print once in a blue moon, so this never really came up before. But today I wanted to. I am able to print to the iMac in the basement from anywhere in the house on the MacBook, but I would like the same capability on the Gateway. Well, five minutes on a mixture of google and Mac Help, and I found out that if I installed Bonjour on my PC, it would recognize the shared printers and set them up in the windows printer utility for me. That worked instantly. But then I wanted more. I decided that I wanted file sharing as well. (btw, I used it to transfer this post which I was typing in word from the Mac to the pc) So I went onto google, I went onto Apple’s help page, but eventually got my help from some forums that I was to excited to take note of the name of. (Sorry unknown forum) Long story short, I am able to not only see, but read, write, delete files on my pc from my Mac now, and on my Mac from my pc. Of course, Apple makes it much more beautiful. Good thing I have an XP pc too, because I would not have done this on a Vista pc.
-Ryan