iPhone 4s Day 12: Word to the Waze

This was a typical Wednesday: Get Isandro up and ready for school, get him to school mad late, Starbucks, finish the drive to work while on conference calls, gym, hectic rest of day, traffic, get home, feed the boys and give them baths, put them in bed, hang out with wifey, sit in bed and type to blog. Nothing special other than the smiles on my boys' snotty nose faces (seems big brother may have had more than allergies).

I'm starting to think about Friday and whether I conclude the iPhone posts or if I will try to make it to 30 days. While I think making it to 30 days would be cool in a nerd type of way, I'm not sure I have that much material. I also should have started the blog at Day 0 so "Phone Decision 2011" would have been on Day 14 instead of Day 15. If it doesn't ruin people's comments, I'll fix it. But if you can't already tell, the phone is a keeper.

Before I do the review on the Waze app, I also downloaded Craigslist! which is currently free in the App Store. I thought it would be crappy but it is a feature packed app that was easy to use. I also used FaceTime for the first time. The lucky recipient of my first FaceTime call was...drum roll please...myself. Well actually my wife's iPod Touch, but she refuses to participate in my video chat tests when she's sitting right beside me. Spoilsport! The call was good but both iDevices were on the same wifi connection so that wasn't a good test. I'll have to find someone a little farther away, preferably ridicule free. I also figured out how to get "Siri" to send a message in one command (Tell blah blah blah). That was cool, but I'm still working on the enunciation part. The things she thinks I said may land me on an FBI watch list.

So into Waze. My best description of it would it be that Waze is the bastard child that resulted from Facebook and Garmin having a one night stand. I have far from figured out all its features, and I've got most or all of the social networking featured turned off. But basically it's a map program run by the people. It gets it's traffic from other Waze users who passively send their locations and speeds to the server so that when the next person taking that route comes along, Waze will know whether to have you take the same route or calculate an alternate route. You can also notate various traffic conditions like traffic, accidents, construction, police locations, etc. Then there is the social part. You can see where other Waze users have been and ping them. This reminds me of AOL chat rooms back in the day where you look for a girl in the room and try to get her to talk to you one on one in hopes of cybersex. Not that I've ever done that...recently. I don't see why I'd ping a fellow driver stuck in traffic. There's some point system I have yet to figure out. You can connect your account to FB, Twitter and Foursquare if I recall. I'm sure I'm missing some features but you get the idea.

The route from home to preschool worked out well. Waze avoided a highway that was barely moving, and took me a route that I hadn't thought of taking. It does turn-by-turn directions but no TTS which means no street names. Not a huge deal. Going home was where it got interesting.

I normally take one of two routes home. One is longer but traffic is only bad in one spot rather than the other option which is alway grid locked. Waze took me through a third route which was a different way of doing the first suggestion. What Waze (or the people who should have Waze running) didn't realize that the on ramp to the different way is always jam packed at rush hour. After I modified the route by driving past the on ramp and continuing the down the path of the first route which was not a bad ride today. My verdict is that for a free app, it does pretty well. Just be cautious of traffic causing weird routes.

Ok getting sleepy fast. Battle for tonight is multitasking. I'm pretty sure I already did this battle, but I had an issue this morning that made this Come up again. The Pre wins. Again. I could give you a million scenarios where multitasking is needed and you could probably prove I didn't really need it. However my example today was getting dressed in the dark. I used to be able to start the LED light and then check the weather while still being able to see what articles of clothing I needed to grab. No so much with this one trick at a time pony.

I've literally fallen asleep and mistyped the hell out of some words. Hopefully I caught them all. Later...