iPhone 5s Day 5: For the love of money

Today I actually used "Siri" a lot. If you are new to my blog, you will see that I put "Siri" in quotes. My sister-in-law's nickname is Siri, and since she was invented first, she gets to be quote free. You can also imagine me doing air quotes every time you read "Siri" much like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers:

"Siri" is WAY faster. I assume it has to be the phone and/or iOS 7, since I was on wifi most of today, but my 4s never got back to me this fast. I wonder if her responses have change to the perverted line of questioning I asked her during our initial courtship. I might check that out tomorrow.

I guessing you're wondering about the title of today's post. In my life as a parent, I've discovered that children are good for love, laughter, and sucking every dollar out of your wallet. This of course severely limits the amount of "toys" an electronics lover like me can buy. So this evening, I spend a lot of time using the 5s camera taking pictures of stuff to put on eBay and Craigslist. Camera is super fast. It's also got a bunch of functions I haven't tried out yet, like slo-mo and the Instagram-like filters. There was one annoying part, which was the iCloud Photo Stream sync. I spent like an hour waiting for the photos to sync wirelessly so I wouldn't have to plug in the phone, since I only have the one Lightning cord currently in the bedroom. I give up, go upstairs to get the cord, come back down, and the pictures have all magically appeared in my Photo Stream folder. Fuck you iCloud.

Battery life was very good today. Several calls from work, a lot of video streaming, some GPSing, some Pandora-ing and all the pictures I took today, and I was at about 11% by the time it was bath time for the boys. I know some of you are like "it's almost dead Marco!" but realistically, I just need it to survive about 12 hours. If I'm away from a charger more than about 10-12 hours, then something has, once again, gone horribly wrong, and you should call the people for me.

I got confirmation from a friend that there are non Apple Lightning cords that are certified unlike the Chinese DEATH BY FIRE cables. AmazonBasics and Monoprice have them. The Monoprice ones are a smidge more, but the shape of their USB A connector looks like the Apple one, which means it will fit in the Palm Pre car chargers I have laying around. One less thing to buy.

I'm officially on my job's phone plan, which means I no longer care about my data usage. At least until my boss yells at me about my data usage. If they saw my Sprint data usage, they probably would have told me to keep expensing my bill. I guess we'll see how that goes.

Why didn't one of you mofos tell me it is 12:15 AM??? Good night...

iPhone 5s Day 2: iOS7 rocks your face!!!

I told you all I was quitting at midnight last night, but that was a lie, because I can't help myself. My phone was activated at some point after midnight because I called my home phone successfully, but the bastards at AT&T couldn't be bothered to send the confirmation email. I'm glad I wasn't actually waiting for them. 

I figured out, unfortunately after the fact, that if your backup isn't encrypted, you will have to reenter your login information into most of your apps. That was close to a hundred apps for me. I'll keep that in mind for the next restore.

The phone is fast as hell. 4G is quicker than 3G for sure, but I'm not sure if it's as fast as the wireless companies make it out to be. I'll run some further tests when I get back to the house.

My first "I miss Sprint" moment was this afternoon. I initially set up my account for 300MB, thinking that would hold me over until my job takes my account over. By 2PM this afternoon, AT&T sent a text saying I was 65% through the 300MB. Granted I am out of town and using Waze for my GPS needs heavily, but I used to laugh at people who had to monitor their data usage. Now I am one of them. 

But the main highlight for me is iOS7. This ish is amazing. I don't understand how people hate it. Apple basically stole things from Android and webOS to make their OS better. I'll highlight a few:

1.  Quick access panel: with a flick from the bottom of most screens, you have quick access to toggle wifi, Bluetooth, airplane mode, do not disturb, portrait orientation lock, screen brightness, music player, flashlight, calculator, camera, clock, and Airdrop. I have no real idea what Airdrop does, I should look that up. But an Android phone has been able to do most of those functions forever, and a WebOS phone could do them with a simple tweak. This was the only reason I considered jailbreaking my phone, and now there doesn't appear to be a need.

2. Cards: the quick launch has been transformed into webOS cards. As one of the few people who stuck with webOS until I was forced out, this feels like rough sex, where it hurts and feels good at the same time. However, it only hurts because no one will realize where they got it from. But double tap the Home button and you'll see your open apps. Swipe left and right to see the apps, and swipe up to you close them, instead of the old "jiggly mode."

3.  Pages within folders: I worked really hard to keep all my apps limited to two pages. Even with folders, it was starting to get hard to continue that recently since you could only have a certain number of apps per folder. Now that there are pages within the folders, I'm comfortably in two pages. I can't understand people that have pages and pages of apps. How do you find anything?

4. Auto update: are you telling me that I no longer have to go into the App Store app, go to Updates, and then tap Update All? The phone will now just automagically update apps when they need to be updated? I guess they stole that from Micro$oft, but I'll take it. I cleared my screen before I could take a pic, but here is an example from someone I follow on Twitter:

That's all I've discovered so far. The only negative I have with the 5s currently is battery life. Like I said earlier, this weekend with my limited wifi access and heavy GPS usage is probably not an accurate measurement of what my actual usage will be like, so I'll come back to that topic later next week when I'm back to normal.

 Please forgive any typos in the post. I've been drinking heavily on top of doing the blog post from my phone...

iPhone 5s Day 1: Audibles and Space Gray Friday

I have officially dubbed today "Space Gray Friday." The significance should be obvious, but in case you live under an Android rock, I bought the 32 GB Space Gray iPhone 5s. Before we get into the unveiling, we'll start off with the audible.

My wife has been pestering me most of this past week to consent to a weekend trip to Asheville, NC since my oldest is out of school today and Monday. She even went so far as to reenact one of my youngest son's fits, which I wish I would have videotaped as blackmail evidence for use at a later date. I finally relented yesterday afternoon, only to realize that my phone and the accessories were coming today. So my audible was with UPS. They have this new service called UPS My Choice. You basically sign up for free, and if their system detects a package with your name and address, it will give you alerts about the shipment, and give you a few options (most at an additional cost) for rerouting the package. I logged on to the My Choice site, and chose the option to have the packages held at the distribution center so that I could pick it up. The distribution center just happens to be off of I-285N and I-85N, the direction we were going anyhow. I get to the UPS distribution center, and they had caught the box with the phone, but the one with the accessories was already on the truck and out for delivery. As the UPS lady pointed out, "at least you got the important one." Truer words, as they say.

So we get to Asheville, we hang out at the NC Arboretum, we go have a very tasty dinner at Salsa's Mexican Caribbean restaurant, we put the boys to bed, and I can finally get to the phone. So before I begin, I'll go over the two major changes, and a couple smaller changes:

I am moving from Sprint to AT&T. My Sprint account was opened for me by my then girlfriend on December 18, 1998 as a Christmas present. Unlike most people, I've never had any real problems with Sprint, and they have always had the cheapest rate plans by far.The only reason I'm leaving is because my job will pay for my phone bill if I go to AT&T or Verizon. I hear Verizon's network is better, but I was tired of waiting for CDMA to be able to do voice and data simultaneously, so AT&T "Drop calls like it's hot" Wireless it is.

I am going from 3G to 4G. I remember going from 2G to 3G and how big of a jump that was. I'll see if this speed is as fast as the television commercials make it out to be.

I am going from iOS6 to iOS7. This one is probably not going to be that drastic, but I haven't updated my old phone because the resale value on eBay is higher if the phone still has iOS6, since it can be easily jailbroken. My 4s was also part of the first shipment of phones from Apple where the SIM card port is not carrier locked, so that should fetch a few extra dollars too. From the social media reaction, it appears people either love or hate iOS7 with very little in between. I guess I'll find out soon enough.

I am going from the 30-pin connector to the Lightning connector. Another minor change, but still a sticking point since I have several 30-pin connectors that have now gone the way of the dinosaur. I hear the Apple micro USB to Lightning adapter is very fragile, so I guess I just need to find some cheap Asian knockoffs to hold me over until someone makes a better adapter for micro USB cords, which I also have a ton of. A friend introduced me to these micro USB to 30 pin adapters, and I've already written the company asking when they plan on making Lightning ones. Still annoyed about Apple not using a standard connector, but obviously not annoyed enough to jump ship.

So let's do this thing! I of course take a few precautions. My iPhone 4s is still on iOS 6.1.3, and my iTunes 11.0.5.5. First thing was to take a full backup of the 4s with iTunes. Next was to copy the iTunes backup to another directory for safe keeping. Then I created a system restore point. I now felt comfortable updating iTunes to 11.1. The iCloud Control Panel also got updated from 2.1.2 to 3.0. So while that is going on, let's open the box:

Standard minimalist Apple box

Same presentation as my 4s

A little longer, a little thinner

Space Gray, unassuming, just what I wanted

I do like the earbud case. We'll test the earbuds out at a later date

Nothing shocking so far. I hate that it's longer, but apparently people are content walking around with bricks in their pockets. I am in the minority wanting something the size of my old Palm Pre. Enough with the small stuff, now time to turn this thing on:

She's multilingual, I like that in a woman. So I run through the setup screens to pick language, connect it to the wifi, and it's activation time. I'm kind of sad because this this means that my long term relationship with Sprint is at an end. I hit Next, answer a few questions, agree to the AT&T terms and conditions of giving up my first born child, and then it tells me I can't activate it because the activation server is temporarily unavailable. It tells me to connect the phone to iTunes to activate so I try that next. I have to reboot due to the new iTunes, but no biggie. I basically go through the same activation screens on iTunes for it to tell me that:

Due to the millions of douche bags who have bought iPhones this week, we can't activate the phone at this time. Stop whining about your first world problem of not being able to use the damn thing. We'll send you an email when it is activated.

Fair enough. It allows me to restore the phone from my backup, which fails. I start to panic a little bit, but apparently the second time is the charm and it restores the phone fine. I was just about to use it when iTunes notifies me that iOS 7.0.2 is already out. It appears someone took enough time out from watching porn to figure out how to bypass the lock code, and so we get yet another update.

It's now a little after midnight, so I think I'm going to let it finish this update, and I'll play with it some more tomorrow. This blog post is already an encyclopedia as it is...