I guess I have an excess amount of magnetic energy eminating from my person. Perhaps I don’t properly worship the correct gods. Maybe I have the wrong haircut. Maybe, just maybe, I’m not cool enough. Whatever the case, I have the worse luck with mobile phones.
This Android device was perfectly ok until it started crashing after I finished each call. So it was replaced with another. The replacement was a newer device that lacked the build quality of the first. It also came preinstalled with the previous devices issues, and then some.
Sure it crashes when I end a call. Sure, if I pull the phone away from my face and put it back it disconnects the call. I mean, what phone doesn’t do this now. As a bonus, this phone also refuses to provide any notifications from any of the apps that I have installed like Facebook, Twitter, G+ (which I mostly blame Google for) and SMS messages.
These are all problems that I never read about. Problems that nobody else seems to have.
I’m going to be charging up the Storm tonight and activating it this weekend. It has crappy internet, but at least it will make a damned phone call and let me know when someone is trying to leave me a message somewhere.
I think the problem stems from the fact that I still use my telephone for voice communications. I know this makes me the odd man out, but I still use about 400 minutes per month talking to people, and anther 400 minutes talking with other Verizon Wireless customers (mostly family). Doesn’t anyone bother checking this kind of functionality anymore?
I’m going to end up carrying both devices for a time too. The Blackberry, which rules for SMS and email, is completely lame for everything else. Since I spend the bulk of my time in WiFi coverage areas, I’m going to keep the Dinc around (in Airplane mode) to use as my portable hand-held computer.
Lame, right?
What I would like is to be able to upgrade to an iPhone. From what I can tell, the iPhone doesn’t have any issues when it comes to making and receiving voice calls. At least none that I have heard about.
As I keep saying, my telephone, first and foremost, needs to have the ability to reliably make and receive phone calls with sending and receiving SMS messages being a very close second. Right now, the device I have doesn’t do either of those well or reliably so it’s time to switch back to something that does.
First, G+ had everyone excited. I’m still excited about it in fact. Then a new hotness became available that everyone went super duper crazy for. Spotify. And, to be honest, I don’t get it.
It appears to be a recolored version of iTunes with streaming capability. There is a mobile app that you can download and pay $9.99 a month to use. You can sync your iTunes library too if you have a premium account, plus a few other features.
Streaming on the desktop is speedy and the sound quality of the tracks is pretty good. No complaints. I haven’t gotten into the desktop app fully, mostly because the strength of Spotify, or the piece that every is going crazy about, is the premium mobile streaming service.
I’ve never been one to ‘rent’ my music. I guess I’m a little bit old school in that I still like to own (a questionable term to be sure) my music. I’ve switched from CD’s to digital downloads, but I still mostly download complete albums that I can use to build playlists that I sync to my ipod.
“But”, you say, “Spotify lets you stream your tracks to your mobile device db”.
Which I can already do on my phone using either the Amazon cloud service or Google music (which I haven’t tried yet). I need to check the new pricing on Amazon, but I have 20gb of online storage for $.99 a year. Google music is practically free too. There isn’t any discovery there, but I can listen to my music on any device I want.
So is the big sell for Spotify discovery? If so, ok, cool. I get that. In fact, as I write this, I’m using it to stream some Depeche Mode (unlike Pandora, I can listen to any tracks I want it seems). For this it seems pretty capable.
Or is the excitement about this for mainly iOS users that don’t have a way to sync, wirelessly, to their phones? That would make sense. And make sense that Spotify is released in the US prior to iOS 5 and Apple’s new iMobileMeDropBox service is released, which, I would think, would render Spotify moot.
I think it’s a nifty app. I also think that $10 a month a bit much to pay to have music streamed to a device. But, as I have already mentioned, I don’t get it.
What is it about Spotify that you are super duper excited about?
So far we have discussed privacy and setting up your circles and actually using G+, including hangout. To wrap this lets look at Account settings, the main page and a few other notes.
This is where you started when you were setting up your privacy settings. Here is what the rest of the choice do.
So, you’ve got your profile dialed in and circles setup, now what? Much like Facebook and Twitter, G+ is a place for sharing. Sharing what you are doing, sharing photos and sharing links. Turns out that it is also a pretty good communication tool. Today we are going to talk about posting things and using hangout.
Almost 2 weeks I’ve been using Google Plus (G+) and already I wish I could use it to replace both Twitter and Facebook. And one of the questions that I keep getting is, as you could expect, why? To answer those questions, give you a better idea of what G+ is and to force me to dig further into the settings and features, I’m going to write up a multiple part series on the key features of G+.
Where Facebook makes you dig down to multiple pages in different sections to find your privacy settings that still don’t make sense, with G+ they are very easy to find, very easy to modify and very easy to control who sees what.
Above is a screen shot of my profile page in edit mode. The arrows show what parts can be controlled through the settings, giving you complete control over who can view what in your profile, like this.
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