3 years in cell phone years is like 60 people years
I went two weeks with a dumb phone (a phone that isn’t a smart phone). I went from the Sprint HTC Evo 4G to a Samsung Rant, which in its own rights was a great phone when it came out. However, “3 years in cell phone years is like 60 people years.” As noted by my good friend Dan Savlon.
It wore on me quickly. I initially fought the urge to want a smart phone again, I wanted to force myself to use this one and be content. It didn’t last long. Two weeks later I jumped into the Sprint HTC Evo 3D running Google Android. I learned some things along the way that truly justify a smart phone, and prove that I’m not just a spoiled brat.
Know your where. I don’t get lost often, but I was exploring a new area with my old phone. The Sprint Navigation on the phone is horrendous. Once I know where I want to go it’ll walk me through (usually 100-200 feet behind though, which is great driving around the city), but just exploring (trying to find a different route to the Cheesecake Factory) it tanked. The small screen makes it difficult to see what’s around me. Also, the Google Maps app for the phone doesn’t know where I am; it’ll do directions but doesn’t pull in my GPS coordinates. Also, I was at a customer and couldn’t simply find stuff around me, I opened Google Maps, then I had to navigate the map to my location then search near me, then once I found something I wanted, Google Maps couldn’t get me there, I had to jump back into Sprint Navigation to get there. Ug…
On the Evo 3D, I get a large screen, and the Google Maps app rocks. Shows exactly where I am, I can search around me for anything I need, and it will then navigate me there flawlessly. That alone makes a smart phone worth it in my book. In addition to getting to where I want, additional apps like Foursquare allow me to have a little fun and share with my friends (I was ousted as major in TWO locations during my 2 week stint).
Get information, fast. I recently ran into car problems and needed a tow, all I had was my Rant. I searched for a tow company using the internet on the phone, which took its sweet time, but found a number for a local place. For some reason, I couldn’t just call it, I had to memorize the number then enter it in and call it. Very frustrating, took a few times to get it right, and each time I had to research for the number since it didn’t keep the window open. Another down side was that my contacts didn’t sync, I had to manually enter the contacts I cared about into the phone. Also there isn’t a calendar.
Back in Droid land, the above isn’t a thought. I can search for info, not just through the web but I can use other apps like Facebook, Yelp (to get some reviews along the way), or target specific apps for specific information like movie times (Fandango). My contacts and calendar sync with Google services and my work email. Oh so lovely.
Get more done. In my above example about Get information, fast, I couldn’t minimize the browser to make a call, it closed every time on the Rant. Same went for the navigation. When I used Sprint Navigation, and then needed to jump out to text someone (not while driving of course) I had to initiate the navigation route all over again. And that’s all the phone could do, there wasn’t much in way of apps on the thing.
This should go without saying, but the Android OS loves multitasking, probably more so than Apple’s iOS. I can run multiple applications simultaneously without issue: I can search the web, find an address, pull it up on Google Maps, check movie times near my destination, text my friend and call my wife without ever having to reopen anything. It’s fantastic.
Fun! Outside of the above, a smart phone can really be a toy. With Angry Birds, Netflix, Google+, Shazam, Skype, and more, it’s a device that can lower stress and give my brain a break once in a while. The Rant didn’t have one full game on it.
A new phone, a new lease on life?
I’m a HUGE fan of Microsoft, and almost anything Microsoft does (except for Windows Media Player, still lacking). Ask my friends, I can get a little carried away with it. I’ve always been a fan of Windows Mobile. It is a work horse of an OS for a phone and always ran great for me. I’ve always had more issues with hardware than software, so I can’t blame Microsoft. And that leads me to this post.
A couple of weeks ago I was at a trade show and talking with a customer on my HTC Touch with Windows Mobile 6. I love this phone, been my best phone by far. I was getting into my car and my phone slid out of my hand and into a puddle. Picked it up and kept talking with the customer. After I got off with the customer, I popped the cover off and the battery to let it dry out. A little bit later I reassembled my phone and found that the power button was missing. Looking in the hole where the button of power wasn’t, I saw it floating in there. After a few shakes it came out along with what appears to be the little metal piece that should be attached to the circuit board. Needless to say I was sad, I fought off the tears since I was amongst co-workers. Being at a trade show lacking a phone my boss told me to go out and get a new one. Fortunately there was a Sprint store minutes away.
I walked in and simply showed him the phone and begged for another Windows Mobile phone. He said they had none in stock so I went with the best Android phone he had. I walked out shortly thereafter with the HTC Hero. Angered by Sprint and Microsoft for not having more phones available, I left the store in bitter disappointment. My goal was to keep my HTC Touch until Windows Mobile 7 came out. I was hoping that in typical Microsoft fashion (3rd time’s the charm) that Windows Mobile 7 would be the bees knees.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure stuff out, grunting at things it couldn’t do, or at least didn’t seem intuitive. This went on for a long time. A few days later, I dove into the Market Place and boy was I pleased. I downloaded a slew of apps from games to sound boards to mapping and social networking. So much fun! My biggest requirements were met: Exchange Email, Calendar, Contacts; GPS; Web Browsing. So I entertained my fun side and I will admit that I am a fan of this phone! Not only because of the gazillion apps available, but it really is a nice phone all around.
My favorite features
- Screen is large, clear, crisp, bright and has brilliant colors
- 5 mega pixel camera is sweet (had 1.3 before)
- Battery lasts all day even with web browsing, gaming, GPS and calls
- Social networking hooks are easy to use
- Multi-tasking appears simple and keeps running fast
- Don’t have to worry about memory management or where to save stuff, everything goes where it should
Owning an Android has sparked an interest in me to develop an app for it. I have some cool ideas, both business and personal, that I think would be fun to make and I might make a buck or two. I’ll let you know when I roll something out.
Has getting a new phone given me a new lease on life? Meh, I’m not that superficial. Has it opened a new world to explore and experience through a fun and easy to use window called Android? I think so!
Save the world one byte at a time!
So there are enough tree huggers out there that are bent on recycling and saving the world and certain things in it like the rain forest, ozone, star-nosed mole, etc. I’m not necessarily against all of that, I’ll rant about how we spend our money later. What I wanted to share is a concept of saving the world one byte at a time. Divulge my inner-crazy for a moment and read on…
If there are less bytes floating from computer to computer the world would be a little happier and a little cleaner. The more bytes your computer has to crunch the more power it needs so the more power the power stations need to produce therefore more pollution. Our current solution for dealing with this is making more energy effecient computers. Well, energy efficient means slow. Computers need power to do their thing. The more power you can give a computer the faster and better it does its thing. Period. If we make slower computers, we’ll all go crazy waiting for things to load then we’ll want fast ones again. Think about your day to day tasks that you complete on a computer. If you cut your work load in half, your computer would have to work half as much therefore effectively saving about half as much power (which in turns requires less power to be generated).
Don’t believe me? Download something that will cause you computer to compute and crunch. Try the SETI@Home app from http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/. This is a little app that downloads data from a server and processes it in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Whether or not you believe in aliens, this app will use your computer’s resources to crunch data. This will make your computer work hard when you’re not on it. Now monitor your home’s power consumption, or at least your monthly bill. It will go up, and noticebly. Why? Because your computer needs power to do its thing.
So how can you help stop this energy consumption crisis? There are a few things you can do which will help minimize how much crunching your computer will do, and in turn minimize its power consumption. Also, by minimizing what your computer does the services that serve your computer will be minized as well.
Check your email
Unsubscribe from e-newsletters. Take a look at your junk e-mail folder in your email system and read through and manually unsubscribe from newsletters that you are apparently not even reading. Important note, some of your junk e-mail might be legitimate spam (oxy moron I know). Basically, there will be emails in your junk e-mail that are spam, not newsletters. Unsubscribing from these might open you up to more emails. Pay attention to what you’re looking at and unsubscribing from.
Stop receiving your “important” alerts. Very similar to unsubscribing from newsletters, but instead check out the emails that do make it to your inbox. Do you really need them? Do you need an email alert everytime someone comments on your Facebook? You go to Facebook daily, why waste bytes on email alerts? Update your profile and stop receiving these emails.
There may be some alerts that may be real important like from your bank or work. Keep these, but look at the data being sent. Can you configure your alerts to send less data? Why receive an alert from work that is 2 paragraphs long, when all you’re going to do is log into the system and read through it anyway? Can your alerts be reduced to a sentence or two? Can the alert be sent via SMS to your phone instead of email?
How this helps: If you use an email client like Outlook, unsubscribing will minimize the amount of bytes your computer downloads and crunches. Also, each email that is downloaded is also processed by your antivirus scanner, yup, that means more crunching. Unsubscribing will also minimize the amount of bytes sent to your email server, and other network devices like your home modem, router, your ISP’s routers and firewalls. And finally it will minimize the crunching the sending server has to do as well. Unsubscribing from that one email that you never read will reduce the bytes from the source all the way to your home. Easy enough!
Really Simple Syndication
Also known as RSS, really simple syndication allows people to subscribe to a feed, like a blog or twitter, and read a summary of the item. If there is interest, then they can click to read the full article. So instead of going to your favorite news website and blogs, get a free RSS reader and subscribe to the lists and sites you love most.
How this helps: Using this blog post as an example, if you were to read it through an RSS reader, you would get a summary, a small portion of the article, and then a link to read the entire thing. This allows you to choose whether or not you want to go to the site and read the article. Also, because the RSS reader is only downloading the content, there is no wasted bytes on the site images, ads, and other stuff that clogs up the internet. You simply download text and read text. Pretty sweet!
Automatic Updates
Chances are your computer is talking to the internet more than you know! Windows, Antivirus, iTunes, Quicktime, Rhapsody, Instant Messengers, Adobe Acrobat, Logitech, Dell and more all connect to their associated servers periodically to check for updates and statuses. In most cases this occurs behind the scenes and you only find out about it if there is an update available. Go through your installed applications and disable the automatic updating. Important note, do not disable automatic updates for Windows or your Antivirus. These two components are critical to remain as up to date as possible.
How this helps: When your computer starts up, shuts down, is idle for a period or whenever else it wants, your applications check for updates. They crunch some bytes on your computer, then send these bytes to their server (over several routers/firewalls/etc) and then their server crunches the bytes and returns more bytes. In most cases, this transaction results in nothing, there is no update available but your computer is checking anyway. By disabling the automatic updates (again, do not disable them for Windows or Antivirus) you are limiting the amount of automatic crunching by your computer. At any point in time you can manually update your applications when you want to. Why upgrade when it isn’t broken?
Do your part
If we all contribute and reduce the amount of crunching our computers need to so, we can and will reduce the amount of power needed. Some of the side benefits will be faster internet browsing speeds since the internet connections aren’t all clogged up with useless bytes.
If you have other ideas on how to help reduce your computer’s power consumption, let me know!!
Facebook Lite!
Just when you thought Facebook couldn’t get any cooler, it did. There is now a lite version available, check it out at http://lite.facebook.com/.
No more stupid apps! Just the stuff you want from Facebook, the reason you signed up for Facebook: statuses (or is that stati)!
Enjoy!
