Franco's Sub-Station & Italian Pizzeria

Posted on May 6, 2011 by bluedepth

A few days ago Scott and I followed a recommendation and went to Franco’s Pizzeria in Portage Michigan. This place is very tiny, but has a setting and atmosphere that is really close to what I imagine a pizzeria in NYC would look like. The building it’s housed in is exceptionally, remarkably tiny and the parking is unfortunately very limited.

We ordered a large pizza with extra cheese. The cook time was acceptable and the quality was good. Neither one of us was really impressed however and that may have been because what we ordered was very plain. The total came to about $18 which was right down the middle of the road for what we expected. We likely won’t return, but not because of the food. Mostly for the cramped environment and the parking challenge.

I can’t help but compare this pizzeria with our current favorite place, Erbelli’s. There really isn’t any comparison. Erbelli’s does cost a bit more but I got more of a NYC Pizza experience at Erbelli’s than I did at Franco’s. To be fair, I am not recommending against Franco’s Pizzeria, some people prefer their pizza a certain way and it is well-executed pizza, but it’s just not for us.

Barnes & Noble's Nook Color Review

Posted on April 30, 2011 by bluedepth

Today I got a chance to sit down in private with a Nook Color from Barnes & Noble Booksellers and give it a thorough try. After I’ve used the device for about half an hour, I have many good things and some not-so-good things to say about the device.

The Good

The device is small, but not too small. It most resembles a paperback book and that’s both a pleasing shape and comfortable in the hands.
The resolution of the display is sharp and crisp, there was very little eye strain.
The charger is a standard wall-wart and the plug is a universal mini-flat USB cable. I give B&N mad props for not reinventing some awkward or fragile interface and going with an industry standard.
Touch sensitivity is a welcome feature from the original Nook device. The entire screen is touch-sensitive and that goes very far in making the device very person friendly
Buttons are where I expect them and function well, except for one which ends up being in the bad column.
Apps allowed to work in the background was a nice surprise, also the notification system was pleasant after I noticed how it worked, being in the lower left corner of the display.
The keyboard click is surprisingly clean and very crisp. That was a very nice surprise and very good feedback.
You can download ePub books from the Internet. I visited Project Gutenberg and downloaded the Brother’s Grimm Fairy Tales. The device opened the ePub book competently and all the features of reading a book worked as I expected them to.
Being able to add extended storage via the SD card was a pleasant surprise.

The Bad

The Volume Buttons on the right side appear to be too close together. This presents a volume control issue. When I pressed the + Volume button the volume went up, but if I pressed it again, the volume went down. I think it’s because the two buttons, for volume up and for volume down are too close together or the rocker has been damaged by too much use.
The keyboard is both too laggy and too sensitive. When I get to entering web addresses I find myself typing in wwww accidentally. Also, related to this problem is the Search bar. When I touch on Search to look for something I notice the Nook volunteers the last searched item, this is fine, but when I go to tap on the X on the right to clear the field, the keyboard expands and pushes the X up and out of the way. Unless you are very watchful and expect this keyboard behavior, you end up searching for whatever was searched before over and over again, or at least until you master the knack.
While playing Pandora in the background I couldn’t help but notice that whenever I did something that taxed the processor, the music would stutter. Perhaps Pandora needs a bigger cache, perhaps there is something else afoot. It wasn’t an awful flaw, but it was noticeable.
The lack of Bluetooth Technology precludes wireless keyboards which would render the Nook Color a poor blogging tool.
Despite the device being run by an Android Operating System it cannot run Android Apps. It will only use Barnes & Noble’s App Store and not the Android Marketplace. This fragmentation may prove to be an Achilles Heel for this class of device and most certainly will detract from someone comparing the Nook Color to an iPad.
The device comes with 8GB of storage, 3 of those are reserved for Android itself, so that leaves the user with 5GB of storage. This pales in comparison with the 16GB iPad, and doesn’t even show up on the field when compared to the 32GB or 64GB model of iPad, however, the presence of the SD cards does mitigate this failure somewhat
The Nook series of readers can only consume content from the Nook store, there is no way to get iBooks or Kindle content on a Nook.

The Ugly

The device is HEAVY. It’s about as heavy as my iPad, or at least it feels like it is. It’s surprisingly heavy for it’s size and I did have a little trouble holding it like I would a paperback book, in the way it’s design most clearly points that it should be held. It wasn’t enough to upset me, but it was enough to comment on.
The built-in speaker system is rather tinny and dinky. I suppose if I tried it with headphones the audio experience would have come out better. There is a part of me that really likes to listen to classical music as I read on a device. This was minimally acceptable.
The way the Nook Color scrolls with a touch is disconcerting at first, there is almost no scroll inertia and when you scroll quickly the display stutters and you get the sensation that you’ve missed something in the list as it has gone by. After a while of use you get used to this little idiosyncrasy and it wasn’t a show-stopper.
While the Nook Color can download and display ePub book files, I didn’t find a way to move those books into the Books section of the Nook. For these files you are relegated to mucking about in the file system explorer in the Nook to get your books and it does shatter the “All My Books In One Place” theme. I would be far happier if the ePub books that I downloaded off of the Web were immediately shunted off the File System itself and off to the Books function where I could see everything I have in one convenient place.

Final Verdict

The Nook Color is certainly a capable and useful device now that it has a more complete and up-to-date Operating System. The ability to access email, calendars, iCal, Exchange, and use of ePub books are all quite nice to see. I assume that if you copied MP3 files over the Nook Color could be an acceptable music player as well. What it really comes down to here is price. The Nook Color retails at $249.00, and with an Employee discount it hovers around $200 flat. This is in comparison to it’s nearest rival, the Apple iPad which hails at $499.00 for the base model. For half the price of an iPad you can get yourself a very good tablet that can do a majority of the things most people would do with tablets. If you are looking for a “Desktop Replacement Tablet” you won’t find that with the B&N Nook Color, for that you’d be better off going with the Apple iPad. For avid readers who aren’t interested in the Apple App Store or doing Desktop tasks with your device, the Barnes & Noble Nook Color is a fantastic device.

Blackest Night and Brightest Day

Posted on April 27, 2011 by bluedepth

Just finished off Brightest Day #24 from DC Comics over lunch with Scott. My experience with this twin comic book event started out strong. Blackest Night was done quite well and was a pleasure to read, kept you on the edge of your seat for many issues and was easy to follow.

Then the opposite came out, in the guise of Brightest Day. The entire series of Brightest Day was very complex with many players and their sub-stories felt more like meaningless chores than actual meaningful events that I could really get myself wrapped up in. There were a group of incidental characters featured throughout that primarily appeared in the theme of “use ’em or lose ’em” and I couldn’t really form a good emotional bond with any of them. The best thread in the story was how Boston Brand learned how to live again, but that was pretty much squandered in the finale of the story. Many of these second-string characters underwent life-changing events and I couldn’t really care one way or another. The entire series ended with each of the characters setting out on their own separate paths, as if the events of Brightest Day were just a dalliance. I was very excited at the end of Blackest Night, and I was really quite concerned after a few of the first issues of Brightest Day, it felt like the excitement-craft was parked on the tarmac and the engines were very slowly winding up. The entire series felt a lot like that, a kind of regressive, perpetually tripping-on-itself story that always was just on the lead up to the excitement curve but once it started to climb it trembled and fell back away from actual payoff.

The entire two-part story borrowed a lot of creative energy from much of the work that Alan Moore dropped off on DC’s front-steps when he wrote some stories for the Green Lantern series of comic books. The Blackest Night prophesies were the start and at the end of Brightest Day you discover that the major player is “The Green” which is another batch of Alan Moore-inspired material that was injected into DC. I know a lot of professionals regard Alan Moore as a fundamental power in comicdom and I’m sure they would be upset if anyone, let alone little old me, were to tread on any of his hallowed works. In light of that, I can only PRAY TO GOD that we are done with the Alan Moore-inspired stories and we can move on to really creative new stories yet to be told. No more Blackest Night bits, no more Brightest Day “The Green” / “Parliament of Trees” material and get to something, anything else.

Then there is the biggest gyp of the entire series, which comes at the end of Brightest Day. They trot out Swamp Thing, then Alec Holland. There’s some retcon tomfoolery under the covers and a surprising failure of potency in the power of The White. All of a sudden we have to accept Swamp Thing and all the odd “It came from left field” oddity that lays at the core of how this story ended. I never read Swamp Thing, I have no emotional connection to Swamp Thing and the last time I spent any time thinking about that character was after I watched the Swamp Thing B-Movie/80’s rendition of it on VHS tape. I had a dim recollection of Swamp Thing and couldn’t really get into the ending of Brightest Day because all the “momentous” revelations at the end meant very little if anything to me. I still don’t really get what The Green is all about and frankly I don’t care enough to look it up. The crowning moment to Brightest Day was at the very end, they drew a character smoking a cigarette with only one thing to say: “Bollocks”. I had no idea who this character was. As it turns out, Scott knew and let me in on it. It was Constantine, AKA Hellblazer. I didn’t even know that Constantine was even connected with DC, let alone big enough to be the crowning climax of Brightest Day. So this guy is back and he smokes and he swears in an adorable british way. The only thing I have in my memory about Constantine is a rather awful portrayal of the character hacked off by Keanu Reeves. I don’t remember anything about the movie other than he was alive, or dead, or something – that he smoked and had something clever to do with housecats.

So here I sit. I’ve spent a lot of time congratulating Geoff Johns, who was the writer for both of these comic book events and here I sit feeling the opposite of how I did for Blackest Night for Brightest Day. I feel like much of the Brightest Day story was telephoned-in half-heartedly and I fear that Geoff was given too many projects and too much to do and that Brightest Day suffered for it. I don’t want my money back, DC can keep it. I don’t know if I’m going to follow DC anymore with the Flashpoint event. I’m a little leery that we’ll be back to the same feeling of ‘we’re just revving the engines, it’s gonna be cool! just wait for it!” feeling that marked the beginning of Brightest Day. I’m pretty much sitting right on the fence between writing Flashpoint off completely or following it. I suppose I will defer that decision until I read The Flash #11. I have to admit that the way DC has treated their one Flash character, Wally West isn’t helping retain me as a reader. The cagey no-information/why-did-I-sit-through-this feeling I got during C2E2 has me thinking that I could save a lot of time and money pulling away from DC Comics. I don’t really feel a lot of interest for any of Marvel’s projects since I got burned so badly with all the inane Deadpool titles and fell off the event wagon back in Civil War. My weekly take for comic books is right around five bucks and perhaps walking away from them is the best for me. Seeing Geoff Johns’s name as lead writer used to excite me, now I’m filled with wariness and trepidation.

New Blogging Tool

Posted on April 16, 2011 by bluedepth

I’ve found a new blogging tool called Blogsy. I bought it from a recommendation from The GiveMeMind Blog.

The way the app is set up is a novel approach and it is taking a little getting used to. There are two sides to a blog post, a rich side and a write side. Establishing a link is a little cumbersome, but it’s better than having to schlep to an HTML reference to remember the vagaries of assembling an “a href” construct.

I’ve defined all my blogs that I use. Thats another small issue, as I write there isn’t any clear way to say which blog I’m writing to at this point. I suppose that when I get to publishing we’ll see how is all works out.

I figured out where the settings are, but they aren’t ordered logically. the blog you post to is at the bottom of the list, but it’s settings determine all the other fields above that one, urrrr? Also, while WordPress has a correct hierarchy of categories, Blogsy just squashes them all out into a linear list. Perhaps they’ll fix that in a later update. Let’s hope so.

The cost was $2.99 and so far I’ve seen about $0.99 value with this app.

Bimbos Pizza

Posted on April 2, 2011 by bluedepth

Sitting back after devouring a large pizza at Bimbos in downtown Kalamazoo and I’m quite impressed for such a small and unassuming pizza joint. The venue is small, with a very charming interior and a very warm and friendly staff, both of them. 🙂 The pizza crust is very thin, almost a cracker consistency. The only ding is that the pizza we ordered came cut in squares. I think a smaller pizza would be cut in slices. It’s the slices that help a crust like this kind absolutely shine. The pizza oven is tuned perfectly, the bottom wasn’t burnt and it wasn’t rubbery, it was a uniform tan and still retained a little structure and didn’t utterly shatter on cutting. I think we’ll be coming back, and probably selecting smaller pizzas hoping that they are cut into pie slices and that the little square cuts are only reserved for the large size pizzas. It is very close to NYC pizza, but the crust is too rigid to match. It is still quite good and a great value for the money. Overall an 8.8/10.

Loving Apple

Posted on March 21, 2011 by bluedepth

I noticed at work after I logged on that everything was sluggish with using my Mac. Something that’s highly unusual. I thought it was a network issue and filed it away to look at later, I had other things to do. Then I had another one of my users ask if there was something going on that would cause sluggishness and then what was a postpone-able curiosity became a problem.

I checked everything and then I brought up my ARD window to my server, Atlas. There was a Time Machine error (which there often times are these days now that the Time Machine is full and it’s having to eliminate old backup sets, they aren’t upsetting errors and I just clear them and everything is fine) and then there was a message on my console “There is a serious event for your RAID controller, click here to start your RAID Controller program” so I did. Apparently the little battery that keeps the RAID controller alive during a power outage failed conditioning and is a dead duck. That explained the slowdown because when the battery dies in the RAID controller, the RAID controller goes into safe-mode and turns off Write Caching. That was the sluggish bit. I forced Write Caching back on because what the server doesn’t know (and really can’t) is that I have 5 huge lead-acid batteries serving as redundant UPS’s. So we aren’t in a life-or-death situation.

I called Apple Care and after a little wait I got to a nice lady who took my information and asked if I knew what I needed and I told her that I simply needed a new RAID Controller battery. She connected me with an Enterprise Apple Server tech who had me go through just 1 short step and then confirmed that I had a dead battery. He took my shipping information and said that the replacement battery would be delivered next-day and be there tomorrow. I thanked him and that was that.

Why did I enjoy it so much? Everyone was American and spoke clear accent-free English. They were friendly and approachable and they shepherded me through to the solution without defensiveness or caginess. From Hello, to whats wrong, to here’s a solution, to Goodbye. Smooth, quick, easy. That’s the way it is supposed to be!

One final little note… buy AppleCare. Just shut up and plunk down the money. It’s the best investment you will ever make. Don’t wonder, just do it. Trust me.

Auto Accident Repairs

Posted on March 17, 2011 by bluedepth

I got something surprising in my email just a wee bit ago. Ryan Martin at Hansen Collision, Inc. sent me an email. This was something I really wasn’t honestly expecting even though they asked for my email address. What I got was great!

Good Afternoon!

Attached is your estimate for the Santa Fe. We found the high and low note horns to be damaged after tear down. We also found the condenser to be damaged and a small crease on the left fender.

I have all the parts on order and we are targeting completion for 3/22.

Thanks and have a safe trip

Ryan Martin
Hansen Collision Kalamazoo
p 269.383.4450
f 269.383.0320

And then the pictures! For some reason this is what totally wowed me and pushed me over the edge with surprise. That a repair shop would show everything. Here they are:

So there we are. The masters of “Stupidity Erasers” are going to undo my mistake. I can’t recommend this company enough, they have shops throughout SW Michigan and if you ever need body work or collision repair service, this is THE company to bring your car to!

The price to repair is about $1700 with parts and labor. I’ll be out $500. That’s a lesson. A lesson I won’t ever forget!

iPhone App Review

Posted on March 4, 2011 by bluedepth

In an earlier post I wrote about how I promised you all an iPhone App review, so without further waiting, here it is. In this review I will be skipping any apps that also appear on my iPad, as I’ve pretty much exhaustively covered those apps, unless the iPhone brings a fresh perspective that I didn’t have with my iPad. Just so that everyone is on the same page, my iPad is a 16GB Wifi only model, and the first generation. My iPhone is also a 16GB model and linked to Verizon, it’s fourth generation. On with the show…

iPhone 4 App Review

Evernote – The recently updated Evernote app is without a doubt one of the single most awesome and compelling apps on my iPhone. The new interface works so much better than the previous iteration of the app on the iPhone device. I am patiently waiting for this kind of refreshing redesign to happen for the Evernote for iPad app as well. Every time I open Evernote, I can’t help but think back to struggling with the very same app on my old Blackberry. The difference? Night and Day.
Photography Group
1. Camera – The baked in Camera app for the iPhone 4 comes with the device. The controls are very easy and it was a definite pleasure to see that the app does stills and video, and can be configured for either camera, the front-facing or rear-facing.
2. Camera+ – This app borrows a lot of structure from the plain Camera app. It has a different zoom feature, timed shutter, burst mode, advanced flash handling and a pretty neat focus-fixing gesture system which I’ve yet to really get into. The app also has it’s own “Camera Roll” beyond the plain system one, and this allows you to edit the photos, crop them and apply some pretty cool filters. You can of course export any photos you take from the apps “Camera Roll” to the system “Camera Roll”, so it’s quite handy.
3. Panorama – I haven’t really gotten a chance to play around with this one, it was free, eventually I’ll get to trying it out.
4. Instagram – The collision of social media and photography! This app is great. You can configure Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Flickr, Tumblr, and FourSquare all from the app itself. Take a picture, apply one of its old-timey filters if you want, and then send the photo at once to all the services or specific ones you choose. So far very happy with it.
5. FoodSpotting – This is more niche than Instagram. It works a lot like Instagram but it’s for food in restaurants. You take a picture and you can share it. The only gripe I have about FoodSpotting is the setup for the social services aren’t very clear, it’s nothing like any other app I’ve used and I kept on hitting my head against a mysterious login box until I realized I had to put in my FoodSpotting.com username and password. Oops. Once it’s off the ground, it’s very handy.
Utilities Group –
1. Clock – The clock app is one of those baked-in apps that come with the device. I almost never review the baked in apps, except for this one case. There appears to be a gremlin that still lives in this app. I have a handful of alarms, and whether the alarm is on or off doesn’t matter. So far it doesn’t suffer from the previous problem of “alarm doesn’t fire”, but it’s odd in that alarms fire even if they are “Off”. I think this app is still a work-in-progress for Apple’s iOS team to work on.
2. Voice Memos – This app still has a use for really long audio recordings. It’s lost a fair amount of power when Evernote redid their app and added audio recording – so you could technically audio-record right into your Evernote system. I suppose you could use this app and then email the audio into Evernote later, perhaps it’s six and one half-dozen kind of thing.
Facebook – The Facebook app is odd. It’s there for the iPhone but not the iPad. I’ll never understand that. The app works well enough, it’s pretty straightforward and if you have a facebook account, you should get it. I don’t know many people who don’t have a facebook account any longer.
Social Group
1. Glympse – I wrote about Glympse when I had it on my iPad. The system really shines when you have a 3G network connection or if you insist on running it on the iPad, to have a 3G-to-Wifi bridge as you are mobile. I used Glympse with my mother and she loved it. She thought it was really neat. You send a “glympse” to an email addressee and they get a link they can click on and see your position, speed, and path in real-time. The only part of this app that irks me is the expiration to “glympses”. I would prefer to hand my mother a link that would always work if I was running “Glympse” on my iPhone, she would know where I am whenever she liked. Some people see this as an invasion of privacy, but really, what do you have to hide? Come on.
2. Bump – I got this free app to share some pictures that Scott had on his iPhone. Bump works well when the datasets are small. If you want to share a LOT of data, like a bunch of pictures in a Camera Roll on the device, prepare for disappointment. Bump really didn’t work out for me. Another app, which I reviewed on my iPad, called Transfer works much better for moving big data sets between iOS devices.
Travel Group –
1. Trapster – Before the price of fuel went to obnoxiously high levels I used to have a relatively leaded foot when it came to driving. I regularly find myself pushing 76 in a 70 zone and I’ve been caught “Not Paying Full Attention” to speed zones in the past. This app allows you to share socially the presence of speed traps and other road hazards. Since I keep my speed now pretty much below 60MPH to save on gas costs most of the reason to use this app have gone out the window, but I keep it around, it’ll likely be really helpful on long-duration trips.
2. StreetPilot – Garmin’s Nuvi interface designed for iOS. I can enter in an address or do a Google Location search and have yet to find something it can’t route me to. This app has vocal turn-by-turn directions and is as “helpful” as a Nuvi. One of the nicest things is that the maps will never go out of date as it downloads map data from Garmin automatically. When I start this app my mind goes back to the Sprint Navigation app on my Blackberry, powered by Telenav. This app, StreetPilot, blows that old Telenav application out of the water. Again it’s night and day. I would never use the Telenav junk because it never worked. So far StreetPilot has not let me down once. Again it’s because an iPhone is a supremely more advanced and better-equipped phone than the Blackberry could ever dream of being.
3. TripIt – Making big trips, with airplanes and hotels usually is handled somewhat well using Evernote, but not any longer. TripIt is a free app and free web service that enables you to organize all your travel details through one very well designed app. What really blows my mind is the web service provides you with an email address that you can forward your confirmation emails to and the service will automatically extract the details from what you forwarded and populate your trip for you. Incredibly handy. The fact that it’s free blows my mind.
1Password – I have this app on my iPad, my iPhone and every Mac I own. Without a doubt the single BEST purchase and BEST investment I ever made, beyond buying into the Apple Digital Lifestyle. What makes it shine? Sync with Dropbox. Everything is the same on every device. Everyone should buy apps from 1Password, then use the app to change each site they have an account on with the random generator in 1Password and control them all from that suite of apps. When one site suffers a security breakdown, your loss is microscopic. You lost 1 of thousands of 16 digit random passwords. This app is worth its weight in GOLD. I’m so happy my mother pushed me towards it!
Business Group
1. DraftPad – If ever you needed just a quick place to jot down some text, this app does a pretty good job. It’s free, it’s very simple to use, and does one thing, taking quick temporary notes, very well.
2. CamCard – I downloaded the Lite version of this app. It enables your phone to take a picture of a business card and then it scans in the details, does OCR, and populates your Contact List with the details from the card. Very useful. I got the Lite version because I almost never get business cards but when I do, it’s nice to have this as an option.
Scanners Group
1. Qrafter – This app from Kerem Erkan is free on the App Store and is the BEST QR Code scanner I’ve ever had the pleasure to use. It’s professional, free, and the way it scans, presents the contents of the scan and all the extended features that it can pick up from a QR code is wonderful! There are a few other QR scanners and they are okay, but this one is the top of my list without a doubt!
2. QR Creator – Kerem Erkan, on his website, also has a QR creator page which has a special mobile rendering on iPhone devices. I browsed to it in Mobile Safari and then made an app-icon-bookmark. You can create custom QR codes and save them to your Camera Roll and print them using AirPrint or send them to someone else via email or even Evernote or Dropbox! Quite nice.
3. PriceCheck – This app from Amazon.com is a great way to check on local stores profiteering. Just grab an object from the shelf, open this app, scan the bar code with the camera and Amazon will spit out it’s best prices for that item. I’ve yet to use it for more than simply checking on things to see how the scanner worked, but it does work. I’m pretty sure you can one-click order through the App if you set it up with your Amazon login information. That would be too-funny. Especially for Best Buy, Target, and Bed Bath and Beyond. Low prices my ass. 🙂
4. RedLaser – This works a lot like PriceCheck but isn’t tied to Amazon.com. I have used this app and it’s saved both of us some money and aggravation. There is a scented candle that Scott really likes in the bathroom and it’s a big one, the price tag from BB&B was $22 bucks. He wanted another candle just like it for the bathroom but couldn’t remember what it was called or who made it. While I was in the bathroom I fished it out of the garbage and scanned it using RedLaser. Not only did it find the right make and scent but also found it online for HALF THE PRICE. I then tapped the option button in RedLaser and right there was “email this info” option, I sent it to Scott and minutes later he was thanking me. Don’t thank me, thank that app! 🙂
5. Color ID – I have what I regard as accurate color vision. Scott on the other hand can from time to time run into trouble identifying colors. This free app is cute, you start it, point the camera at an object and press the shutter button. The phone will calculate the color, give you its “creative name”, its hex code for inclusion on websites, and it will read the color off via voice from the speaker. I spent half an hour identifying all the colors in my bathroom. For anyone challenged with color blindness, this app is a godsend. The only oddity with the app is that it doesn’t like being sent to the background. Once you put it in the background and then call it up again the scanning part doesn’t work. You have to quit the app and restart it. Even with this oddity it’s still quite useful.
GroceryIQ – This app is sort of a scanner, sort of a listmaker, but it floats outside of other groups because it’s different. I like using this app more than ShopShop because the way it’s designed fits better with trips to the supermarket. I love it’s listmaking and check off features. The scanner is quite dumb, and while you can scan an item and put it on the list, it’s just as easy to type it in by hand.

So that’s that. Those are the apps on my iPhone that differ from my iPad apps. It’s nowhere near the exhaustive list of all the apps I have, but these are the ones I felt warranted the most discussion and I think other people would benefit from using. I’m open to reviewing other apps, if you are an app developer please feel free to drop me a line or make a comment and I’ll check out your app and give you my honest opinion or even a review. If you find something in my reviews that helps you, please comment and let me know!

iPhone 4 on Verizon – Delightful!

Posted on February 16, 2011 by bluedepth

While re-reading my old Blackberry / iPhone / Droid post (which is my #1 most viewed page!) I started to chuckle at my May 10th 2010 self versus my February 16th, 2011 self. What has my experience been now that I’ve had my iPhone for a fair bit?

I am in love with this device.

Now I can fall pretty hard for a pretty face, especially when it comes to a new gadget. I categorize myself as a “use it all” kind of iPhone user, the curious geek who refuses to stop fiddling with a device until I have it just so. I don’t go as far as the GPL/FSF folks who want to take a phone and turn it into an Adirondack chair, but I do take my gadgets for pretty intense rides.

So what do I think now? Blackberry is dead. I rescued all the data I cared for out of my old Blackberry device, I wiped it clean and I removed the battery. I haven’t even looked back or even thought of it since then. I imagine in my mind’s eye, a giant crematorium where I open the giant door and start pitchforking all the useless memories and upset feelings and anger and close the door to watch it all burn to ash. I used to fantasize about annihilating my Blackberry. Now that I have my Verizon iPhone 4, I don’t really care to go back there anymore. I don’t care for Blackberry Enterprise Server, or RIM, or any of the other silly things that having a phone with a network endpoint in Canada means.

As I look out now, I respect Droid for its user base and how well it’s progressed. I’m still quite critical that certain manufacturers are keeping their customers from upgrading to the latest and greatest version of the Droid operating system in order to squeeze as much money as they can from them. I can appreciate the Droid, but I don’t espouse it’s use or recommend it to anyone I know. Most people aren’t seeking my recommendations when it comes to mobile device operating systems anyways. One small problem I have with Droid is the kill-switch that Google maintains on the devices apps and the laissez-faire style with which the Droid App Store is policed. It’s too wild and too uncontrolled for my tastes and I don’t think exposing people who aren’t interested in the hows and the whys is a very wise move. These people get it in their head to download something hazardous like a trojan horse and then the show is over.

How about the iPhone? It’s amazing. The devices display, the two cameras, all the apps! It’s kind of overwhelming. There are so many things I can do now, now that I am using a real network with a real device. I can browse the web the way I want to, not the way that my old Blackberry forced me to do. I can read my emails, including HTML emails with ease and pleasure. The network is snappy, nice and quick and about the same speed as Sprint when Sprint was in its heyday. Those days are done, by the way. This device, this iPhone does everything that Apple promises and does it exceptionally well. Everything from fit, finish, to overall quality is as I expect from Apple, beyond my wildest expectations. Of course, every cute puffy cloud does have it’s darker sides as well. There are only a few of those, and mostly it comes down to ringtones, using the iPhone on multiple machines, but beyond that, which none of them are show stoppers. Instead of wanting to throttle the Blackberry devs to death with my bare hands I just want to tousle the hair of the Apple devs who baked these oddities into their device.

Soon I will write a review sheet about all the apps I’ve gotten for my iPhone. Instead of duplicating all the apps that I reviewed already for my iPad (as there is a huge overlap) I’ll only review those apps that are unique to my iPhone and why I chose them. That’s coming up soon, keep an eye out for it if you like my reviews.

Bluedepth's Journal

Thoughts & Opinions

Category Archives: Review