Dear Mr Jobs, here is a comparison between a $600 iPhone and a $30 Nokia

At the same time, at the same place, with the same GSM provider: a simple comparison between the reception of a $30 Nokia and a $600 iPhone 3GS. This should wipe the excuses from Apple that it is all about "the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display", right off the table.

It is black and white: either you have reception or you don't. Either you can make a call, or you can't.

In my apartment in Rome, where GSM reception is rather marginal, I had to buy a $30 Nokia with a spare mobile number, so people could actually call me.

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My daily struggles with technology

I shuttle between Italy and Belgium. I have an iPhone, which I use in Italy, and an old Nokia for Belgium. Yesterday, the Nokia's plastic casing just crumbled to pieces. Don't understand why. Bought it right after the Iraq emergency. That's only six years ago.

Anyway I thought it would just be better to put my Belgian SIM into my iPhone when I arrive in Belgium. Swap SIMs rather than phones. Then I don't have to drag two phones with me. Seems simple enough. From time to time, I use my mobile phone to send a picture. Or to check Twitter. So, I thought "Great, works fine with the iPhone"...

Then I discovered that I don't have access to the Belgian Internet data services, so I enabled Internet access for the SIM. I tested it, it worked fine. Went to sleep. At 6 AM I got an automated SMS from my GSM provider, stating I just used Internet for 6 hours, while I was sleeping. And while the iPhone was connected to my wireless anyway...

I called them, and they could not help me any further. But to suggest to upgrade my subscription to a 2 Gbyte/month package. Paying a monthly fee even when I am only for two months per year in Belgium did not seem reasonable to me.

Did not find a setting to switched off the data access on the iPhone. Only thing I could do, is to enter fake APN (network parameters), so it could not access the Internet.

It intrigued me. Which iPhone application was using the Internet? Maybe there is an application to control the use of Internet on the iPhone. I Googled it but only found parental control applications.

Ah, there was one Enterprise Control application by Apple. Downloaded. Tried to installed. Beh. I needed an update to "Netframe 3.5 SP1". Downloaded that. Took 45 minutes to install. Reboot. Re-ran the Enterprise Control. Installed well. Started it. Gave me cryptic errors indicating I needed something else, and a key to launch it.
Gave up. De-installed the Enterprise Control thingie.

Googled for more Internet access controls. Found some solution: iPhone IOS 4 lets me switch off the . For which I needed the new iTunes version, which came with the new Safari version. 130 Mbytes. Took 45 minutes to download/install (I have a BIG Internet pipe here, but that did not help).

Started iTunes. Which needs to backup my iPhone first. Another 30 minutes. Then it needs to resync my iPhone with my computer. Another 30 minutes.

The only thing I want, is to email an occasional picture from my iPhone while I am on the road.... Is that too much to ask? Our lives are dominated by technology. Our lives become buggy, just like the technology is.

I got up at 6:30 am. It is now 11 am. The sun is shining outside. I'm going out. Foert. Off to the shower.

BYE!!!

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Although... the mouse on Tine's laptop does not work anymore and Lana's laptop crashed. And Hannah needs a new computer too.

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Snapped: Sunset near Rome

Last year, I started a series of posts on The Road, which I called The Snapped Series, "Mobile phone shots from the hip". They evolved from pictures taken with my crappy Nokia mobile phone to shots taken with the iPhone I got for my birthday.

I was amazed of the iPhone picture quality and got hooked on taking shots as I went along "on the road of life".

One thing lead to another, and the phrase "Shot from the Hip" let to the birth of a separate website, where I posted these pictures, soundbytes, short videos. All taken randomly, and posted via Email from my phone. For the nerds amongst you, I explained in this post how to do that.

Anyways, to make a long story short, I will resume posting a selection of these shots here on The Road. I will start with this one, as there is a sweet story connected to it:

A little girl and her dad watched a sunset.

After the sun went down, the girl asked:

"Daddy, can you do that again?"

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Moving into the 21st century with my iPhone

Remember this post, where I described the things I always travel with? My faithful Palm III PDA was one of them.

I celebrated my birthday recently and the guys at work gave me my present last week: an iPhone...!


I could not believe it. I had been looking at an iPhone for ages, glued to the window like a kid in front of a candy story. And finally, I had one.

My team said "We know how attached you are to your Palm III, but you can not really head a technology team using a 1997 piece of 'wannabe PDA'... So we're bringing you into the 21st century"...

It is true, in a way. At work, we have a "museum"glass cupboard displaying all pieces of old technology we used in the past 20 years. From a manual of WordStar (remember that?) to old VHF radios, a keyboard from a 1970's IBM mainframe and... a Palm III. Many people could not believe my faithful Palm III survived all the travel, the dust roads I drove on, all the remote places I've been to, and all the emergency operations I have served in. It stored my agenda with appointments going back to 1997. It held all the business contacts of people I met in the past 12 years, and all the notes I took while on mission. And it still did its job.

So I spent much of last weekend exploring my brand new iPhone 3GS, figuring out how to use it and the applications I wanted.

Here is my rundown of the things I love about it:

• the user interface, the way the different applications are working
  
• its display (it is color, yay!), the resolution, the touch screen
• the integration of wireless LAN connectivity and all web applications is out of this world
• the speed in which it discovers and registers to wireless LANs.
  
• the vast amount of applications you can download
  
• the speed of the applications
• the quality of pictures and video is great. I always cursed the poor quality of both on my old Nokia phone. Just this is a real plus for me, as it will make the iPhone a great tool to take ad hoc snapshots to post on my blog.
  
• for the first time, I can have all I wanted of a PDA, iPod, compact digital camera/videocam, telephone,.. in one
• I can Twitter, Skype, Email etc... to my heart's content, which for a social media addict like me is a definitive plus

The things I would like to have improved:

• it seems Bluetooth is not used to connect the iPhone to the computer's iTunes. I need to have the cable (or did I miss something here?). I also seem to have problems to get my computer pick up the Bluetooth connection from my iPhone and vice versa.
  
• iTunes is heavy on a PC (maybe I should finally by a Mac?), it is slow, takes ages to load, and has a horrible user interface. It seems to only be a beefed up version of a music library, but does not feel intuitive at all.
• I also hated the fact I needed to register my credit card while subscribing to the iTunes store. Even if I did not want to buy anything...
• the battery runs down in less than 24 hours
• I did not find a way to define the resolution for the camera.
• and the worst part, unfortunately, is the "phone" part of the iPhone: its GSM sensitivity is ways below what my Nokia offers. In a GSM-signal poor country like Italy, this means I no longer have coverage where I used to have it. And that includes my apartment. A real bummer.
• it took some tweaking to have the phone work on data-over-GSM. Luckily some hacker-friends gave me a patch where I could define the data-configuration for my GSM carrier, but somehow this should have been more transparent for the user.

More to come. But for the time being, I love the iPhone, if they could only increase the GSM sensitivity! Thanks again guys! You should not have done this...

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