Saturday, October 20, 2007

iPhone post-activation bliss

i had a terrible experience getting the iphone to activate.  it turns out it was a defective unit and i got in touch with a manager at the at&t store that sold me the iphone the day before, and he agreed to waive the 10% restocking fee and replace my unit.  that was after 5 hours of pain and 3 trips to at&t.  worst case i would have had to send the phone to apple for a warranty repair, even after never successfully being able to activate it!  so one word of advice, if you are considering buying an iphone, you're probably better off doing it at an apple store, which was the conventional wisdom i knew before.  i just never expected it to be an issue still in october, so i ignored what i had heard.  the brand new replacement unit i received worked perfectly out of the box.

now that i've been an iphone user for 5 days, i'm really smitten with it.  it's been great to have on several occasions to kill time where i was forced to wait.  i know have lots of music and several podcasts always with me and a good browser experience and push yahoo mail.  i'm also encouraged by the announcement to open the platform to developers.

i still have had a couple of minor pain points.  i don't like being limited to 200 text messages with the default rate plans.  how silly.  unlimited data, but limited text messages?  i'm just going to start encouraging everyone to send me email instead.  i've had one or 2 instances where the phone has become unresponsive to my screen taps momentarily, but it's too early to say what that was all about.  overall, i'm extremely happy now that i'm up and running.

Monday, October 15, 2007

iPhone activation hell

so i bit the bullet and got an iphone today.  what i expected to be an absolutely painless and easy activation experience has been absolutely terrible.  itunes does not recognize that i need to activate my iphone and i've been on the phone with at&t and apple for 3+ hours tonight.  the current assertion is that the sim card may be at fault and that i need to get a new one from at&t.  i'll have to wait to try that until tomorrow.  i must say that once you finally get a person on the phone, both at&t and apple did try to troubleshoot and were friendly.  however, given that i started this journey at 8:00 pm CST, i'm disappointed that i spent so much of the time on hold.  it's also very apparent that there are two distinct companies involved in my experience, each one referring me to the other at various times in the night.  i finally got to the back-line specialist from apple who assured me that this is extremely rare and something she hasn't seen since the launch.  somehow that doesn't make me feel much better.  i'm frustrated, aggravated, and angry that i've wasted an entire evening on the activation and it is unlikely that i'll see any compensation for my poor experience.  if it were june i'd understand, but part of the reason i waited for october was to avoid something like this.  let's hope this gets better.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

record companies optional?

i bought radiohead's new album this week and got it delivered as a 40-something megabyte zip file full of DRM-free mp3's.  and now madonna, nine inch nails, oasis, jamiroquai and others are following the trend.  this has to have the industry in a state of panic.  if they aren't then, they should be.  i'm sure that they still feel like they have a stranglehold on a lot of typical distribution control (radio+mtv), but imagine if social networks start flipping that on it's head.  there's been rumors of a big new set of features for music on facebook.  just imagine if/when radio becomes less relevant towards artist discovery, and it's based on recommendations from social networks.  that time is almost here and it's going to get very interesting.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

getting things done, etc

i have my own non-formal productivity system that works for me for the most part.  i feel like i could be more efficient, but it's not something that i get depressed about or am that hard on myself about.  i think it's part of my personality not to be overly structured.  but in case i ever feel like it, my friends patrick and kelly would be my go-to-guys.  here are a couple of links that patrick uses.

100 Tips to Improve Your Life

ZenHabits.net