A decade ago, I was traveling with one of the founders of the company that I worked for at the time, Timm Martin, and we arrived at the discussion of electronic books (ebooks). I said that I thought ebooks were the wave of the future and I wished that I could figure out how to start a company that was a part of that change. Timm, who was the technology visionary of our company, seemed to cautiously agree with me at the time and I think we both worried that the portable platform had yet to be created that made that prediction a certainty, at least in the near term.
I can attest to occasionally experiencing this problem. It is rather intermittent for me and I can mostly control the problem by not moving the phone from my ear during the conversation.
This is a little frustrating. I get the antenna being affected by my hand but this proximity sensor problem is just bad engineering (either software or hardware).
My thoughts on my new iPhone 4. I just received it yesterday from FedEx (it was fun watching the FedEx package being tracked from China through Hong Kong through Anchorage through Indianapolis and then to Loveland, OH where it was routed to me). I received it one day ahead of Apple’s expected revised delivery date.
I say “revised” because AT&T and Apple screwed up and missed my first delivery date. The unit was supposed to ship on July 2 but they updated their date on July 3 to say that it was going to ship a week or so later. I was upset and I called Apple – the very polite and professional rep apologized but couldn’t change the ship date. He did give me a bumper as a consolation gift – good thing too as it turns out.
I wish the brave aviator and his crew luck on their “around the clock” flight! Stories that show the ingenuity of science and engineering are always interesting and motivating.
Read the entire story here but here is a small excerpt:
An experimental solar-powered aircraft took off from a Swiss airbase here in the early hours of Wednesday in a bid to make history by flying round the clock and through the night. Solar Impulse whirred along the runway at Payerne in western Switzerland, reaching 35 kilometres per hour (22 mph) as lone pilot Andre Borschberg gently lifted into clear skies at 6.51 am (0451 GMT) on a scheduled 25 hour flight,
“This should be a great day of all goes well,” said team chief Bertrand Piccard, who made the first non-stop round-the-world flight in a balloon more than a decade ago.
Apple has recently put out an open letter explaining that they have made a mistake in calculating the signal strength bars on their hit product, the iPhone (all versions up to the latest iPhone 4). I am glad that they Apple code developers have stumbled on this bug and are producing a fix. We all know that there are a few more software bugs in every product, so it is no surprise that Apple has a bug in this portion of their code.
But, is that really the fix? No.
All wireless devices need antennas. If you are as old as I am, there is a chance that your first mobile phone was a “bag phone” or a “car installed phone”. These phones were massive and required a car or, at least, a briefcase to carry them around. The towers were so far dispersed that you needed a BIG antenna that was putting out mega-wattage to reach them. Putting that antenna up to your head would almost certainly turn your brain to scrambled eggs in a couple of weeks or so. These monsters were also analog and all you could do was talk on them (no texting – how in the world did we survive?).
I just upgraded my iPhone 3G to the new OS today. I must admit that the new features (especially the ability to group apps together) is quite nice. I wish I could take advantage of the backgrounds but that doesn’t work for a 3G phone.
The biggest complaint on the entire process is that it took FOREVER to do the upgrade. It took over 4 hours to do the backups, reflash the ROMs, and then re-sync the apps, movies and songs back to my phone
My biggest advice to anyone that is going to do this upgrade soon – take your time. Plug it in, get it started, and then go do something else for several hours.
You know it is bad when one of the greatest founders of a technology company says the following (from a Fortune interview):
It must be private, never go public. There will be no upside investors other than me and the employees. . . . I hope we can pull it off under those conditions because I would be thrilled to lead another group of smart engineers, without all the crap that goes into running a company today. I just don’t want Congress telling me how much I should be paid or firing me. I want to pretend I am back in the 1980s again.
Arthur C. Clarke often wrote about space elevators. Space elevators (in theory) are mechanical connections between the surface of the Earth and synchronous satellites. This concept is pure science fiction – or is it? Great article in Wired that discusses some advances to develop the technology. Even with these developments, I doubt that this will happen in my lifetime.
The iPhone is the best phone that I have ever owned. It has a few things that I hate though.
First, I hate the AT&T network. I have used T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon in the past (as well as a pre-cursor to Verizon – Cellular One and a pre-cursor to AT&T – Ameritech). I have owned a cell phone (used to call it a car phone) since 1990. I have never had so many dropped phone calls when I am sitting in one location and the person I am talking to is in one location. AT&T has to have the worst network in the USA.
The other big complaint about the iPhone is the hysteria around it. Yes, I have a good number of apps that I use to do my job or get through my day. However, I don’t love the apps. To me, a phone should have this stuff just because it can. I am a bit tired of the “coolest app” conversation that inevitably happens when I talk to another iPhone user (esp. one that doesn’t use it for work related reasons).
I am giving up on Roxio Media Creator. It is supposed to be an easy program but it is anything but easy.
It starts out with a confusing array of software modules that were obviously written by different teams and then hacked together. This would be okay since each different module needed to accomplish a specific goal but that wasn’t the case. Some of the modules duplicated functionality but didn’t duplicate the interface or the workflow.
I could live with all that if the software worked reliably. I have never had to do so many registry tweaks and compatibility changes for a product under $100 in my life.
