This is one of my rants, so if you’re not into snarky griping with your facts, this might not be for you. Okay, let’s do this.
I’m sick of the trend to remove the headphone jack from phones (and surely other devices). There’s nothing wrong, and plenty right, with the 3.5mm headphone jack, and replacing it with Bluetooth is totally self-serving for vendors with no benefit to consumers. I’m not going to say anything here that hasn’t been said countless times before, but I want to add my voice to the choir of the perturbed and get this off my chest.
I’ve been a Google Voice user since June 2009, when it was still invite-only and had the promise of doing to phones what Gmail did to email. When I finally got access I was excited, and even though I didn’t have a smartphone (which meant using Voice was cumbersome) I was happy with its performance. It was one of the driving factors behind my getting an Android phone, and at first things were awesome.
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This is a first for me on this blog: a post about a phone. I’ve written posts about specific devices (even ones that don’t yet exist) before, but I haven’t gone down the smartphone rabbit trail. I’m breaking that pattern.
On Monday Google announced their latest additions to the Nexus line. I already have a Nexus 7, so their update to that product wasn’t very interesting to me. Nor was the Nexus 10, despite its impressive specs, since I’m just not looking for a tablet that big (part of the reason I’ve not bothered with an iPad).
My office ordered a Nexus 7 tablet, which I’ll be using. It arrived this week, and so far I’m pretty blown away by it. I’m not going to go into too many details about features and day-to-day with it yet, but I figured I’d provide some pictures.
I recently rooted my HTC Thunderbolt and put Cyanogen Mod 7 on it, which includes tethering capability. This morning I connected my iMac at work to my phone, and ran a speed test. The results are impressive.
Download: 15.48 Mb/s
Upload: 4.86 Mb/s
Ping: 104ms
The test was run with the following signal status:
So in case there was still any doubt, LTE is awesome.
A couple of weeks ago YouTube released their new mobile site, which added some really cool features. The most notable: watch videos directly from the mobile site in a device-native format, without the need for a dedicated app. Aside from this being really cool from a technical standpoint - as an indicator of the true potential for shifting from platform-specific apps to web apps that can run on any device - it’s important from a philosophical & content-centric standpoint.
Google has just announced that starting today, Google Voice will be open to the general public & will no longer require an invite. For those unfamiliar, Google Voice is a service from Google that gives you a phone number which you in turn can have forward to any combination of phones, use as a voicemail service that automatically transcribes them, and much more.
I’ve been using Google Voice since I got my invite in June of last year & absolutely love it.
Now this is the story all about how
My life got flipped, turned upside down
And I’d like to take a minute just sit right there
I’ll tell you how I became screwed by a store called Best Buy.
Based on the title of this post and its apparent topic you may be thinking that I’m being melodramatic or overreacting, but I am not. You see, the incident that has incited this post involved my cell phone, more specifically a smartphone.
