7 posts tagged “iphone”

Show us the gadgets you carry with you.

Mac Book Air

Perhaps the next hottest accessory for the tech crowd and greenies alike will be the new Mac Book Air. Thinner, lighter, and gorgeous in its design, Apple's new laptop weighs in at a mere 3 pounds. There's no doubt that it'll turn heads and start conversations with perfect strangers, much like its cousin the iPhone did last fall.

Though MacWorld isn't part of *my* world anymore, I couldn't resist checking it out online. Does the name "Air" refer to the minimalist form factor? Or is it because it ships ready to connect to WiFi networks and Bluetooth (which is strangely lacking on the iPhone)? For existing Mac users like me, the wireless migration seems like a huge selling point; apparently the Migration Assistant can move over all your "stuff" from your old Mac remotely - a tremendous convenience (assuming it works!), as migrating computers has taken me weeks in the past.

The sleek aluminum clamshell opens up to reveal a bright, 13.3-inch screen that's backlit using LEDs. Kudos to Apple! Though LED lighting isn't quite in the mainstream for home use, it seems to be one of the most promising green technologies because it's bright and uses very little energy. The Air claims a battery life of five hours and is free of mercury (found in fluorescent bulbs) and arsenic. Its hidden ports remind me of how the controls have disappeared from today's integrated dishwashers.

The other seriously cool enhancement that grabbed my attention was the adoption of "gestures" used for navigating the iPod and iPhone. The new, larger trackpad on Air recognizes pinching (for zooming in) and swiping motions (like turning pages). How quintessentially Apple is that?!

Interestingly the Mac Book Air lacks an optical drive, though it can connect to a local drive via the USB port or share a drive on another computer using its built-in wireless connection. As an aspiring iTunes user, I'm not sure how I feel about not being able to pop in a CD or DVD; besides, my kids would be so disappointed.

As enticing as the Mac Book Air looks, it sounds like those in need of serious computing power might have to wait. Air is available with a 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor at the upper end, but compared to the 2.4 GHz chips in the larger Mac Book Pro systems, I imagine it might still be slow for editing photos in Aperture, for example.

I've been waiting months for a new laptop, hoping that MacWorld would bring my dream machine. But not quite. So it's a tough decision. Form or function? Nab something now, or wait for the next generation of the Pro? Decisions, decisions...

Over a million iPhones have been sold.  Have you: bought one, considered it, or decided it's not for you?

I love my iPhone - and my very thoughtful husband for bringing me one on Day 1.

But I do have a few techno-gripes. Downloading email can be really slow. YouTube doesn't work then I want it to, and the selection of videos is limited. Calendaring is so-so (and not as good as Palm/Treo in many ways), but the list view is good.

But... The interface is cool and easy to use. It feels nice in my hand. Visual Voicemail rocks. Every so often I have time to listen to my favorite NPR podcasts.

iPhone Hype

All the iPhone buzz hasn't been lost on my kids. E found out that one of his classmates has his own cell phone (the non-i variety) and hinted not so subtly, "So mom, how come *some* six-year-olds have their own cell phones?"

As enamored as I am of my new iPhone, I haven't made the big commitment. My old mobile number still rings on my Treo, and I haven't updated my web accounts to talk to the iPhone yet.

Yesterday I neglected my kids for a higher cause: migrating the family calendar, a piece of mission-critical technology without which my family cannot function. In fact, if it were to disappear in a hard-disk crash, the four of us would probably be found staring at each other confused and immobilized.

The old calendar was managed using Palm Desktop software for Mac and sync'd on my Treo 650. Despite the bugs (e.g., creating duplicate contact entries when sync'd), I've been using Palm for years, and an elaborate color-coded system has somehow emerged from the muck of my overtired mommy brain. But since the daddy brain in our family isn't psychic, the system has been in need of some improvement.

So the night before the iPhone came to dinner, we were eating out with some friends who swear by the Google Calendar. Okay, she actually works at Google and might be biased - but it still sounded like calendar-sharing nirvana to me - so I vowed to upgrade.

Enter the iPhone a day later. Touching the calendar button gives you a view of iCal, and there doesn't seem to be a way to point it somewhere else. It doesn't work with Google Calendar or Palm Desktop. After scratching my head for, oh, about two hours, I did manage to get the family calendar onto the iPhone *and* share it with my husband, who will never again have an excuse for not knowing where to be. Here's what I ended up doing:

1. Set up a blank Google Calendar and naively admired the Import Calendar feature.
   
2. Exported the Palm calendar to a vCal file. Realized that GooCal doesn't read Palm or vCal formats; wants iCal.
   
3. Imported the vCal file to iCal, which created an iCal calendar - sadly, all in a single color layer with all the labels gone.
   
4. Exported the iCal calendar to an iCal file.
5. Imported the iCal file into Google Calendar, still monochromatic. Recurring events were handled poorly - missing end dates, lost exceptions, duplicates, etc.
   
6. In Google Calendar, re-created the color-coded labels under My Calendars - one color for each person, plus ones for the house, birthdays, holidays, travel, family events, etc. - and set up sharing preferences. Hurray!
7. Assigned events to their appropriate colors; this was a little cumbersome, and I wish Google had a way to search for a keyword and bulk-assign them to a calendar. Oh well...
   
8. Realizing I needed to sync the Google Calendar *back* into iCal on an ongoing basis, I dug through various blogs and tech support forums - and came across Spanning Sync. Downloaded free trial on my PowerBook. Held breath.
9. Set up matching calendars in iCal and clicked Sync in Spanning Sync. Spanning Sync was a little slow but worked like a charm. Big cheers!
10. After all that work, I almost panicked when I didn't see my new calendar on the phone. It took me a few moments to figure out that iTunes holds the syncing technology for the iPhone. Upon launching iTunes, I realized the software had been upgraded and I had to click through the user agreement to unlock it. Once I did that, iTunes immediately recognized my phone and voila - sync!
    

Yep, that's ten steps (plus some clean-up) to migrate the calendar. Maybe there's a piece of Mac software that can move cleanly from Palm to Google Calendar (or even a cleaner migration to iCal), but I could only find a PC solution.

So now the good news is that the family calendar is shared, on the iPhone, and syncs to my Mac *without* putting the phone in its cradle.

The bad news is that I'm reminded that there are reasons that I wasn't using iCal before: namely, that the iCal UI is much less visual than Palm (e.g., it lacks a calendar picker for dates), there are fewer options for recurring events (e.g., ones that occur T/Th or MWF), and it doesn't display monthly calendars as legibly. Urk. Apple still has a lot of work to do on iCal; even on the iPhone, it looks surprisingly bland.

But since I've moved over, I think I can pretty much put away the iCal app on my Mac and use Google Calendar as my primary calendaring tool. I think I read somewhere Google is developing *offline* capabilities, too, which sounds super-useful for times when my Mac doesn't have Internet access. Or maybe I'm just dreaming?

It's been a long time since I've been anywhere near the cutting edge of technology, especially without tech support or at least a budget to seek professional help if I needed it. So following a slow but successful out-of-box experience - the phone arrived charged! - it's fun to be trying out something so fresh and, um, hyped.

While the kids were in gym class this morning, curious parents flocked to check out my new companion. "Ooh, it's so sleek," they cooed. "Much thinner than what I expected." I showed them YouTube videos like this one:

My wonderful husband went out to pick up some Indian food for dinner. Half an hour later, he came back with a pair of iPhones. (And the butter chicken, too.)

Better than jewelry?