All posts by kirsch

Reality Distortion Field

The road to iPhone 4S II

Leave a comment

…continued from The Road to iPhone 4S

October 13, 2011

T-1. I decide to call AT&T again. This time they are able to cancel my order. So why didn’t the last person cancel it? What changed? This further proves that when it comes to phone or cable companies, you can’t trust what you are told and just need to keep calling.

The representative does warn me: It will take 2 to 3 days for your contract to revert. Uh-oh.

Genius idea: since the phone is presumably unlocked, use my still valid AT&T SIM on it for 2-3 days until the contract reverts. Then start my phone activation and number transfer with Sprint.

October 14, 2011

I leave my house to work. Interestingly, my phone had no service. Common in the area. Later I realize that it was not just bad coverage, but it was dead. No service from AT&T. My genius idea goes down the drain. When I get to the office I try to log-in to AT&T:

I’m not about to cal. Two possibilities:

  1. AT&T’s guy canceled my account, not just my order. Potential problem: I could lose my number. Or…
  2. Sprint started my number transferred too early. Potential problem: My contract with AT&T still says I just renewed and they make me pay the full cancellation fee.

Then… I receive my iPhone 4S. It’s as beautiful as I had hoped. And my number is working! (which means it was #2). I test an AT&T SIM to see if it’s unlocked. Damn.

Reality Distortion Field

Launch-day Sprint iPhone 4S in NOT Unlocked

1 Comment

Today I got my Sprint iPhone 4S. Of course I had to settle the unlocked-locked-unlocked Sprint debacle. I popped in a good AT&T micro-SIM card from a colleague.

Then I rebooted… I managed to make it into Settings > General > About > Carrier and briefly saw AT&T. Then my phone rebooted into the Activation Screen.

My Sprint iPhone 4S with an AT&T SIM card. The original Sprint SIM it came with next to it.

When I tried to activate I got the following disappointing message:

Only compatible SIM cards from a supported carrier may be used to activate iPhone. Please insert the SIM card that came with your iPhone or visit a supported carrier’s store to receive a replacement SIM card.

Your AT&T SIM card is not welcome here.

Did anyone have different luck?

Reality Distortion Field

The road to iPhone 4S

2 Comments

Getting my hands on an iPhone 4S hasn’t been a smooth process. Here’s a rough summary of what I’ve had to go through so far to get my hands on some Sirious goodness (haha, get it?)

  • October 4, 2011: iPhone event. I want.
  • October 7, 2011: Preorders begin. I realize I’m not yet eligible for an upgrade so I will get it unlocked instead. Need to wait until November and then pay through my nose for it.
  • October 8, 2011: Brilliant idea from Erica Sadun (TUAW): AT&T wants me to pay $250 extra for an iPhone because I’m still under contract. But leaving AT&T would cost me $80 at this point. Makes no sense. Call AT&T, explain this slowly to two different representatives. The second one finally gets the math, gets me a $250 credit. I place my order. I should get it on launch day! Oh, and they will renew my contract for another two years.
  • October 11, 2011: My order does not show up in the system yet. It should within 24 hours. Something stinks… I had beans for lunch. And something is wrong here. I call AT&T: half an hour later I get disconnected. Call again. 2.5 hours later, mostly on hold, and after explaining the same thing to 4 people and two answering machines, someone can finally tell me what the problem is: I didn’t accept the Service Agreement by clicking on a link in an email I never receive. She re-sends it and I click it. She assures me my spot on the preorder queue will be respected. Four hours later a confirmation email arrives with a 28 day estimated shipping time. Depression sets in. At night, Macworld’s Jason Snell claims that the SIM slot on the Sprint iPhone 4S is unlocked!
  • October 12, 2011: Morning realization: I’m better off switching carriers: I get an unlocked iPhone 4S for when I travel and a significantly lower monthly payment (goodbye old AT&T family, hello new Sprint family). The phone call to Sprint takes about an hour but my phone is supposed to arrive on Friday or Saturday. The first thing I see after I hang up is a rebuttal to the Sprint SIM unlock story. Damn. Then I call AT&T to cancel my order. They claim it cannot be canceled, and blame Apple. What the?! Call American Express to instruct them to withhold all payments to AT&T. You don’t want to mess with Marcos: I withhold payments.
  • October 13, 2011: Sprint say my phone is shipping and due to delivery tomorrow!

To be continued…

Living in the Bay

AT&T

1 Comment

It wasn’t until I moved to California that all the AT&T coverage jokes made sense to me. In the less than 3 mile stretch between my house and the office, there are three dead spots where calls are guaranteed to drop and in some other areas I get knocked down to Edge instead of 3G.

If I lived in the middle of nowhere, I’d understand (maybe). But I work two blocks away from downtown Berkeley CA and the UC Berkeley Campus. I’ve seen lots of dead spots all over San Francisco, too. And of course, most of the BART stations (stations, not inside the trains) have no service at all.

They claim (yes, I called) some towers in my area are “under maintenance” and one is “under repair”. I don’t fully believe them. We’ll see.

And yet, I stay with AT&T… I like the ability of being on the phone and use data at the same time, I like the faster GSM download speeds (when there is service), I had good service all over Texas, even in the middle of nowhere (i.e. on the road to Lared0). I’m naive enough to believe they will improve here. Will they?

Reality Distortion Field

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Leave a comment

To transform one industry in your lifetime is enough to be remembered by history. But what if you transform several industries, and change the way people think of and interact with technology several times?

Here’s some of the things that exist thanks to Steve’s unparalleled vision, drive, and leadership:

  1. Macintosh
    Hard to remember just how primitive any computer before the Macintosh is.
  2. iPod
    Not the first digital music player, but the first one with the right mix of features, size, capacity and ease of use – replacing Walkman as the default word for “portable music player”.
  3. iTunes Music Store
    Completely changed the way music is distributed and sold, and thus the music industry. Per track purchases and instant gratification. The technology was there, but only Apple was able to put it all together in a successful manner.
  4. iPhone
    No phone looked or acted like iPhone before it, and no phone is expected to look or act unlike iPhone after it. Only four years after its introduction people forget just what a massive change this was and just how primitive a pre-iPhone phone looks.
  5. App Store
    One place to securely find, buy, install and uninstall software. Software distribution changed forever. Everybody (Google, RIM, Microsoft) have exactly copied this model.
  6. iPad
    Not the first tablet computer by a long shot. But it was a completely new vision and the first (and still only) successful one. It takes a lot of guts and an uncompromising vision to distill a product down to the appliance-like minimality of the iPad. Again, no table was like an iPad before it, and pretty much every tablet after it is an iPad clone.

Thank you for always skating where the puck is going, and for taking us along for the ride.

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” [Steve Jobs to The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993]

Reality Distortion Field

iPhone 4S

Leave a comment

…and it’s here.

Let’s see what’s new and exclusive to the 4S (meaning, not part of iOS5):

  • A5 Processor: About 2x faster, 7x faster graphics
  • AirPlay mirroring
  • Siri, which looks like something out of a sci-fi movie
  • Much improved camera, and not just megapixel wise
  • 1080p video with image stabilization
  • Better battery life
  • Faster cellular download speed
  • World phone (CDMA and GSM)
  • Better antennas, presumably more resistant to the Grip of Death

As someone that had the 3G and upgraded to the 3GS, I can tell you how huge the camera and speed and battery life improvements were. They made the day to day use of the phone vastly better. And it was good to begin with. Sure, there were other things, but these three were the biggest (oh, and support for multitasking). So I’m really looking forward to the iPhone 4S.

Some people are disappointed because there wass no iPhone 5. Who cares? The only difference between the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5 are the name and the form factor. I couldn’t care less about the name, and the form factor is already excellent, especially when compared to most of the gigantic and ugly Android phones out there.

Ready to pre-order.

Update: I use my phone’s camera a lot, so I was happy to see this sample, unedited photos taken with an iPhone 4S on Apple’s website.