Pricing Up a New Maxed Out MacBook Pro Max

I typically buy a new personal laptop computer every 5-6 years. I was a diehard Windows person until Windows Vista came along when I crossed over to the Mac world. I've been a Mac person ever since.

Because I keep my computers for a long time, when I buy I always load up on hardware. I typically go for the fastest processor, most memory and the largest storage drive.  Today I decided to price up a new loaded MackBook M3 Max and was blown away by the price - $7200!

Pondering, I decided to skip the $19 Apple Polishing Cloth. I can always pick one up later.

Granted, maxed out the configuration is for high end niche users and not users like me. My 14 inch M1 Pro is only two years old with 16 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD so..... I'll just hang on to that for now.

Apple Pay – How Printed Store Receipts are Handled

Diane and I had an interesting couple of transactions. Around the holidays, Diane and I went to one of the big box retail stores and bought her Mom a couple of boxes of disposable heating pads for a sore shoulder. I used the Apple Pay app on my watch to pay for the pads. Last week her Mom let us know she did not need the second box so Diane brought that box back today with the original receipt.

There was some confusion at the store about the credit card number on the original receipt because it did not match either of the two cards Diane and I have. We were concerned the original transaction may have gone on someone else’s card and, with us returning the heating pads and getting credit on one of our cards, we may have gotten ourselves in some kind of trouble.

When Diane got home we looked at our credit card detail and sure enough – the $77.85 we spent on December 27 was listed. So, why was the last four unknown (to us) digits wrong on the original receipt? A little more digging found similar receipts with the same unknown four digit number for Apple Pay purchases.

With a little investigating, we were able to figure out what happened.  When you use Apple pay the card number on the receipt reflects your device ID, not the last 4 digits of your credit card. There is also no name on the receipt – it will be listed as “Contactless”. This way if you drop a receipt and someone picks it up there is no way you can be identified. It has no personal information on it. If you use Apple Pay check it out the next time you buy something using it.

Not having to take may card out of my wallet, no Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on the receipt...... added privacy and security – good stuff!

Checking Available Disk Space on a Mac

I get asked this question lots - here's how to check your available space step-by-step when running Apple Operating System  OSX 10.7 or greater.

Step 1
Click the Apple icon in the upper left hand corner of your screen and this drop-down menu will appear.

Step 2
Click About This Mac from the drop-down menu. The following dialog box will appear.

If you are not sure which OS version you are running you can see it here. Notice I'm currently running OS X Version 10.8.4

Step 3
Click the More Info... button and the following will appear (note: I've covered up my serial number).

Step 4
Click the Storage (top of dialog box between Displays and Memory) option for the following.

There you have it broken down nicely into Audio, Movies, Photos, Apps and Other categories.

So..... this is a little embarrassing..... I've only got a little over 1.7 GB free..... looks like I need to do a little drive housekeeping or I'm going to be out of space soon :)

Talking and Surfing Same Time Yet? The Verizon iPhone 5s and 5c

Most of us have taken a peak at the exterior and reviewed major specs for Apple’s two latest phones. If you are a Verizon Wireless customer there is one technical detail you may have missed. The new Apple phones are still not supporting SVLTE and SVDO. What’s SVLTE and SVDO? Here’s some details on these two protocols / technical standards:

Simultaneous Voice and LTE (Long Term Evolution)

Referred to as SVLTE, allows a mobile phone to use both voice and data networks at the same time – specifically when the voice network is CDMA 1xRTT (what Verizon uses) and the data network is LTE (what providers are calling 4G. By not using SVLTE, Verizon’s 4G data network is not available while on a voice call.

Simultaneous Voice and Data Only

Referred to as SVDO, this is the older standard for 3G networks. If you have an iPhone 4 or older, you have a 3G phone. Later iPhone (5 and on) have both a 4G and 3G radio and the device will fall back to 3G-mode when not in 4G coverage areas.  Similar to SVLTE, when the voice network is CDMA 1xRTT and the data network is CDMA 3G (also referred to as CDMA 1xEV-DO) the data network is not available while on a voice call.

Is this significant? Yes and No. The lack of SVLTE should not matter once VoLTE (Voice over LTE) launches on a large scale, allowing both voice and data to operate seamlessly on one Verizon Wireless 4G network.

What’s really interesting is Verizon Wireless has required their handset manufacturers to support both of these technical standards – that is - all manufactures except Apple.

Google Hummingbird - the Beginning of Latent Search

Most of us have had a chance to experiment with Siri on an iPhone or some of the Voice Assistants on an Android mobile device. You may not have experimented with something Google rolled over the past few weeks code named Humingbird though. It's a major new core algorithm for Google that allows users to use conversational speech for searching. I'm amazed at how under the radar this has been. Different terms are being tossed around for this including "latent", "conversational" and "abstract" - here's a quick 2 minute video I recorded demonstrating how it works.


We're so used to searching on keywords it's second nature. Larry Kim from Wordstream refers to keyword searches as "Caveman English".  Hummingbird is probably the biggest change in Google's search technology since 2001. It's similar to Facebook's Graph Search, allowing users to use more abstract or latent language when searching - the same kinds of things we do when having a conversation with another person.

It's also something Google has to do to stay competitive. Both Facebook and Siri use Microsoft's Bing for searching with Apple just switching from Google to Bing with iOS7. Current estimates put Google's search market share at around 70% with many referring to the company as a search business that also does experiments.

If Apple gets Siri fixed up and Facebook also fixes up Graph Search, Google could pretty rapidly lose search market share. Facebook has to be a huge concern right now - recent comScore reports that analyze Americans’ surfing patterns found people are spending more time on Facebook than Google. If Facebook can get their search act together (it's pretty bad right now) lookout.

Right now, Google's Voice Search sure feels pretty natural to me - grab the latest version of the Chrome browser and give it a try.

Displaying Mac Hidden Files

I get the Mac OS hidden files question a lot from friends and thought it would be a good thing to discuss here. This is a pretty typical request:

I recently switched from the Thunderbird email client to Sparrow. When I removed the Thunderbird application from my computer I noticed I only had an additional 96 MB of disk space. What's up? I know I've got a ton of Thunderbird email taking up a ton of space on my hard drive still. I search around using Finder and cannot see any of it. How can I remove it?

Thunderbird (and Sparrow and thousands of other apps) are considered third party apps. When you delete them from the application folder you delete the application but commonly not any of the additional folders and files associated with the application. When removing an application like Thunderbird that means you are not removing the files and folders that contain old emails whcih can consume very large amounts of disk space.

These folders and files are typically hidden by the operating system to prevent users from easily accessing them and messing things up. If you want to get to them, you need to enable hidden files/folders in the Finder window. Here's a step-by-step how to do it with Mountain Lion (10.8.2):

[Note: proceed with caution and use procedure at own risk.]

1. Open Finder
2. Open a Terminal window. To open Terminal, click the Spotlight (little spyglass) icon in the upper right corner and search on Terminal. Terminal will be listed as an Application. Click it to open a window like the one shown below.
   
3. Copy and paste the following command into terminal and hit the Return key:
4. defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
5. Hold the alt key down and right click the Finder icon.
6. Select Relaunch from the drop-down menu and you will now be able to see all the hidden folders and files on your computer.

Be very careful and do not edit/delete/etc anything you are not sure of.

iPhone Antenna Signal Strength Measurement Is Back

On January 26, 2010 I wrote a post here titled How To Put Your iPhone Into Field Test Mode & Compare Signal Strength Bars To Actual Signal Levels. That post received a lot of attention including a mention in The Wall Street Journal Numbers Guy Carl Bialik's blog.

The blog by Carl was titled The Case of Apple and the Mysterious Bars and focused on the antenna problems iPhone 4 users were having. Before he wrote the piece Carl and I talked - discussing antennas, signal strength and measurement. We also talked about how Apple had disabled field test mode with the release of iOS 4.0 back on June 21. This meant if you had purchased a new IPhone 4 and thought you were having antenna problems, you had no way of determining your signal strength - all you had were bars to look at.

Here’s an edited section of my January 2010 post:

The iPhone has the ability to go into something called Field Test mode. Once in this mode you can look at signal strength in both signal bars (what we are all used to seeing) and also in dBm. To put an iPhone into Field Test mode just punch in the following “number “on the phone keypad, including the "star" and "pound sign" keys:

*3001#12345#*

After you punch these numbers and symbols in, hit the Call button on the keypad and you'll end up with your iPhone screen looking like this:

Take a look at where you usually see the signal bars and you'll see a negative number - this is the actual cell signal strength your phone is receiving in dBm referenced to 1 mW. In the above screen shot I'm measuring -102 dBm. Touch that signal strength number once and it toggles to the familiar signal strength bars. Touch it again and it toggles back to the signal strength number.

What constitutes a good signal? Here's some rough signal strength guidelines:

Full Signal:-70 or lower

Optimal Signal:-70 to -75

Fair Signal:-75 to -85

Poor Signal: -85 or higher

Remember, as a negative number increases in its numeric value it is actually decreasing with reference to zero. This means a -70 dBm signal is stronger than a -85 dBm signal.

This is interesting to experiment with - check your signal strength in different locations see and how it correlates to the numbers of bars you are getting.

To exit out of Field Test mode on the iPhone just hit the Home button.

On September 8, Apple released iOS 4.1 and they’ve turned Field Test mode back on. You access it exactly the same way.

Once you’ve updated your iPhone to iOS 4.1 be sure to give Field Test mode a try.

Hands-on with the iPad Podcast

On Sunday (4/25/10) Mike Q shared his initial impressions after some hands-on time with an iPad. Mike does a great job describing the device along with some of his favorite applications for the device. Here’s some of the questions he answers:

• So Mike you broke down and got an iPad - which one did you get?
• Why only 16 gig?
• So how long have you had it?
• So give us some of your impressions. How is the battery life?
• What about the screen?
• What about the keyboard?
• How much is the case?
• Did you get any other peripherals? Can you connect it to a projector for presentations?
• Have you been to the app store? What are some of your favorites so far?
• What do iPhone apps look like on the iPad?
• OK, how about some apps? Let's start with the iWork suite.
• So what's your assessment of these apps?
• What about Keynote?
• Have you moved your Kindle content over? And, speaking of the Kindle – I know you have a first generation one – how do they compare as a reader?
• What about some quick hits on some apps that you've found interesting ?
• Does it have a GPS radio? Have you tried out any of the location based applications?
• What about some quick hits on some apps that you've found interesting ?
• What’s up with Israel banning iPads?
  

Mike also provided a few screen shots from the device:

• Here's a screen shot of a dictionary lookup created by Mike on the iPad.

• Here's an OmniGraffle example created by Mike on the iPad.
  

• Here's a Penultimate example created by Mike on the iPad.

Note: After we recorded the podcast, the Israeli Government lifted the ban on the WiFi iPad.

Here's how to listen:

To access show notes and audio of our 44 minute and 29 second audio podcast titled Hands-on with the iPad click here.

Listen to it directly in your web browser by clicking here.

If you have iTunes installed you can subscribe to our podcasts by clicking here.

Apple iPad First Impression Podcast

Last week Steve Jobs and Apple announced the iPad. Jobs and Apple say the tablet-style iPad computer represents a whole new category of consumer electronic devices. On Sunday we recorded a 36 minute and 40 second podcast where Mike Qaissaunee gives his first impressions and we discussed some of the technical specifications of the iPad. Here's a list of some of the questions Mike answers:

Size - How big is the iPad?
What about the hardware? Some people are referring to this thing as a big iPhone or iPod Touch?
What about the screen?
What about capacity?
Does the iPad have senors like the iPhone?
What about wireless?
What about other carriers?
Bluetooth?
What about GPS?
Battery Life?
What about the processor?
What about the software?
What about what's missing?
So, what do you think - is this going to go down in history as a revolutionary device?

Podcast

To access Mike Q and my 36 minute and 40 second podcast titled Apple iPad First Impression Podcast, click here.

Listen to it directly in your web browser by clicking here.

If you have iTunes installed you can subscribe to our podcasts by clicking here.

10 Random Thoughts On 12-17-08

There's a Springfield, MA newspaper sports reporter by the name of Gary Brown who writes a weekly column titled "Hitting To All Fields". In the column he lists his random thoughts for the past week. I've always enjoyed Gary's writing and they say imitation is the best form of flattery..... If this format works - it may become a regular Wednesday thing for me:

Wondering who Obama will select as Kevin Martin's FCC chair replacement.

WHAT.... no Steve Jobs at MacWorld 2009 ?

And double WHAT.... no more Apple at MacWorld after 2009 ?

Wondering how those Walmart iPhones will sell.

Some are saying (myself included) broadband access is a human right. Others disagree.

Been hearing the term "social shopping" used this holiday season as if it is something new. Isn't it what we've always referred to as "word of mouth"?

Can the Patriots pull the playoffs off in the next couple of weeks?

It's been a disgusting political and financial week in our country - the rest of the world must be laughing pretty hard at us.

The Feb 18 Analog to Digital Mandated TV Conversion is looking like it might get messy for people who are still watching over-the-air. I'll be writing more on this soon.

Early this morning my blog passed the 100,000 visitor mark for 2008!!!

Happy Holidays and thanks for reading!

The iPhone, the SDK, the Kindle and the Future of Mobile Learning

Yesterday, Mike Qaissaunee , Vince DiNoto and I gave a presentation titled The iPhone, the SDK, the Kindle and the Future of Mobile Learning at the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education Conference in Washington, DC. Mike put up the slides from our presentation on SlideShare - here's the presentation:

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: apple iphone)

Bandwidth Hogs and the iPhone 3G

A couple of weeks ago I purchased an AT&T USBCONNECT 881 3G card and have been doing spot bandwidth tests where 3G is available. The 3G iPhone will use the same network so these spot tests will be a good indicator of the kinds of bandwidths we can expect. You can see my speed test results by location linked here. Coverage and bandwidth has been good so far in areas where I spend time including out on Cape Cod in North Truro, MA.
On the left is a screen shot (click to enlarge) sample - 1324 Kbps downstream and 334 Kbps upstream in the wilds of the Cape Cod National Seashore - pretty good for a PC and would be very nice on a new 3G iPhone!

A recent piece on Gigaom titled Is 3G Ready for the iPhone Stress Test? is an interesting read. Here's a quote from the post:

The original iPhone runs on the 2G networks using a technology called EDGE. Despite the slower speeds, the data usage on AT&T’s mobile network ballooned due to the original iPhone. According to Chetan Sharma, our favorite mobile data guru, iPhone users used nearly five times the data used by average AT&T subscribers, and nearly twice as much as other smart phone owners. About 55 percent of the data was carried on Wi-Fi networks, while the rest was on EDGE.

3G bandwidth on a small handheld device..... sounds very nice especially for YouTube and other mobile video applications. YouTube does run on the original iPhone over the EDGE network but it is slow. As a result, most are only watching YouTube videos on their iPhones when they are within WiFi range. If users can now watch elsewhere - will mobile video become a 3G bandwidth hog? I think so.

I'm also interested in how AT&T will handle the inevitable BitTorrent iPhone file-sharing applications (these are much bigger bandwidth hogs) that will be rolling out this summer. The AT&T 3G service I purchased for my PC card has a monthly 5 Giga-Byte (GB) data "soft cap". Will users get cutoff for the month when the 5 GB cap is hit?

It's not just AT&T that's going to have to deal with these issues - they'll just likely have to face them first with the 3G iPhone.....Verizon and Sprint also have similar caps in their 3G wireless contracts.

Second Generation 3G iPhone To Be Released June 9?

PC World reported we can expect the "first of an impressive wave of new products" announced at the Apple Conference June 9-13 in San Francisco. Rumor has it one of those new products will be the second generation iPhone which will incorporate 3G technology.

I wrote last November about 3G technologies, AT&T's 3G build-out, and the iPhone:

3G technologies provide approximately 144 Kilo-bits per second (Kbps) to around 2.4 Mega-bits per second (Mbps) to mobile devices like cell phones and non-mobile devices like computers. For AT&T, 3G is a significant upgrade from the current EDGE network which, according to PCWorld, averages around 109 Kbps.

First generation iPhones run on the AT&T EDGE network. Here's more from the November blog entry:

EDGE is commonly referred to as "2.5G" or "2.75G" (between 2nd and 3rd generation) and has been the source of a lot of discussion with regards to the iPhone. Many questioned Apple's decision to go with AT&T/EDGE and have debated why Apple did not go with a 3G option for the iPhone. Steve Jobs has always said the decision to go with EDGE instead of 3G (on the first generation iPhone) was based on battery life.

According to PC World and Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research , Apple will not stop making the "2.5G" model but will upgrade the case and drop the price to between US$299 and $349, compared to the current $399.

Apple is also expected to announce an updated Mac laptop and new iPod versions.

MacBook Air Hacked

The ninth annual CanSecWest 2008 Conference was held last week in Vancouver, British Columbia. CanSecWest focuses on applied digital security, bringing together ndustry luminaries in a relaxed environment that promotes collaboration and social networking.

A crowd favorite at the conference has been the hacking contest and last week the tradition continued. This year's target machines were Ubuntu, Vist and OSX based. Here's details on the contest from the CanSecWest website:

Three targets, all patched. All in typical client configurations with typical user configurations. You hack it, you get to keep it.

Each has a file on them and it contains the instructions and how to claim the prize.

Targets (typical road-warrior clients):

• VAIO VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10
• Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1
• MacBook Air running OSX 10.5.2

This year's contest will begin on March 26th, and go during the presentation hours and breaks of the conference until March 28th. The main purpose of this contest is to present new vulnerabilities in these systems so that the affected vendor(s) can address them. Participation is open to any registered attendee of CanSecWest 2008.

Once you extract your claim ticket file from a laptop (note that doing so will involve executing code on the box, simple directory traversal style bugs are inadequate), you get to keep it. You also get to participate in 3com / Tipping Point's Zero Day Initiative, with the top award for remote, pre-auth, vulnerabilities being increased this year. Fine print and details on the cash prizes are available from Tipping Point's DVLabs blog.

Quick Overview:

• Limit one laptop per contestant.
• You can't use the same vulnerability to claim more than one box, if it is a cross-platform issue.
• Thirty minute attack slots given to contestants at each box.
• Attack slots will be scheduled at the contest start by the methods selected by the judges.
• Attacks are done via crossover cable. (attacker controls default route)
• RF attacks are done offsite by special arrangement...
• No physical access to the machines.
• Major web browsers (IE, Safari, Konqueror, Firefox), widely used and deployed plugin frameworks (AIR, Silverlight), IM clients (MSN, Adium, Skype, Pigdin, AOL, Yahoo), Mail readers (Outlook, Mail.app, Thunderbird, kmail) are all in scope.

Here's the results according to Heiss Online:

Of three laptops to be hacked, the MacBook Air with Mac OS X 10.5.2 was the first to fall victim to crack attempts of participants in the PWN to OWN contest at CanSecWest. The laptops with Windows Vista SP1 and Ubuntu 7.10 remain uncompromised. According to information provided by organizers of the TippingPoint competition, Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff and Mark Daniel of security service provider Independent Security Evaluator were able to take control of the device through a hole in the Safari web browser. The vulnerability has supposedly not yet been made public and is still under wraps until Apple is able to provide a patch. In addition to $10,000 prize money, the winners also get to keep the MacBook as a bonus.

Here's more on the contest from ChannelWeb:

The vulnerability has been purchased by the Zero Day Initiative, and has been made known to to Apple, which is now working on the issue, TippingPoint said. "Until Apple releases a patch for this issue, neither we nor the contestants will be giving out any additional information about the vulnerability."

The iPhone Software Development Kit Podcast

Mike Q and I recorded "The iPhone Software Development Kit" podcast today. Below are the show notes. You can listen directly by turning up your speakers and clicking here. If you have iTunes installed you can get this one, listen to others and subscribe to our podcasts by following this link.
If you don't have iTunes and want to listen to other podcasts and read shownotes you can click here.

Shownotes:

Intro: On Thursday, March 6, 2008, Apple released the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) beta along with the App Stores, a place where iPhone users will be able to get applications written for the iPhone. Apple also launched the Enterprise Beta Program.

Gordon: Mike, can you give us a quick rundown on what Apple released on Thursday?
Sure, much of our discussion today is based on an excellent post at macworld.com titled The iPhone Software FAQ. Macworld editors Jason Snell, Jonathan Seff, Dan Moren, Christopher Breen, and Rob Griffiths contributed to this article. They also thank Glenn Fleishman, Craig Hockenberry, and Daniel Jalkut for their feedback and contributions.

Here's how Macworld answered the question:

The SDK is a set of tools that lets independent programmers and software companies design, write, and test software that runs on the iPhone. Right now there's a beta version for developers, but a final version of the iPhone software that supports the installation of new programs written by independent programmers is due in late June.

As a part of the announcement, Apple introduced a new iPhone program, App Store, through which you'll be able to purchase, download, and update iPhone software. That will be available as part of the new iPhone Software 2.0 update in late June. That's when you'll be able to add third-party apps to your iPhone for the first time, at least via official channels.

Gordon: You blogged about you experience with the SDK - can you tell us your first experience?
I downloaded the new iPhone SDK and wrote about my first impressions. I did quite a bit of FORTRAN programming many years ago > 10, but haven't done a whole lot lately. The SDK took a long time to download -2 Gig - over my wireless connection. And about 45 minutes to install. I also downloaded a couple of the sample applications Apple provides ~ 1 Meg each. In about 15 minutes - would have been shorter if I knew what I was doing - I was able to open the sample, compile and run on the simulator Apple provides.

I have no doubt that this is going to have a huge impact on mobile application development. It's really easy and really cool. If you teach programming - I suggest you download the SDK today, install it in your labs, and have your kids developing and running native iPhone apps by Monday afternoon. Get the SDK here. Even better, download Jing have your students record the simulator running their iPhone apps and embed in your department or faculty webpage - great for marketing! Wish I was 20 again!

Gordon: And you actually compiled a little Kalimba (African Thumb Piano) app. Where can we have a look?
You can go to my blog at http://q-ontech.blogspot.com/2008/03/iphone-sdk.html

Gordon: Apple is taking 30% of what is sold from the App Store - will shareware apps be available or will we have to pay for everything?
That's a good question and one that was sort of answered in the macworld.com post. Macworld assumes Apple won’t let you sell a “free” program that requires an unlock code. However, there are some other scenarios we expect to see. First, donationware: People will probably sell “free” programs that request that you make a donation if you want to keep the project going. We don’t think Apple will have any problem with that, since the donation would be voluntary. Second, it’s possible that you’ll see two versions of various iPhone programs: a free “lite” version that’s a good advertisement for a more feature-rich for-pay version.

Macworld also mentions Iconfactory’s Twitterrific, a Mac program that is free, but contains ads. For an “upgrade” fee, users can shut off the ads. Whether Apple would allow this to be handled within the program or there would need to be two separate versions of an iPhone version of Twitterrific remains to be seen.

Gordon: On Thursday, five companies demo'ed applications - can you give us a brief summary of what was shown?
From Macworld: Five companies showed off what they were able to put together with two weeks of engineering work and very few people involved. There were games from Electronic Arts (Spore) and Sega (Super Money Ball), an AIM client from AOL, medical software from Epocrates, and business software from Salesforce.com. The programs took advantage of the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer, Multi-Touch capabilities, interface elements, and more.

Gordon: I'm going to go back to the Macworld post again and take some questions directly from that FAQ for you to answer:

1. What kind of stuff does Apple say it won’t allow developers to create?
2. What if someone writes a malicious program?
3. What’s a “bandwidth hog?”
4. Can I buy these programs on my Mac, or just on the iPhone?
5. What about software updates?
6. What if you’ve synced your phone on one computer and then restore it on another? Do you lose your apps until you sync to the original?
7. If I buy a program for my iPhone, can I also transfer it to my significant other’s iPhone?
8. Can I download programs off the Web, or any place other than the App Store and iTunes?
9. What about internal, “private” software? What about beta testing?
10. Can I try the iPhone SDK and how could it be used in the classroom?

Gordon: Apple posted a roadmap video - can you tell us a little bit about that?
You can watch Steve Job's presentation and see what's ahead at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/iphoneroadmap

We hope you enjoy this 48 minute podcast!

Tiered Internet Services Coming?

On January 18, Business Week published an interesting article about a trial Time Warner’s cable division will be running in Texas later this year. Here’s a quote from the article:

Time Warner Cable plans to test a multi-tiered price system for high-speed broadband service later this year. New customers in the trial area of Beaumont, Texas, will be charged different rates based on the amount of data consumed in a month, much like a cell-phone plan charges based on minutes used.

Right now Time Warner is saying they will offer plans priced for up to 5, 10, 20, and 40 gigabytes per month, with middle-tiered plans running roughly the same amount average users currently pay (around $30 per month) for high-speed connections. The company also says they will allow customers to go over their limit but they will be billed for the extra.

This actually makes some sense from both a business and a consumer perspective – the ISP’s have always said 5% of users consume as much as 50% of network capacity downloading vast numbers of large files, such as movies, videos, and songs. I think of my parents who use little bandwidth to check email and occasionally surf the web and compare them to our house where my teenagers are often watching and uploading videos on YouTube, uploading to Flickr, downloading Mike Q and my podcasts , etc. I’m certainly not putting my kids in that top 5% but you get the idea – why are my parents paying just as much as us when we’re using a lot more bandwidth?

Companies looking to sell audio and video products on the web (NetFlix, Apple, Amazon, etc) are the ones who could ultimately get hurt. If I’ve used up my 20 gigabytes this month I’m not going to download that movie I wanted to watch on Friday night……… Here’s another piece from the article:

Another unintended consequence of tiered pricing is that it could discourage some companies from launching new services that require large bandwidth, consumer advocates say. The plans could also penalize early adopters whose heavy use of new services helps developers come up with refinements that use up less bandwidth……

According to the Business Week article, Comcast is considering a similar plan. Right now, Verizon does not appear to be.

I’ve written in the past about the Amazon Kindle eBook reader. The Kindle uses a cellular network connection to deliver books purchased by users. The cost of cellular service is bundled into the price of the book by Amazon - users do not need a cellular contract to make purchases on their Kindle. Perhaps the ISP’s should consider similar arrangements with companies selling audio and video products on the web.

An iPhone For A Day Experiment

On Friday I went to New York City for a National Science Foundation sponsored Ethics in Research Workshop held at Borough of Manhattan Community College. The workshop was excellent, with a focus on research integrity and institutional review boards (IRBs) at the community college level.

Over the past ten years I've got into the habit of carrying a notebook computer with me just about everywhere I go. Our campus uses GroupWise for email and I've got the client installed on my notebook. I can usually find wireless access and end up pulling email off locally. I can then answer, create, etc email without a network connection. The next time I get access to a web connection I can send out the email I have queued up and retrieve new email. It works but can get a little frustrating when I need to get to something and cannot fund a connection. I've considered buying a wireless broadband card from Sprint, Verizon or AT&T but have resisted.

Friday was just a day trip for me so I figured I'd try a little experiment and just take the iPhone. One of my biggest concerns was accessing my campus account. IMAP and POP access are turned off and I cannot access directly using the iPhone email app. This left me with a few options:

1. Have all GroupWise email forwarded or delegated to my gmail account which I have setup on the iPhone. I would end up getting all my email this way but it is difficult to reply to messages because I have to retype addresses (the iPhone still does not copy and paste)
2. Use the GroupWise web interface in Safari on the iPhone. In a pinch this works but it is time consuming and not very efficient.
3. Setup an auto-reply in GroupWise saying something along the lines of "I will not have access to this account today - if you need to contact me immediately send me a message at gordonfsnyder@gmail.com"

I opted for #3 and it worked out well - I did actually get one person who had a time sensitive issue and ended up forwarding to my gmail account. It's a solution that works for me right now but I do wish our campus would turn IMAP on so I could start collecting all campus email on the iPhone.

Regarding the iPhone iteself, the biggest issue I had was battery life. I was careful to turn the WiFi radio off in areas where I did not have access to save power and I did not use my bluetooth headset (Bluetooth on the iPhone was turned off). Even so I only got a little over 4 hours of common use (voice, email and web browsing) before I had only 10% of the battery left. Mike Q was at the same conference and had just about identical results with his iPhone. The next time I travel with just the iPhone I'll be sure to bring my charger with me and plug in whenever I get a chance.

I was really impressed with the enhanced map application that came with the iPhone 1.1.3 firmware upgrade released last week. The map application now uses Google Maps at My Location, which finds where you are based on the cell antennas your phone is accessing. You don't have to have an iPhone to use Google Maps at My Locatiion - it is available for most web-enabled mobile phones. It's not as accurate as a GPS but is close with the added advantage of working indoors. With the number of antennas in Manhattan, the location finder was extremely accurate.

Overall my iPhone for a day experiment was a successful one. My biggest concern is the battery life - Apple claims we should be getting approximately 6 hours of battery life so both Mike Q and I are questioning our batteries and will be checking with Apple.

My 2008 Top 12 Prediction List

2007 was a busy year and things do not look like they will slow down in 2008. Here's my personal top 12 predictions for the year in no particular order:

1. Apple announces new 3G iPhone at MacWorld. 3G service will be switchable to conserve battery. New iPhone will also have at least internal storage with SD Card slot.
2. First generation Google Phone will be OK but just OK as the bugs get worked out. However.......... just wait for the second generation!
3. Patriots go undefeated and win Super Bowl - how can I resist this one?!
4. Verizon northern states (Maine, Vermont and New Hamshire) sale to Fairpoint Communications is halted by one of the 3 states.
5. Google wins 700 MHz spectrum auction. First Google "telephone" trucks appear on Bay area highways.
6. Celtics win NBA championship - this one is a stretch!
7. Verizon offers 100 Mbps symmetrical data service to FiOS customers
8. Google Docs, Spreadsheet and Presenter webware become available offline.
9. Microsoft goes on buying and marketing spree in an effort to keep up with Google's webware applications.
10. Red Sox win American League pennant but are upset in the World Series.
11. Comcast launches DOCSIS 3.0 100 Mbps data service to compete with Verizon's 100 Mbps FiOS service.
12. Video and image search will go mainstream..... watch for my video podcast interview with Atalasoft President Bill Bither coming soon - it's been shot and is being edited now!

As much as I love hockey I'll skip the Bruins this year....... Looking at these 12 - minus the Sox, Patriots and the Celtics - the web has become the development platform of choice with high bandwidth access and availability required on any connected device......... You ain't developin' if it won't run in a web browser!

Happy New Year!

AT&T Wireless Upgrades and the Second Generation iPhone

A small article in the Springfield, MA Saturday Republican paper caught my eye. AT&T has been quietly updating their cell phone towers to 3G in Massachusetts along with 220 other metropolitan areas in other parts of the country. Just last week the company updated 30 towers in the Western part of the state with plans to do the New Bedford area next. Both Boston and the Worcester area have also been upgraded.

3G technologies provide approximately 144 Kilo-bits per second (Kbps) to around 2.4 Mega-bits per second (Mbps) to mobile devices like cell phones and non-mobile devices like computers. For AT&T, 3G is a significant upgrade from the current EDGE network which, according to PCWorld, averages around 109 Kbps.

EDGE is commonly referred to as "2.75G" (between 2nd and 3rd generation) and has been the source of a lot of discussion with regards to the iPhone. Many questioned Apple's decision to go with AT&T/EDGE and have debated why Apple did not go with a 3G option for the iPhone. Steve Jobs has always said the decision to go with EDGE instead of 3G was based on battery life. Here's a quote from Steve jobs in a piece from MacNN:

"The 3G chipsets that are available to semiconductors work reasonably well except for power. They are real power hogs," .... "So as you know, the handset battery life used to be 5-6 hours for GSM, but when we got to 3G they got cut in half. Most 3G phones have battery lives of 2-3 hours [of talk time]."

There have been rumors (see Mathew Millers post at The Mobile Gadgeteer here ) going around since the current iPhone was announced in January that the next generation iPhone would be 3G capable. People have also been questioning whether the current iPhone has both an EDGE radio and a 3G radio built in, which would allow current iPhones to software update to the faster 3G network as the network becomes available.These rumors have pretty much died out after people have taken iPhones apart and have not been able to find an upgradeable radio.

Some complain about EDGE network performance with the iPhone but this has not been an issue with me personally. Perhaps it is because of the places I find myself at - I may be unique - I find myself on a WiFi network probably 90% of the time with the iPhone. The 10% of the time I'm not on a WiFi connection I'm usually checking email, looking up directions on a map or searching for a phone number on the web. On these occasions the EDGE network performance/bandwidth has been fine for me.

Is this 3G build-out by AT&T in (at least partial) preparation for a 3G enabled second generation iPhone? Partial is the key word here but i would say yes - it's time to move to 3G. I'm excited to see what Apple comes out with for the second generation iPhone and it will be interesting to see (if it is 3G enabled) how the battery life issue is dealt with. My bet right now would be on a multi-mode EDGE/3G/WiFi second generation iPhone that would operate on all three types of wireless networks. Time will tell!

What You Can and Cannot Do with an iPhone on an Airplane

Traveling to Nashville on Sunday I had a chance to experiment with what the iPhone can and cannot do in airplane mode. Here’s my list in iPhone Dock (main screen) order:

SMS: I can read prior messages but cannot reply while in airplane mode. I tried queuing up a message thinking I could send the next time I got a connection. After entering my message and hitting send while still in airplane mode I got “Error Sending Message” which kicked me back to the message reply screen.

Calendar: I am not using the iPhone Dock calendar but it appears to work. Mike Q is using Gsync to two-way sync his Google calendar with iCal on his MacBook. This then syncs with the iPhone calendar. I had tried GSync before and had some issues with it and ended up using Calgoo. I believe I can do something similar with Calgoo and will work on this week when I get a few minutes. I'll also take another look at Gsync.

Photos: I can view all of my photos stored locally on the iPhone.

YouTube: Does not work and produces message “You must disable airplane mode to access data” and displays a Cancel and Disable button.

Stocks: Same response as YouTube.

Maps: Same response as YouTube. I did have a map of Nashville that was still displayed from my last connection. I could pinch zoom the map.

Weather: Same response as YouTube. I could flick through all of my city listings. They displayed the weather from the last time I had a live connection and got an update.

Clock, Calculator and Notes: All work fine.

iTunes: Does not work and requires a WiFi connection. iTunes also does not work with just an EDGE (cellular network) connection.

Phone: I can access all of my contacts, add, make changes, etc. I could also listen to voice mail.

Email: I could read messages that were stored on the iPhone the last time I had a connection. I could also reply to any messages – they went into the outbox and were sent the next time I got a connection.

Safari: If I did not power the iPhone off the web browser allowed me to view sites I had looked at and left open the last time I had a connection. The sites did go away when I powered the device off and on.

Overall Impressions
Email works great and I love the ability to listen to voice mail without having a connection. Not being able to access my favorite Mockdock applications, including Engadget, Digg, Chess, Bejeweled and especially Google Reader (that I use to read RSS feeds I subscribe to) is disappointing. I’ve got to do some research on Google Gears and determine whether I can get the feeds offline. I’m looking forward, with the release of the iPhone SDK, to applications that run off the main Dock. And… yes – I realize I could have just put the iPhone in airplane mode to run these tests – I did not have to get on an airplane!

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