The blog sphere has really beat up the Canadian cell carriers over the past few months and rightly so, but I and many others still gave in and bought into pricey long term iPhone plans with loads of hidden charges. At the end of the day it just seems like the Canadian carriers only goal is to confuse their customers into spending more money than they actually want too and further destroy their brand. One can only hope that the new national carrier Globalive will make a difference. Right now they run yakMobile which seems to have honest pricing. By honest pricing I don’t mean cheap (although they do have cheap pricing), I mean I want to pay what they say I will pay on the plan I have chosen. Why can’t all these useless fees just be part of the total fee, because that’s what they are. They aren’t special fees to the government or taxes, they are just carrier fees that are part of your plan but are not listed in the total price of your plan so it looks more attractive than it is. It’s dishonest advertising.
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It seems like FaceYourManga.com has gone mega viral, so viral that one by one my Twitter buddies are being transformed into their cartoon equivalents.
FaceYourManga is a site where you can create a manga / anime style avatar of yourself. The sheer number of options from the type of head you want, colour of skin, and other characteristics like beards, glasses, lines and sideburns leaves ample room for creativity. Only a few of my Twitter followers have converted themselves into cartoons, but so far they do look a lot like there real human counter parts.
Anyone can make one and within moments of completion your new avatar will be emailed to you. Be warned though that you cannot go back and edit your avatar once completed. This would be a nice feature and would probably make the site a little more sticky. This one drawback is why mine has brown eyes instead of blue.
Although this trend may be short lived, it’s kind of cool seeing all these unique cartoons of people you know showing up everywhere, so go try it out, it only takes a few minutes to create one.
Over the past few days the web has been awash with rumours of the HTC Dream, a Google Android phone. Well it looks official now, HTC will be releasing the phone very soon and it may be available as soon as September. It has received F.C.C. certification and T-Mobile the US carrier will be first to have it. No word yet on which Canadian carrier will have it or when.
Even though I have an iPhone now I am eagerly awaiting the reviews for the first Android phones. Competition can only be good for everyone. Apple gave the smartphone industry the kick it needed to start innovating and now things are about to be kicked up a notch with Android entering the scene. HTC also seems really serious about releasing great phones as they have proven with the HTC Touch Diamond which was based on Windows mobile. The UI of the Touch Diamond was nicely designed, but only skin deep, hopefully Android gives them the flexability to really flex their muscle and serve up an even better UI.
Google has also finally released an updated Android SDK today.
So I did something I rarely do, I ran out and saw a movie from a franchise I love without looking at any reviews and saw it on the second day. Usually I hold out for a week or even several weeks, but with Star Wars I figured how could I lose? Yes the newest Star Wars movies don’t come close to the originals, but they were all entertaining in their own right. Below is a list of how I would personally rank every Star Wars movie to date.
- Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
- Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
- Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
- Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
- Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
- Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Yoda in Star Wars: Clone Wars
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What is it with companies and their hard sell tactics? I wrote about this already in Extended Warranties and the hard sell and less then two months later I have experienced similar tactics with Bell support.
I recently bought an iPhone which was also my first cell. It’s rather pricey and I don’t really have a need for two phone bills so I called up Bell to cancel my home line. I will still continue to use their Internet service, so I have not completely left them. I fully expected the customer retention spiel and even put up with it for the first five minutes of the conversation.
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While writing and researching my post on the new Asus Eee stick game controller I came across the incredible website of Johnny Chung Lee, a Ph.D. Graduate Student of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
His entire website looks interesting and I plan to dig around some more when I get some time, but what really caught my attention was his Wii projects YouTube videos. These videos show everything from Minority Report style interaction to virtual reality all using a Wiimote for the underlying technology. Minority Report is a near future science fiction movie starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg. The film was released in 2002 and featured a lot of fictional technology that many people said was within the realm of reality in the near future.
Minority Report computer terminal
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About 20 minutes ago I tried to send an email and got an error. So I logged out and logged back in only to find that gmail is down. I asked a co-worker if his was down and it was. I just now received an RSS feed update from TechCrunch that says this is a system wide outage. I personally have never had Gmail fail me until today. Lets hope it’s nothing serious, some of us rely on and trust Gmail so much that it’s basically all our eggs in one basket. I mean it is still in beta after all, but Google seems to be perpetually in beta, and a Google beta is usually many times more reliable than production software from other companies.
Update: All is well in Google land, Gmail is back, it seemed to be down for about 30 minutes for me.
Twitter has become my favourite social app. I have to admit it’s very hard to explain why. Twitter is one of those things that you say is stupid until you get hooked. There is no explaining why, it’s just one of those things that you either get hooked on or you don’t, there seems to be no in between. I even have Twitterrific on my iPhone, it was the first app I installed. I like Twitter because it’s fast, simple and it forces people to get to the point with only 140 characters per tweet, which also leads me to my biggest pet peeve with Twitter.
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So my long debate over what phone to get is finally over. Yesterday morning I picked up an iPhone at the Fido store. I had already played with the first iPhone and the second iPhone along with the iPod Touch so I knew what it was all about. Even though I had played with them, I was still blown away at the ease of use and so far I’m extremely pleased with my iPhone.
My first iPhone street car ride home was spent catching up on my Google Reader feeds. People have asked me why I need to be connected all the time, so I tell them it’s really not much different than reading a newspaper in the morning only my preferred method is digital and the content I want to read for the most part won’t show up in the morning newspaper. Couple that with the fact that I hate how a newspaper feels, lets face it, they have a horrible user interface.
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Ever since I bought a Wii I have been wondering why no one has hopped on the Wii like pointing device bandwagon. I rarely use my Wii but I love the Wiimote, I find it really excels at relaxed web surfing. What do I mean by relaxed web surfing? I mean laying back on your couch with a wireless pointing device and surfing YouTube or your favourite daily websites. The downside to Wii web browsing is the standard definition screen which makes surfing blurry and text hard to read.
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