If you happen to find it part of your day to visit this here site on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you may notice that it is a bit different. I installed a theme plugin that will automagically detect you are on an iPhone or Touch and apply a iPhone-based theme. Let me know how/if it works.
Archive for the 'Cell Phones' Category
So, I helped Mike with getting new ringtones for his iPhone 3G without paying the ridiculous $2 per tone. Well, the system I showed him works just fine, but only for the Mac. I found an easier way that as far as I can tell works. Unfortunately, I don’t have an iPhone 3G (yet) to test this, so I’m going to show you guys the video and have you guys tell me whether or not it works.
When I followed this procedure, sure enough, I have a 30 second snippet of a Bad Religion song in my Ringtones list. I did this on iTunes 7.7.1, but like I said, I don’t have an iPhone to put the ringtone on to, so try it out and tell me if it works for you.
Now, I’m going to try to edit a song down with Audacity and see if it works that way too. Hold on a sec.
Yeah, I did it. Turns out though, that Audacity won’t output to AAC, so I exported the clip in MP3. Generally, I export the audio as the same filetype and bitrate as it was imported. Then I used dBpoweramp Music Converter to convert it to AAC and changed the filename to m4r. Maybe the video’s method is a bit easier, but I like to have a lot of control over my ringtones.
Good luck and let me know how it goes.
I’m sure many of you are expecting me to gush all over the iPhone 3G. Yes, I love it. I watched the keynote from WWDC. I plan on getting one on July 11. However, I do have a problem.
That problem? AT&T. They don’t have any adjusted plans for the new iPhone. They aren’t selling any as it is. They don’t have any. There is only one iPhone now and it is the iPhone 3G. Get up on it and release those plans. I don’t want to hear rumors anymore. I want facts. I want to see the FamilyTalk iPhone plans. AT&T, get on it.
Second thing I want to mention is that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are finally on Hulu. That is the coolest. Now I get the only two shows I would watch Comedy Central for and don’t have to watch the crappy network. That is good.
So, I just got home from a harrowing day of tutoring math. A lot of people. Ok, so I sit down in my comfy chair and at my trusty PC and start going through Google Reader and my RSS feeds to see what happened since I checked earlier today.
Well. Apparently AT&T is going to subsidize the cost of the new 3G version of the iPhone down to $199. I was at first very happy. I’ve been waiting for the 3G iPhone since its launch several months ago. I kept telling myself, “Just wait. 3G is gonna blow your mind. Stick with that crappy HTC 8125 for a while longer and get a good 3G phone.” In fact, I even got my wife into getting an iPhone. So, our plan is to get the new 3G iPhones when they are released and all will end in happiness.
Then, I thought about the move AT&T is (pseudo) announcing. If you sign a new two-year contract, you can take advantage of the new subsidy. Ok. Sounds good on paper, but think about it. What is one of the big things everyone is worried about with the 3G iPhone? Data transfer. I read somewhere (and for the life of me, I can’t find out or remember where) that the average data usage on the iPhone is 100MB per month compared to 10MB of usage on average for Blackberry users. If you bump the transfer speeds to 3G levels (~1.5Mbps), those numbers are going to exponentially skyrocket.
Undoubtedly, AT&T is worried. They are afraid that their brand-spanking new 3G network will crush and die
a horrible death under the power of the iPhone and its users. I don’t blame them. So, this brings me back again. Why would they subsidize the iPhone, even if the offer is only for new contracts? Because they are planning on cutting back the iPhone plans. I have no proof of this, but it is just a prediction. I present to you that the 3G iPhone will have no unlimited data option or if it does, it will be in the higher end “business” plans. They will limit talk time, data, and probably even text messages, but truthishly, I can’t really see that last one, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Why would AT&T cut the iPhone at the knees? To recoup the loss of cutting around $200 per iPhone. If you get data-happy iPhoners (iPhoneys?) blowing past their monthly “limit,” you can make a fortune. Especially on a phone that automatically calls to several places, using data you didn’t actively tell it to. Naturally, I know that other phones do this too, but I’ve heard the iPhone does it a LOT comparitively, though I could be wrong, not being an iPhone user. This seems like something a big company like AT&T would do, but it also seems like something that will make a lot of people VERY unhappy. If this does happen, if we can’t use the 3G data network to our iPhone heart’s content, what is the point? If we can’t browse and download new apps through the App Store on the 2.0 firmware or do anything we feel like doing on the net, why buy something like the iPhone? If AT&T is going to kick its iPhone customers in the balls as hard as it kicks its regular customers, I’m not sure I want any part of it.
Maybe it won’t happen and I can get a 3G iPhone and go to town on a sea of free, unlimited data access.
Now. We wait.
Today marked the release of the new 16Gb Apple iPhone and the 32Gb Apple iPod Touch. Let me tell you something. People don’t really want more storage space on their iPhones. Yeah, maybe it is a concern about that measly 8Gb, but the real concerns transcend storage space. The one and single reason I have not purchased myself an iPhone is very simple: N0 3G access. A company as supposedly consumer-minded as Apple (though I would disagree) should know what it’s consumers want and that is NOT an iPhone that uses EDGE and has 16Gb. They want an iPhone that uses 3G and has 16Gb. There are a few other complaints I’ve heard about the iPhone, to see the one’s I agree with, go and watch this episode of Tekzilla. Patrick Norton does a fairly excellent job of listing the top five things wrong with the iPhone. It’s at the beginning of the episode, so it shouldn’t be too painful if you don’t really like that kind of show.
In fact, I’ll do you a solid. I will embed the episode and you can watch for yourself right here without having to leave my site. If you just can’t stand the combination of Patrick Norton and guest-host Kevin Rose, just watch to timecode 1:05 (I guess technically when using the word ‘timecode’ I should have used 00:01:05;00) when Patrick starts talking about his beef with the iPhone. It’s pretty short, sweet, and to the point.
