Just got back from vacation and there have been a number of little things to have happened lately.
iPhone 3.0 software came out. Pretty much liking it. I know other people have been complaining about hangs and lags and crashes, but I haven't had too many. I attribute that to a little app I picked up called FreeMemory. I believe there's a small price, but it does a couple of nice things: shows the actual percentage of battery power I had left (I can't tell you how many times I've looked at the icon and said - oh, I have like 60% still there, only to find it was 38%), the amount of memory I had left (and when the iPhone is getting laggy, it's because the memory has dropped to around 4M), and - if over 4M - allows you to free memory up - making it run more efficiently. This is a godsend, because as I discovered, 3.0 seems to reprogram what happens when you hold the Home button. Used to be, it force quit the app - exited out of the program and dumped it from memory, rather than closing the program down but still - while not exactly running in the background - retained a bit of memory back there. That's gone, and holding down the iPhone's button does nothing on the iPhone 3G. (A little research shows it's supposed to bring up voice commands on the 3GS, but ... erg.) This guy says you can force quit by holding down the sleep/wake button until the slider appears, letting go, and then pressing the Home button; yeah, I haven't gotten that to work. This post provides more detail - hold in the Home button for 6 seconds. This means it takes a long hold on one button, switch to another button, and hold that for even longer. It takes like 10 seconds just to quit the entire program; and that kinda blows. Yeah, FreeMemory.
I got Google Voice - which seems really cool. I'm still sorta configuring it and figuring out what I can do. But I really like the idea that I can give out one number and then I can do all sorts of stuff with it - have my wife ring every device I have, have a special greeting for her (I'm thinking "Hey there, gorgeous," in my best Barry White), block people I don't want to talk to (Omaha Steaks, are you listening?), have people send SMS messages to me that only go to my Verizon phone - but allow me to retrieve and send SMS messages on the iPhone (or computer for that matter). Many wonderful things.
I just took advantage of Verizon's New Every Two and got an LG Chocolate 3. I pretty much like it, but I'm still playing with it. Impressions: the ear piece and speaker are plenty loud, but almost too clear - in a way that kinda gives way to tinniness and distortion, and isn't at all natural. Harsh, in a word. The all plastic body feels cheap (especially compared to my old LG flip phone - RIP.) And I can see what they mean by the keys feel slippery and that's not helped by it being a smudge-fest surface. BUT, I'm liking this phone. It's light and thin, the keys are plenty big, I think I can eliminate some of that harshness by keeping the volume lower (especially if it's plenty loud), the front view screen is nice and large, and - AND - it has a full sized headphone jack. And works with my Decoy's (and my wife's enV2's) power jack - which is power adapter to USB to USB.
With the new phone, I've been playing with making ring tones to replace the ring tones I had ported to the old flip but got discouraged with the Decoy and never ported there. And along with that, found a snappy way to make iPhone ring tones for free off non-DRM'ed music. Excitée. WavePad has been a component of making the Verizon ringtones - and works well. Supposedly I can use that to make iPhone ringtones as well; we'll see.
Well, off to another meeting, so more detail later.
Well, off to another meeting, so more detail later.