iPhone 4

- Why another iPhone? I'm surrounded by android users so I got to try out the Google Nexus One and the HTC Evo 4G quite extensively. There were several things that really impresses me about android especially the ability to side load apps (can we say free tethering) and tight integration with google services like goggles, voice, and navigation. As far as apps go they are catching up and rather quickly though they are still missing some key media apps. They still don't have anything close to something that works as well as air video. But in most key areas they are pretty much covered except for one. I'm a gamer. Heck it's in the tag line of this blog. I love my portable gaming and well that's one area that android is way way way behind iPhone. The top tier games just aren't there. I don't know if it's just iPhone's momentum in this segment or it's more of a development technical issue with android but android lack of big AAA titles is a huge drawback for me. So until/if android ever catches up in that department and has same day releases with iPhone for big games like Street Fighter IV, nova, Final Fantasy Chaos Rings, GTA Chinatown, Resident Evil, etc I'll stick with my iPhone. Besides, it is an iPhone, it is the best phone, it's 3g and has the wifi's, and I got the one with the bigger G B's. Of course I can't say I wasn't a bit envious when I was recently at a baseball game with a friend and he was pulling 1.8mbs (speedtest.net app) on his evo over 4g while I was struggling to get 200kbps but that's more the carrier than the phone itself. I guess it helps when you are sharing a cell tower with only 10 other people.
- So I picked up two 32gb iPhone 4's. I decided to sell our existing two 32gb iPhone 3gs's through gazelle.com (see what I did there gazelle? I didn't even hyperlink your site because I'm still kind of pissed at you) again. The day after the announcement of iPhone 4 I went ahead and got my quote locked in at $304 per phone (perfect condition, all accessories). That quote is good for 30 days (they are very strict on the 30 days). I figure I'll just preorder day one from apple.com, have them shipped to me, and still leave me about a 2 week window. Well as you know preorder came and everything went to crap. I tried all day and couldn't get the preorders in until 10pm that night. Suffice it to say I didn't get a day one ship day. I didn't get the phones that Thurs but they did come in the following week on tues and wed. So I immediately shipped the 3gs's to gazelle that thurs (a week after launch) and it got there in time. Current used value of the 3gs had dropped a ton down to $168 at that point so I really wanted my original quote. Unfortunately, they did not agree with my quality assessment which IMO is complete BS. The day I opened my 3gs I literally took it out of the box, slapped a powersupport anti glare screen protector on it, and stuck it into a case. The screen itself hasn't ever even been touched by human hands! I never dropped it. It was IMO in perfect condition. They claimed minor scratches on the back side and a small crack near the mute switch. Whatever. I think their definition of perfect is unrealistic (as in it still has to be shrink wrapped is my guess). Still, they offered me $277 each instead, and I took it. What else was I suppose to do. It was still matching current ebay prices. So if you use gazelle just a bit of a warning. Just make sure you are happy with their "good" rating price b/c you will NEVER see that "perfect" price. Other than that things went smoothly and they payed through paypal promptly.
- Pricing on the iPhones was another issue. We didn't qualify for the cheapest price because we were both upgrading only 1 year into your 3gs contracts. My wife's phone qualified for the $499 price. My phone on the other hand didn't qualify for any discount. That's right. I had to pay the full $699 price. The reason they explained is since my wife's phone was the main line and mine was the add on family line, the bulk of the monthly charges was on her phone therefore qualifying her for the $499 price earlier than mine. On the bright side I have zero commitment on my line now (where's that verizon iPhone?). This also means next year I would qualify for the fully subsidized price of $299. So $499 every year on the wife's and $299 then $699 every other year on mine. The math still works out to an average of $500 per year if you upgrade every year. Don't forget you can recover at least half of that if you sell your old iPhone.
- I highly recommend purchasing from apple vs at&t. First, last year I ordered through at&t and the sim cards were totally screwed up, and we had issues activating them. This year I had no issues activating. Also, if you have to exchange the phone you'll have a better shot at the apple store holding some stock to do that. AT&T won't have anything.

- I HAVE NO ISSUES WITH THE ANTENNA. I just spent $1200 on iPhones. Why would I not use a case? There are only two articles you need to read about antennagate:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-apples-ios-41-signal-fix
Like my high school AP chemistry teach use to say: "Units are your best friend." Bars have no units. Without units they are pretty meaningless especially when comparing between different phones that use different dB brackets. Those above articles have the hard dB numbers.
- The phone has rebooted twice while syncing now (syncing daily for about a month now). Nothing catastrophic has happened but it is a bit unnerving. Hopefully it gets sorted out in a patch (either itunes or iOS).
- That's pretty much it. I haven't had any real issues so far. It has been working great.

- Retina display is best summed up by my wife: "It's so sharp it cut my eyes."
- 512mb for more multitasking fun (yeah yeah yeah set of background services exposed through their api, blah blah blah, you know what it covers all my use cases that I care about, and if it helps battery life then I'm all for this flavor of "multitasking.")
- It's zippier thanks to the A4 but it doesn't feel as big of a jump as it was with 3g to 3gs.
- LED flash, front facing camera, facetime, 720p video, gyroscope - all very nice upgrades.
- Battery life definitely seems better than 3gs.
- Speeds vary greatly from market to market and location to location but my best over 3g was 3.2 mbps down and 1.3 mbps up (speedtest.net app). HSUPA rocks. It's kind of amazing that my phone upstream speeds are twice as fast as my home dsl.
- All existing 3gs accessories seem to work (chargers, sync cable, composite av cables)
- I did some more testing with the composite av cables. Air Video and dropbox also work with tv out. SlingPlayer, cnn, revision 3, g4, hulu, tv.com do not.

- I just got my powersupport crystal film set. Yes they are pricey at $20 for two sheets but they are hands down the best screen protectors you can get. In the past I went with anti-glare because I liked the feel and it was very resistant to finger prints. I went with crystal this time because I wanted nothing to get in the way of that awesome Retina display. They are even easier to apply now. The backing is partitioned into 4 pieces. You can remove a center strip only, position and stick that part on, then peel off each additional section and stick it down. I have to say the look and feel is great (not tacky like invisible shield). It's almost like it's not even there.

Highly recommended. Yeah sure the glass back is a bit stupid too IMO. But guess what. STICK IT IN A CASE and all the problems go away. Heck Steve Jobs is giving you a free case. Take it, use it. You hate cases? Then don't buy an iPhone 4.

Virgin Mobile MiFi 2200

http://www.virginmobileusa.com/phones/mobile-broadband-2200.html

- It's for those of us poor saps stuck in the US with iPhones and refuse to give up our unlimited data plans and don't plan to jailbreak (and missed that flashlight app by 2 hrs).
- $150 from best buy
- Performs pretty much just like their previous usb modem: Same sprint evdo 3g network and coverage, same speeds, same pricing plan, same great pay only what you need when you need it.
- 4 hrs of batter life on a charge. I tested this, and it indeed does last 4 hrs.
- It's a complete router with a ton of settings on it's built in little web server config pages.
- Setting up couldn't be easier with the wpa password printed on a sticker on the back along with the ssid (you can of course change all this if you want to).
- Range was good (covered my entire house).
- It does get pretty darn hot.
- The best part is the freedom you get with this thing. Having no wires or anything sticking out of your laptop is awesome. Not needing any kind of drivers (no OS specific dependencies) is even more awesome. Having it be a mobile wifi hotspot which you can use with a variety of devices (up to 5 at a time) like: nintedo ds, psp, ipad, ipod touch, iphone (take that stupid wifi only restricted apps aka evil at&t) is the most awesome-ist. On a recent road trip we rubber banded the mifi to the back of the car rear view mirror for really great signal reception. My wife surfed the entire time on the macbook pro this way.
- I tried iPhone 4 facetime over mif and it works! The video stuttered once in a while but I was surprised by the quality.
- It comes with an AC adapter charger and a usb cable (mifi uses a micro usb port). The problem is once you plug it into a laptop it tries to go into tethering mode which then shuts down the wifi hotspot part of it. I found that you can charge it from an external battery pack like the Just moble gum pro and still continue to use it at the same time. Another option is getting a cable that only charges (no data) so that way you can charge it off of your laptop's usb port but still use it as a hotspot. I little research came up with 2 possible options (neither which I have tried): Best Buy Rocketfish ($15) and a retractable one from 3gstore ($15).

Highly recommended! It's a neat little device. I've always wanted to own a mifi device ever since verizon got one but I was not going to pay a huge monthly fee for something I would only use a few times a year. Virgin mobile comes through again with the right product coupled with the right pricing structure (except for that annoying 30 days your minutes expire thing though).

UPDATE: 10/14/2010
- So they updated their plans. Now there are only two: $10 for 100MB for 10 days or $40 unlimited data for 30 days. The unlimited is quite reasonable but I kind of miss the $20 for 300MB for 30 days.

SANS DIGITAL TowerRAID TR4M-B

- I picked one up from newegg when they were on sale for $100. (UPDATE: That model might be discontinued now. Here is one that seems similar.)
- My current main server was maxed out on drives (5 hdd and 3 optical).
- I wanted a cheap but speedy solution to further expand my storage space. This was mostly for media that was already archived so redundancy/raid wasn't import.
- The key thing I wanted out of this was esata port multiplier.
- The case/fan is very quiet. I can't hear it over my PC at all. I threw in a 2TB seagate 5900 rpm and a 2TB samsung 5400 rpm drive. Drives are barely warm to the touch.
- Drive installation was a snap using just a few thumb screws. Install the drives from bottom to top.
- The pcie 1x card that came with it was: SiI 3132 CN, bios r7.5.07. You can grab the latest bios and drivers from here. 7.7.03 were the latest ones at this time. I flashed the "r" version (update: flash the "b" version if you don't need raid which is what I'm using now.  Monoprice also sells the cards for around $13). The cool thing about how you flash the bios update is you do it right from device properties (device manager, storage controllers, siI 3132, flash bios tab). That is way slick. No need to mess with any bios flash utilities.
- I didn't even bother to install the drivers. If you just want 4 extra drives you don't need to. Though I am burning through a lot of drive letters. If I run out I can simply start using ntfs volume mount points.
- Performance was exactly what I expected. With one drive going I got around 88 MB/sec which is what I expected from these slower spinning hard drives. If I hit both drives at the same time I get around a combined total of 150 MB/sec. From what I understand that is a pcie X 1 bottleneck.
- The esata card has two ports so I still have one port free. I can easily drop in another one of these raid towers for another 4 drives in the future.
- I would stay away from RAID on these cheaper software based raid cards. Performance can be quite unbearable.

Highly recommended! For $100 it's hard to beat. You get full sata speeds if you only hit one drive at a time and even 150MB/sec is plenty for what I need if I happen to hit more than one drive (which is rare in my situation). This totally demolishes the performance of cheaper NAS systems like the dlink 323 (which btw still costs more). If you already got a pc on 24/7 and don't need raid this solution is a no brainer.

UPDATE 4/29/2012:
Power supply blew on it.  A spare one seems to be $60 so I'm not sure if it is even worth it.  I've contacted support to see what my options are.  Luckily, I had a second one and was able to get things back up and running.  I also decided to flash with the "b" for base version of the 7.7.03 bios.  After a reboot you will need install the BASE version of the driver.  After another reboot my drives came back up just fine.

Freedom i-Connex Keyboard

- I've been looking a bluetooth keyboard to use with my iPhone ever since iOS 4 was released. At first I tried a really crappy one from Frys which I returned. I guess you can say I went too cheap. You know there is such a thing as going too cheap I always say.
- I've been keeping my eye on this model for a while waiting for a US retailer to finally get them in stock. I picked it up from expansys-usa.com for $70 which is pretty steep and there weren't barely any reviews out there. So I took a risk and ordered it. They shipped quickly and got it in less than a week.
- The overall design is pretty feature rich. You've got a dedicated power switch, a lock switch to lock the keyboard in an open position, and even a nifty slide out stand for you iphone. It takes 2XAAA batteries. They cram an amazing amount of well designed features into a very compact space.
- Keyboard layout: It's cramped, and it's definitely going to take some practice to get good at touch typing on this thing. The keys are mostly where you would expect them. Some keys are just really tiny which makes it a bit hard to hit consistently like the right spacebar, the backspace is really small, enter is fine, right shift is a bit of a stretch with the up arrow crammed in where you would expect the shift to be, B is a bit further too because it's on the other half of the split, and most symbols and number keys are a bit shifted to the right. The keys feel a bit mushy to me and could probably be a tad more responsive but not bad overall. You can definitely type faster on this than the soft touch keyboard but nowhere near as fast as even say a 10" netbook keyboard. I'll probably improve over time but I'll have to work at it.
- Construction materials seem to be mostly plastic. Though it seems well made I wonder how durable this thing really is.
- It comes with a nice carrying case.
- The iPhone stand works very well and holds the phone in landscape or portrait. There are a few different angle adjustments but I wish you can prop up the phone in a more vertical position.
- All the multimedia buttons work well and there is even a home key.
- Since it's just a standard bluetooth keyboard with a few iOS extras thrown it, it should work fine with any PC with bluetooth or even your Playstation 3 (untested at this time).

If you need something very portable that lets you get some real work done, and if you are willing to practice then this keyboard might be for you. If you don't need the portability then probably something like the similarly priced Apple wireless bluetooth keyboard might be a better option. Recommended with reservations especially at the steep $70 price.

One more thing. I wrote this entire review on my iPhone 4 using this keyboard.

TomTom US & Canada (iPhone)

First, a big thank you to AppAdvice from which I won this app from ($60 value). It's a great site which I also follow on twitter. Check out their video podcast too.
- I already use Navigon on my iPhone which I love and purchased all the in app upgrades too. This is more of a quick impressions since I've only messed around with TomTom for about an hour but drove around 800 miles with Navigon. Navigon recently had a very nice ios 4.0 update so I'll be commenting on that too (fyi, any in app purchases with navigon you can just redownload after you update the app. It's smart enough to know you purchased it before and it will tell you it is downloading again for free).
- It's about a 1.5gb download so like navigon all map data is local. This is great compared to other solutions like Google Navigator or the free mapquest iphone app which streams the map data. This means you'll still have a fully functional gps navigation system even in areas with no coverage.
- In general I find tomtom has more options, some quite handy, some pretty useless.
- Route calculation seems to be a bit slower on tomtom but both do a pretty good job with rarely an odd ball suggestion. I like how navigon shows 3 routes right up front, recommends one but lets you choose.
- Flipping between 3d/2d map modes and over view of entire trip takes way too much back and forth menu navigation on tomtom. Navigon does it in a lot fewer actions and just gets you to the most used options and views faster than tomtom.
- 3D view graphics are very good on both but I like Navigon a bit better. I think tomtom has a very nice clean look, and it's easy to identify all the import elements. I even like the dots they put on the route so you can see relative movement easier. Navigon looks a bit more busy but I just like the more "realistic" look of navigon (Panorama view 3d enabled). I like how the horizon on navigon reflects the current weather and even the position of the sun.
- TomTom has a lot of voice options to choose from where navigon has basically none. So if you want to be bossed around by a british lady you can! Another neat option is the ability to pause your audio instead of just quiet it down while the nav lady speaks. This is handy if you are listening to a podcast/audio book and you don't want to miss anything. Navigon only quiets down the background audio. TomTom has only the standard pause/play,next/previous ipod controls while navigon has a stripped down version of the ipod app built in. This isn't so import since they both support multitasking now. Also, you can play streaming audio apps in the background while using the navigation app say pandora. This works with both tomtom and navigon. The only thing is even in tomtom the option to pause background audio won't work with streaming audio (only the built in ipod player).
- Both apps run great in the background. You sill get audio directions no matter what you are doing and hopping back in the app instantly puts you right back in the map at your current location. It works really really well.
- TomTom and Navigon integrates google search right into the app for finding a destination. An updated POI database is nice but it's no google.
- Traffic option is $20/year which I did not try. Navigon is a $25 one time charge. I HATE reoccurring fees.
- Both seems to get a gps lock fairly quickly.
- Speed warning is fixed at 5mph which is really annoying. +5mph is my normal driving speed so the alert goes off constantly if I have the option on. Navgion lets you choose between 5, 10, 15, 20 mph separately for urban and non urban areas. I have it set at 10mph which is just right for me.
- Both do text to speech pretty well and speak all street names.

TomTom is just loaded with options and might be a bit overwhelming. Navigon has a cleaner easier to navigate interface and does all the critical things right. Both are excellent options in my opinion. The annual fee for traffic in TomTom does bug me though. You really can't go wrong with either app but I'll probably be sticking with navigon - better graphics, useful speed warning, cleaner more efficient UI navigation, and no annual fees for any of the options. The only thing I think I'm really going to miss from TomTom is the ability to pause background audio while the nav lady speaks.