My Thoughts ... : Consumer

An iPhone to Match Your Kicks – This is So Stupid …

Donnie Wilemon — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:35:00 GMT

OK, this is a physical manifestation of why I soooo hate the whole “Apple thing” … I mean, seriously.

The Apple Tax – Get Less for More

Donnie Wilemon — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:17:58 GMT

I’ve discussed previously how the consumer’s dollar doesn’t go as far with Apple products, but this chart illustrates it much better than words. The data below shows how you can save money on hardware that is actually more powerful (fast processors, more memory, bigger hard drives, etc).

As a consumer, make sure you understand the extra money Apple requires of you for your computing experience. Do real comparisons of their hardware versus other options in the marketplace and you may be surprised by the savings you can achieve. Don’t buy into the hype and hysteria; make informed decisions and get more for your dollar.

No, I will not fix your computer …

Donnie Wilemon — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:37:04 GMT

OK, this was just too good to pass up … might come in handy one day, huh ? Enjoy …

Remember: Going HDTV Is Not So Easy for Everyone

Donnie Wilemon — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 23:40:45 GMT

I think this kind of speaks for itself … watch the video.

Your 3G iPhone Is Broken - Do You Care ?

Donnie Wilemon — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:47:03 GMT

I thought this story on MSNBC was very interesting ... more proof about the growing issues Apple is dealing with around quality, technical issues, and customer satisfaction. It's so fascinating to see how the media continues to treat Apple with kid gloves by turning what would otherwise be very negative press for any other company, especially Microsoft, and spin it to something positive in regard to their "fanboy" base. As you can no doubt tell from my previous postings, I am ready for some "reality reporting" for Apple ... Yes, I understand what they do well and I am more than ready to admit that - but when they do some of the same things that other tech companies get crucified for in the press, I think they should be exposed and treated in the same manner.

"Such a string of mishaps and missteps might throw another electronics company into crisis. But of course, Apple Inc. isn't just another electronics company." ... This is exactly what I'm talking about ! I would ask this author for an explanation of just why Apple isn't just another electronics company. When they screw something up, they should be called on it roundly - even more so considering how the media has gushed over everything they've done for the last several years regardless of how truly innovative it was (or not).

"There was no going back at that point, but after I sold it, I quickly started to regret it," he said. Bruce's complaints echo countless Web forum posts: The device gets uncomfortably warm. Programs crash. And it so seldom connects to AT&T's speedier third-generation, or 3G, data network that Bruce carries the iPhone around with 3G turned off." ... Another quote from a devoted Apple fanboy. The device gets warm. It crashes constantly. It never connects to the 3G network (which was supposed to be the entire reason for the second iPhone release). Yet why isn't there some sort of outcry in the media to begin to paint Apple as a dismal failure with this release at least technically ? This article was buried 10 headlines deep on MSNBC.

This article also contains complaints about Macbook Airs getting too warm and other issues (iTunes, etc). That said, every tech company has issues with releases ... but everyone should be held to at least similar standards by at least the same media that routinely criticizes other companies. Apple's response to this article ?

"Apple, which declined to comment for this story, said little as complaints rolled in, then released a software fix it said would improve the device's ability to connect to 3G networks. Since then, users on various sites have reported no improvement."

Must be nice.

What about Blackberries ?

Donnie Wilemon — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:21:09 GMT

** Update: I've gotten some comments about inaccuracies here; investigation on my end ensues. Thanks for your patience and take this information with an asterisk for now. My apologies for now. **

I am an equal opportunity guy, so, while I'm at it, let's discuss some points about the Blackberry that you might not know ... especially in regard to a Windows Mobile device.

1. Did you know you can’t view HTML e-mail on any of the BlackBerry phones for sale today?
2. BlackBerry’s e-mail server has gone down several times over the last year, which means BlackBerry users couldn’t e-mail, possibly at vital moments.
3. With BlackBerry devices, you can only choose from a few devices that are on the market. Did you know that none of them offer a touch screen yet?
4. Did you know there’s almost no customization on BlackBerrys, besides changing the home screen?
5. To listen to music on a BlackBerry, you must use Roxio Music Manager. On Windows Mobile, just use your existing Windows Media Player playlists.
6. Document edits made on Blackberry devices are lost when transferred to a PC. With Office Mobile, only on Windows Mobile, you can work on docs just like your PC.
7. Windows Mobile works perfectly with Exchange ActiveSync. Advanced security policies help to secure corporate assets and personal data.
8. With a Windows Mobile Phone, you can display PowerPoint presentations on a screen by connecting to a Bluetooth projector. With a BlackBerry, you’ll always need your laptop.
9. You can keep in touch with Pocket MSN on Windows Mobile. Instant messaging enables you to say “hello” to your friends, just like on your PC.
10. With the Live Search application on your Windows Mobile phone, you can find cheap gas, the latest movies, and more ...

Is the iPhone Perfect ? What you might not know ...

Donnie Wilemon — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:09:41 GMT

Highly doubtful if you go by what is now beginning to leak out from those that would otherwise look for any reason to buy an iPhone. Apparently there is some momentum beginning to build behind the problems the iPhone is encountering. I thought this was a very interesting read from an Apple fanboy site you're probably already familiar with - www.gizmodo.com. Check this out ...

The iPhone 3G is infuriatingly buggy. It crashes. It doesn't get great speeds when it should, switching to EDGE in areas that have 3G coverage. Coming out of the subway, it takes minutes to find a signal again and stop claiming to get "No Service" in the middle of Manhattan, often requiring a restart. Requiring a restart to get service! What is this crap? And when I do have service, calls still drop and fail all the time. The keyboard lags so much that writing text messages is more annoying than using T9 texting on a number pad. The orientation switching when you rotate the phone is inconsistent at best. Backups take minutes, sometimes hours. Sometimes, the audio output dies and it needs to be restarted to listen to music through headphones ...

... but wait, there's more ...

I called Apple famed customer support to see if they had any solutions for these bugs. Their fix for my problem getting service when coming out of the subway? Turn Airplane Mode on and off. If there's a more ghetto fix for a problem than that, I'd like to hear it. Last time I checked the C train didn't have wings. As for when all of these bugs will be fixed, the guy on the phone said "Sooner or later it'll be working to its full potential ... If you're interested in reading the entire rant, check out http://gizmodo.com/5040593/cranky-windows-guy-apples-iphone-bugs-stopped-me-from-switching-to-a-mac.

>> In regard to Windows Mobile versus the iPhone, did you know ...

1. The iPhone has no physical keyboard. With Windows Mobile, you can choose a keyboard, a touch screen, or both! Your phone is truly personal.
2. Window Mobile lets you multitask, with two applications running at the same time. Only one application can run at a time on the iPhone.
3. Windows Mobile camera phones can take pictures up to 5 megapixels. The iPhone’s camera is only 2 megapixels with no flash, video, or optical zoom.
4. ... the iPhone can’t record videos? With Windows Mobile, you can, with up to 640×480 resolution and 30 frames per second (FPS).
5. The iPhone does not have an exchangeable battery. All Windows Mobile phones do.
6. The iPhone’s Web browser still doesn’t support Adobe Flash — if you visit a Flash website, all you’ll get is white space and error messages.
7. With an iPhone, you’ll pay extra if you leave the US— expect charges up to $20 per megabyte and no image downscaling or data compression.
8. Using an iPhone in the car isn’t really hands-free. No voice dialing and limited navigation and Bluetooth ...
9. The iPhone will cost more over the mandatory two-year contract than what its predecessors did, even with the lower price point.
10. Bottom line: the iPhone still has no removable battery, no voice dialing, no picture messaging, no video recording, no Copy and Paste.

IBM Reports Apple #1 in Reported Security Vulnerabilities

Donnie Wilemon — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:49:31 GMT

Infoworld is reporting that a new IBM security study is showing Apple as the #1 provider of security vulnerabilities. Final results were close, according to the IBM X-Force 2008 mid-year report , with Apple achieving vulnerability disclosure score of 3.2 percent, followed by Joomla (open source) with 2.7 percent and Microsoft at 2.5 percent. Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers had a marked drop in critical vulnerabilities from 2007. Both browsers had six memory corruption vulnerabilities, down from 20 and eight respectively in 2007, however Firefox fell short of it's rival with one security zone bypass, and a single miscellaneous vulnerability. Firefox had 11 security zone bypass and four buffer overflow flaws in 2007.

NPD Study: Average Mac Computer Price More That Twice That of Average PC

Donnie Wilemon — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:20:32 GMT

Very interesting ... There are a couple of ways to look at this, but why stand on your head to explain away the blaring truth ?

Specifications often vary sharply for these systems, with Apple often focusing on faster processors than some rivals in notebooks but at the expense of memory and hard drive space. Its insistence on using mobile processors and custom designs for desktops, however, has created feature discrepancies where a Dell Inspiron 518 tower nearing the $700 mark features two more processor cores, three times as much memory, and twice the hard drive space of an $1,199 entry-level iMac despite both coming with near-equivalent LCDs. While the average price for Windows-based systems is described in the NPD data as having largely flattened and unlikely to drop further in the near future, the disparity between these and Macs has only widened in the last few months, according to eWeek. Apple's general policy of refusing to alter prices until its next hardware revision has reduced the value of its systems relative to Windows competitors.

"If Apple is going to continue its market share gains, or simply maintain that 8.5 percent U.S. share, prices must go down and configurations bulk up," eWeek notes. "The math is simply undeniable."

The Microsoft Mojave Experiment

Donnie Wilemon — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:29:21 GMT

Microsoft gets a bunch of people in a room with negative impressions of Vista (and no previous experience) and shows them what they think is the next version of Windows. Microsoft asks them for feedback and opinions. Everyone is "wow'd" except for one skeptical guy. Most of the ABMers and Apple fanboys out there are poo-poo'ing this new approach saying it really ignores the problems with Vista and blames the users for what is really a substandard product. I couldn't disagree more ... Microsoft has been more than forthcoming about some of the shortfalls in our bringing Vista to the marketplace (hardware requirements, application compatibility, etc), and we've done many things to address these issues. However, the plain, hard truth of the matter is that Vista is a very secure, high-quality product that performs very well in many environments. This truth is lost on many in the general population due to what have been some very effective (and unaddressed) Apple ads of which I'm sure you're all aware (the Mac guy versus the PC guy). Trying to remake a Vista "first impression" will be difficult, but needs to be done ... hopefully the biggest mistake in the Vista release - allowing a competitor to falsely label the product with misinformation - will be a lesson well learned for the next time around.

Windows Mobile Smashes iPhone Sales, Easily

Donnie Wilemon — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:40:42 GMT

You have to wonder why this kind of news isn't more prominently featured in the at-large press ... could there be some sort of illogical bias or HYPE with the media in regard to their "relationship" with Apple ? Seriously - you'd think every other person on earth had an iPhone ... the simple truth of the matter, according to IDC, (the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets), is that Windows Mobile sold approximately 4.5 million phones during the year's first quarter, up 1.8 million year-over-year. Apple, meanwhile, sold only 1.7 million iPhones according to IDC's figures for the same quarter - Microsoft was actually up more for the quarter YOY than Apple sold the entire quarter !

iPhone Vulnerable - Lacks Security Updates, Doesn't Want to Talk About it ...

Donnie Wilemon — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 03:00:49 GMT

Robert Vamosi reports on his news.com site that Apple has not kept the iPhone operating system up to date with patches it has issued for the desktop. The iPhone runs a stripped-down version of Mac OS 10.5 and automatically checks for security updates. The last update for the phone, 1.1.4, was issued in February. That means iPhone users are still vulnerable to a flaw discovered by Charlie Miller in March - that's 4 months ago for those of you who are counting. I guess the most telling piece of information from Vamosi, apart from the fact that Apple hasn't updated this greatest and most innovative piece of hardware the world has ever seen (sic), is his last sentence ...

>> "Apple does not respond to requests for comment on its software security policies ..."

How nice must this be ? When did the rules change ? I didn't know this was an option ! Don't even talk to me about "enterprise ready" and Apple. I want the same set of rules applied to them that everyone else, including Microsoft, has to play by. How many times has Windows Mobile had to jump through every security hoop in the universe to justify a proof-of-concept inside a particular company, but the iPhone/iMac/i-whatever can just glide in on pure marketing and never have to prove a thing. Microsoft has a completely transparent message about our security processes and communicates them regularly to our customers and the press as part of our "Trustworthy Computing" initiative ... on the other hand you have Apple, which "does not respond to requests for comment on its software security policies". Makes me think that they don't have any "software security policies" other than to just patch stuff whenever they get around to it.

Why doesn't the "professional IT media" begin holding their feet to the fire on this stuff a little more ? Why the continued pass ??

'Get a Mac ... it Just Works' Indeed - Apple Patches 25 Flaws with Latest Update

Donnie Wilemon — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:52:59 GMT

I guess this is the "And then some" part ... Apple today released TWENTY-FIVE (25) updates for the Mac OS (10.5.4) and Safari (3.2.1) browser (and some networking hardware) - THIRTEEN (13) of which are security related. Fixes/enhancements/vulnerabilities were littered across the products and include alias manager, CoreTypes, c++filt, dock, launch services, Net-SNMP, Ruby, SMB File Server, System Configuation, Tomcat, VPN, and WebKit. This is across processors and client/server scenarios, but, nonetheless, do the math below - unless I'm mistaken, that comes to approximately 2GB. Not as easy at it looks or advertises, huh Steve ?

Seriously - creating and maintaining a full-featured and powerful operating system for today's computers is not an easy or perfect process. The lengths that Apple goes to in their advertising to persuade the general public that they can become immune to the various trials and tribulations of personal computing if they buy a Mac because it "it just works" is misleading at best and false-advertising at worst IMHO. This speaks for itself ... updates/patches/fixes are a way of life regardless of the platform - no company is excluded. See how stable and/or secure your Mac is if you ignore a couple rounds of these updates ...

Amen

Donnie Wilemon — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:10:18 GMT

When does the honeymoon end "journalists", or should I say "fanboys" ? It's sickening.

Link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-9964190-60.html?tag=nefd.top

Office Live Workspace - Office Meets SaaS

Donnie Wilemon — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 06:22:00 GMT

I'm also a very interested participant in the Office Live Workspace BETA currently underway. There are tons of applications for this service (see below) ... I am anxious to see how it's offered and how well it's received. Microsoft Office Live Workspace is your online place to save, access, and share documents and files - save 1,000+ Microsoft Office documents and files in one place and access/preview them from almost any computer, whether or not it has Office installed. Seriously, why even try Google Apps ? You already know Office and this new service only makes it that much easier.

Learn more about what you can do with Office Live Workspace.

>> Sign-up to try it out yourself ... pre-registration is now underway. Also, check out the Office Live Workspace Team Blog.

There are dozens of ways to use Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta for work, school, and home projects.

- For Work ...

Access documents when away from your desk

Save documents and access them from any computer
Stay productive at home, an Internet café, library, airport, etc.

Share documents with others

Gather feedback on a document, report, or presentation
Share with people who can’t access your corporate network

Prepare for a meeting

Share the agenda, minutes, and action items
Post meeting handouts or presentations

- For School ...

Organize a study group

Work together on assignments and share notes from class
Keep a shared schedule and task list for your group

Keep track of important school information

Manage schedules from sports to registration deadlines
Track your GPA and progress toward degree requirements

Coordinate with club or team members

Post and manage schedules (for sports, clubs, etc.)
Share lists of who brings what (no more e-mails back and forth)

- For Home ...

Organize an event

Use for a party, camping trip, even a wedding
Share to-do lists, timelines, budgets, directions

Save your information and keep track of favorite things

Access important passwords, frequent flyer numbers, etc.
Create Top 10 lists of your favorite films, restaurants, books, etc.—and keep them private or share with friends and family

Prepare for a trip

Plan for the trip with travel budget and packing list templates
Share your itinerary, contact info, and important documents with colleagues or family