tech, humor, and nuance by David Chartier—tech distiller, freelance writer, Macworld contributor, wrangler of Finer Things in Tech
Tumblr: still shipping through the madness. Fuck...
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I just paid off our AT&T account in full, told them I wanted to unlock my iPhone 4S (purchased only eight months ago), and they did it without a fuss. Sweet.
So, anyone want a slightly used, white, 64GB, protected-with-AppleCare+, unlocked iPhone 4S? Hit the store or get in touch with questions.
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Before we switched to Verizon this week, Jess had an iPhone 4. She told me to save some money and get her another 4, but I surprised her with a 4S.
I think she likes it.
T-Mobile has released its Q4 2011 earnings. Overall revenue dropped slightly, but contract deactivations rocketed up to 802,000 (from 186,000 in Q3 2011). The reason?
However, not carrying the iPhone led to a significant increase in contract deactivations in the fourth quarter of 2011.
So the iPhone 4S is a dud that sold more than twice the units in its opening weekend than the iPhone 4 and is now directly named and blamed in a major US carrier’s earnings statement for nearly one million customer defections.
Got it.
via 9to5Mac
GelaSkins makes hard cases for the iPhone 4/4S and 3GS now. I’m on the hunt for a new case and always liked their stuff. One of these might do the trick.
Apple released a new Christmas-themed ad for the iPhone 4S. It’s cute.
However: I’m surprised to see Apple promote using Siri in-flight. Despite questioning the reasoning behind why we need to put devices into airplane mode, the law is the law.
I took our dogs for a walk this morning, and it turned into an on-the-fly trial of Siri and iOS 5’s new voice dictation features. Yes, I became That Guy speaking “read my message” to myself on a walk around our neighborhood, and it was great.
While walking, I started thinking about an AgileBits blog post I had to finish drafting, so I decided to try iOS 5’s new voice dictation abilities (which are iPhone 4S-only) with Elements, one of my favorite Dropbox-powered iOS text editors. Despite background noise of cars passing by and, for part of the walk, getting close to a bridge over a highway and one of Chicago’s busy L trains, iOS 5 did a pretty good job of translating two short paragraphs of the post. I should note that I was using Apple’s standard iPhone headphone set for all microphone input and triggering Siri.
There were two instances where iOS 5’s voice dictation tools didn’t place proper punctuation, and there were two word jumbles. But on the whole, I was impressed with how well and quickly iOS 5 translated my speech into text in Elements. I learned a handy tip too: you can select some text, hit the microphone button, speak your peace, and iOS 5 is smart enough to overwrite the selection you made with your new text.
In the middle of dictating the blog post, I received an iMessage from my wife. After nonchalantly looking around to check if anyone else was on the block to see me turn into That Guy from the iPhone 4S commercial, I embraced my transformation, toggled Siri, and said “read my message.” It went really well. Siri’s pretty good at pronouncing complex or abnormal words, and the process of replying with a couple of voice commands and speaking my message went great, aside from aforementioned punctuation quirks.
Unfortunately, my iPhone 4S voice experiments didn’t go well for at least one party involved: my dogs. We’ve trained them fairly well and they know quite a few voice commands. Nearly every time I started talking to Siri or dictating part of the blog post, they would look back or hesitate at the next turn. I wager they can get used to this as time goes on, and maybe I can get in a better habit of addressing Oscar and Maddy specifically when a voice command is for them, and not my phone.
I’ve enjoyed using Siri for the usual things like setting timers, checking tomorrow’s weather, driving directions, and sending the occasional iMessage. Those uses quickly became habit, and I like iOS 5’s voice abilities even more now that they work this well out in the field.
Siri does not yet directly support posting to social media services. But Josh Sunshine has a clever tip to rectify that, which basically leverage the SMS posting options from Twitter and Facebook. This should work for any service that offers an SMS gateway.
“I think Bajarin is correct that Siri is a huge deal, and that if it truly thrives, it will adversely affect traditional web search like Google and Bing. But I can’t see Apple monetizing it through advertising. That’s tacky.”
