A Consuming Experience: Apple

Showing posts with label Apple. Show all posts

Thursday, 30 September 2010

iPhone 4 free case: last chance TODAY to get one!

TODAY 30 Sept 2010 is your last chance to order a free iPhone case from Apple - see the Apple iPhone 4 Case Program - if you got yourself an iPhone 4, which I recently did.

The point of course is that the iPhone 4 suffered from signal problems if you held it in the way that most people hold their phones when talking, so in an attempt to firefight the resulting PR disaster Apple started offering free cases which solve the antenna issue.

These blogs have reviews and pics of some of the cases available.

To get your free case, on your iPhone 4 go to the App Store and search for "iPhone 4 case", you may have to scroll a bit in the results to find it. You order the case through the iPhone 4 Case Program app.

Personally, I went for the black Speck PixelSkin HD case (see photos) and I'm very happy with it. Smart, unobtrusive, and it seems pretty tough and hard-wearing.

Only downside is there is no screen protector (but most of the cases don't seem to offer any), and if like me you have feeble fingers, turning the iPhone on and off takes a bit more doing as you have to press it very firmly through the case for it to register.

I wasn't sure from the pic whether dirt might get trapped in the grid lines but luckily the design is such that the grooves are too wide and shallow for that to happen.

Monday, 20 September 2010

iPhone 4 & iTunes: minimising iTunes; & iPhone experience part 1

(iPhone 4 photo by Yutaka Tsutano)

I just got an iPhone 4. No I didn't go for the cheapest possible or even cheap iPhone deal, I went with Three. Partly because from their involving me in their various consumer trials, I've been impressed with them (I ain't never going back to T-Mobile again, not unless they pay me. Lots).

I'm not an Apple fan due to their closedness, but I finally thought I'd see what all the fuss was about, on both the shininess and usability fronts.

However, I'm going to try to use the iPhone with as little Apple stuff as possible.

I wasn't best pleased about having to:

install Apple's iTunes on my computer
get an Apple ID account, and
connect the iPhone to the computer

- before I could even use the iPhone as a basic phone that you can just make or receive phone calls on!

So it's timely that Broadstuff recently (in iTunes Bloatware - and its antidote) pointed to a post on how to install iTunes with minimal components.

I know with Android phones you have to have a Google account and enter that, but at least you don't have to get to a computer and install stuff you don't want before you can use the phone as a simple phone.

There's probably a way to activate the iPhone 4 without iTunes, but I didn't have time to try looking for it.

I'll be blogging about my Apple newbie experiences from time to time. (I did once have the use of a MacBook for a while, but I hardly turned it on as I couldn't get used to the lack of the keyboard shortcuts I'm so accustomed to in Windows. On Linux I've even change the hotkeys to Windows ones).

Thursday, 24 June 2010

iPhone 4 deals in the UK

Moneysupermarket.com have published a helpful table (scroll to the end of the webpage) comparing UK iPhone 4 deals, in order of total cost over the contract period.

Tesco seem the cheapest.

Not that I'm necessarily rushing to get one myself.

I'm not normally an Apple person. Their admittedly very clever marketing and ingenious brand imaging haven't succeeded yet in winning me over as I'm don't care that much about fashion and I don't like Apple's over-controlling and locked down approach, which takes away users' own power and control - from the way iTunes was originally DRM'd to the hilt (despite the availability of some iTunes files now in non-DRM form), to Apple's insistence on vetting all third party developer iPhone and iPad apps to their own arbitrary moralistic and possibly monopolistic criteria (as witness what happened initially with Simon Maddox's excellent and consumer-championing 0870 app) and taking an unreasonably long time to do it in too, to their refusal to support Flash (e.g. for viewing YouTube videos), and effectively trying to stop cross-platform mobile development. I think the US were right to start anti-trust probes into Apple.

But, having tried a friend's (older model) iPhone, whose soft onscreen keyboard is much more accurate and faster to use than the Android G1's soft keyboard, and having seen the huge range of iPhone apps available for free or at very reasonable prices, I have to say I'm just a little bit tempted…