Darkavich's Daily Ramblings Ramblings of a Mad Sys-Admin

In response to some of my friends who think I am anti-iphone 😉

Oy! I think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but the problems I see with it is the data network choice (but will withhold my judgement until I can play with one on edge and see if it’s fast enough or not) and the total lack of knowledge of the people selling the phone. (someone that has one, let’s talk 😉

I stopped into both an apple store and AT&T store and had bad experiences… Will that stop me from getting one? Probably not. Mario knows me better than that… it’s the performance of the data network that will sway me one way or another. It’s one of the reasons I refused to buy a Treo when everyone on the block was raving about them.

Lots of people think I am negative because of the company I work for. But come on guys! Remember I bought a GSM phone that only supported 9600 baud as well as a wireless attachment for my palm that did 19,200 baud? I needed it for specific reasons and not for all the wiz-bang features everyone else did.

For those of you that remember: I got the Nokia 9000il because I could send/receive faxes from it and it had a telnet/ssh client available. This was critical for me as I was consulting at the time and needed to fix a system problem from anywhere in the world. BTW, I think I was the only person in california that actually had the phone activated properly. Helps that you have a relative that sells them 😉

Anyway, I am just sitting waiting for more sources of information to come in. BTW, I am really curious why neither Apple or AT&T are willing to discuss how many units have been sold or how many have been activated? What’s to hide guys?

I see a new video of dissection has been posted, so i will check that out and see if that helps answers some of my questions.

So, wanting to be impartial I went to the apple store here in Vegas (yea on vacation) just to see how things went.

While waiting to talk to people the woman behind the register answered 3 phone calls that she answered the same way “No, we do not have any more iPhones” and “Sorry, we do not know when they will be in.”

There were actually three demo units on the counter that people could play with. The question was asked if they should demonstrate how to use the phone by calling someone, and was told “I’m sorry, we are not allowed to use them to make calls”.

Now I was so taken aback by this I had to ask.. “why not?” to which the response was exactly what I expected. “They do not have service activated because too many people would use them to make calls”.

Holly CRAP!!!! Your selling a fracken phones! You better damn well have fully functioning units. Hell, you can demo the internet (because it was on wifii..) They had the nerve to tell someone “See how fast the internet is?” when I asked “is it wifi or edge?” and they could not tell me!!! I pointed out “Uhm, if the phone isn’t activated I am pretty sure it’s wifi” and well that’s just plain misleading to the customer.

BTW, if there is someone that knows how to tell if a phone is currently on wifi or edge, please let me know.

This experience has left me scratching my head. Anyone remember the Nokia 9000il phone. Best phone ever made in it’s day. Those of you that don’t know what I am talking about, rent a copy of “The Saint” to see it in action. I loved this phone, but it died because nobody knew how to sell it. Go into any Pac-Bell wireless store, which became cingular, which is now AT&T (how ironic), and they couldn’t tell you anything about it, and what they did tell you more than likely was a lie.

I sure hope this is not an omen of things to come. Remember even if you have the best product in the world you will never sell it if your sales team are a bunch of uneducated liars.

Keeping my fingers crossed for when I visit the san diego office and as them the same questions.

…It does think I am a geek.

So today I looked at the suggested recordings and it recorded the CES 2007. I actually found several items I may look at getting.

ionAudio Vinyl Recording USB Turntable

iAxe

Outcast Speakers

I actually own this one:

Gorillapod

As some of you know, my camera went belly up on my last vacation on like the 3rd day of my vacation. So I have no pictures or movies to share with you. I took the camera back to Sony (I did have an extended warranty) but fully expected them to not cover the camera.

It took about a week longer than expected, but in the end they could not fix the camera. They gave me back my original purchase price. I basically received a free upgraded camera for the same price. So I am working on learning all the new features of this new unit. So, I hope to have lots of new photos online soon.