I flew back to Boston last night from LAX, and it made me think about all the states I have never been to. I have the west coast and north east pretty much nailed down, but you may notice a pattern in where I haven’t spent much time. Maybe I can do another road trip sometime along a more southerly route.
On my flight home for thanksgiving I decided this thing was too awesome to not share…(Yes is a portable garage type thing for your car)
After playing around with the storm last week I got to thinking about ways the iPhone can be improved. I’m sure there are a lot of things everyone wants like copy and paste, but my idea is that the next firmware update should include a feature allowing users to customize shortcuts on thier phones.
My phone is usually left on Edge to conserve battery, but when I plan on using the internet for a while I often switch to 3G so its faster. What I really want is a way to quickly turn 3G on/off without having to scroll though 3 screens to do it.
The app store revolutionized how we think about and use phones by enabling users to customize software, but I think there is an opportunity to use the physical buttons as hot keys for the most frequent tasks. The screen shot feature already takes advantage of the home/sleep keys, but owners should be able to customize any combination of the home/sleep/volume keys as shortcuts however they please. Sure I have the option to set double-click home as my iPod or contacts, but since I barely ever talk on the phone I don’t really get much use out of it.
I finally got around to testing out the BlackBerry storm on Friday and was mostly unimpressed with what I found. There have been a lot of reviews already, but I wanted to check it out for myself.
Overall I thought it felt pretty cheap and was bit sluggish when navigating, but my biggest problem was with the typing. The keyboard was hard to type quickly on because the entire screen acts as a single button. It was easy to depress but since I kept forgetting to completely take my finger off the screen I continually missed a lot of the letters I was trying to type. This may partly have happened because I am used to just sliding my fingers around the iPhone, but its likely this happens to others as well.
I probably wouldn’t buy one now that I have gotten used to my iPhone, but I am really interested to see where these phones go in the future.
