Life with a Verizon iPhone

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Shane

I’ve been a Sprint customer for a long time. I have good friends who work there and I try to support them and my hometown company just as I hope they prefer AMC Theatres when they can.

However, for the past month or so, I’ve been testing out the Verizon iPhone (DISCLOSURE) thanks to the Verizon Midwest office. Sure, it’s a bit ridiculous that I’m carrying 3 phones right now (work Blackberry, personal Sprint HTC Hero, iPhone), but it actually gives me a nice opportunity to compare and contrast the various benefits and drawbacks of each phone. I also tested a Sprint EVO Shift when I was at SXSW and I’ll be using that as a comparison as well.

Let’s start with the bottom line: I love the iPhone. This should come as no big shocker to people who follow my blog. It isn’t without faults (and I’ll share those here), but overall, my experience with the phone has been great. (In fact, I’ve been delaying writing this post for a while now with the hope that I won’t have to give back the demo device until it is done.)

Network

The advertising for Verizon is all about “the network” and I’ll say, it’s solid. I never really had connection issues for the phone, although there were times when I found the 3G service affected inside of buildings. However, the 3G service was pretty fast, particularly loading web pages, although I’m not sure I can attribute that to the network or to Mobile Safari.

Mobile Hotspot

One nice feature that I was able to use was the Mobile Hotspot. As we were driving to my in-laws’ house in Iowa, I switched it on and Alli was able to connect via WiFi and check her Facebook account while we drove. This is an extra charge on every phone it is available on, including the iPhone on any network. It’s kind of a bogus charge, because it still counts against the data that you are already using. I don’t understand why they should be able to double-charge you for a feature that is built-in.

Applications

It’s simply the best App Store on the planet. Higher quality applications, easy payment, easy purchase on your computer or on your device. There are so many great applications that have been handcrafted with an eye for user experience and design. In comparison to the applications I’ve used on Android devices, the best ones have been applications that were first built for iOS devices. Despite how rigid Apple’s App Store requirements are, there’s something to keeping developers to a standard. Android’s “openness” in their Market just leads to lots and lots of crapplications (trademark pending).

My favorites have been some that were favorites on my iPad. I love the official Twitter application (formerly Tweetie). I love Reeder for reading RSS. I love Instagram, Beluga, Dropbox and especially Gowalla. I love the Weight Watchers Mobile application for tracking my food and activity as a part of my weight loss program. I love that U-Verse has an application that allows me to manage my DVR remotely.

Honestly, two of my favorite discoveries have been games. One I knew about: QRANK Social Trivia and another that I discovered as a more addictive version of Angry Birds called Tiny Wings. I also absolutely love Facebook’s official iPhone application. While on the iPad, I tend to use the full site, but on the iPhone, the application is so efficient and well designed that there’s no reason to go to the full site.

Size and Weight

Another thing that I absolutely love about the iPhone is the form factor. It is well designed and an appropriate weight in my hand. It just feels right. It’s bigger and heavier than my HTC Hero, but thinner. It’s slightly smaller than the HTC EVO Shift, which is thicker on account of the slide out keyboard. The device that the iPhone gets compared to most is probably the HTC EVO 4G, which I’ve seen but never used. The EVO feels massive to me…too large to put in a pocket. The profile of the iPhone is almost unrecognizable when I stow it.

Camera

The iPhone is now the most popular camera in the world. More photos are uploaded now to Flickr via the iPhone than any other camera on the planet. It just goes to show you that “the best camera is the one you have with you.”

And the iPhone camera isn’t just a serviceable portable camera. It’s a good, 5MP point-and-shoot camera (rumor is the iPhone 5 will have an 8MP camera) that also has the ability to shoot video just as effectively as the point-and-shoot equivalent (and now Cisco-murdered) Flip. If you need proof, check out this video that I posted to YouTube from when we went to see The Civil Wars at Lawrence in the Bottleneck. I didn’t edit it at all.

Computer Management

I know a few people who don’t like the iPhone almost solely because it requires Apple’s iTunes to manage. Since I’m in an all-Apple household, that doesn’t bother me even a little bit. In fact, when it comes to using other phones (Blackberry, Android, or Palm-based devices), the fact that they don’t integrate with iTunes is annoying. I love my iTunes library. I don’t want to move it entirely to another library and application. Also, since so many applications on the Mac now integrate with their mobile counterparts, moving documents, photos and files is so easy through the iTunes interface. Sure, it’s bloated, but a lot of software is these days (just open Firefox).

Music

The iPhone was originally presented as an extension of the iPod line of devices. But as anyone knows, it has become an industry unto itself. Still, that iPod application is still one of the ones I use just as much as anything else. Not having to carry a separate iPod for all my music is brilliant and I can carry a ton of music on my iPhone and iTunes allows me to switch it easily. This is one benefit to the phone that gets discounted a lot, but having to carry one less device is a huge benefit for a gadget hoarder like myself.

Pricing

Here’s the rub. When it comes to pricing, I’m in a bit of a pickle. See, I have friends who work for Sprint and I can be a part of their plan for a reduced price. Even Sprint’s unlimited plan at $69.99/month is lower by about $30 than a comparable iPhone plan, either on Verizon or AT&T. The most frustrating aspect of the up charges when it comes to iPhone plans is unlimited texting runs an additional $20 per month on top of your normal monthly fee. Texting costs these phone companies virtually nothing. Charging $20 a month is akin to highway robbery. One benefit of Verizon is they have a Nationwide Talk & Text plan that runs $60/month for 450 minutes and unlimited texting, but it doesn’t include data. That runs you another $30/month and doesn’t include the nice ability to share your connection as a Wi-Fi hotspot for up to 5 devices for another $20/mo. By my calculations, that would cost somewhere in the range of $110 per phone. The 450 minute limit on talk time and the additional up charges for data are the real killers here.

Despite the significant increase in cost, I’m coming to the point where the iPhone is becoming an extension of me. Alli no longer calls me on my normal phone because she knows that I leave it in my bag now. If I was picking up the bill, I am not sure if I could bite that bullet, especially with the Nexus S coming to Sprint this weekend.

But the bottom line is this: as predicted, I have loved the Verizon iPhone. In fact, I’d probably love it even more with more time spent using it because I would further customize it to my liking. I’ve been hesitant to do so with a device that I knew at some point I’d have to return back to the good people at Verizon. It’s been a little ridiculous carrying 3 phones around for the past month, but getting an extended period of time with a fully-functional non-AT&T iPhone has been totally worth it. I’m looking forward to seeing what the iPhone 5 brings in the fall.

So what phone do you carry and what do you love about it?

My First SXSW

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Shane

I’ve been working on the web for the better part of a decade now. I’ve been an interactive designer, a writer, a marketing generalist, a community manager and a digital marketing strategist.

But until this year, I’d never been to the granddaddy of all interactive/digital conferences: South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas.

I was supposed to go last year, but then I left the team at Cerner and one of my former teammates took my spot (which he never properly thanked me for, but whatever). So when I joined AMC’s digital marketing team, I got my travel and conference expenses approved several months ago. Despite several people telling me to book early, I waited until the last minute to reserve my travel and ended up staying a few miles North of downtown Austin. I had a car, which was helpful, but was more of a pain than anything having to get back and forth to the convention center every day.

My first SXSW was insane. Over 25,000 attendees descend upon what is essentially a college town for a week of sessions, parties and networking with some of the industry’s best and brightest.

It being my first SXSW, I tried to experience as much as possible and I am only now starting to recover (as evidenced by the fact that I’m writing this a week after returning home).

Trying to get all the highlights into one post might be tough…maybe it will be better as a bulleted list:

Getting to meet several other brand online representatives for the first time – amazing folks from Famous Dave’s, Southwest Airlines, Match.com, State Farm Insurance, McDonald’s, Dell, Frito-Lay and many others. Having a group of peers who also know what it’s like to represent a brand online…that alone was worth the trip.
The pure spectacle of a bunch of nerdy internet folks all in one city…it was insane.
Using Gowalla in its city of origin and getting all the cool custom stamps.
Meeting Andy from Gowalla and hearing all the great things they have planned. They may not have the users that Foursquare does, but they are going about their business in the right way…with professionals.
Nate Bolt and Mark Trammell’s session: “Stop Listening to Your Customers” about rapid user testing and how they do it at Twitter. There was not a more valuable session to me through the entire conference. More on this session at: StopLing.com
Dinner with the good folks from Twitter. Yeah, that Twitter. Really great people. During the dinner, I managed to help Southwest Airlines get the little blue verified checkmark next to their name, which was funny, since they have 1.5 million followers.
Sitting by an outdoor firepit with @trammell at the “Twitter house” and talking not only about his brilliant session, but also having him give me tips and ideas about how we might begin to address our guests’ website needs. 40 dedicated minutes with a guy that smart...I cannot put a price on that.
Discovering the awesomeness of breakfast tacos
Discovering the awesomeness of street food for that matter. I’ve never been in a place that offered so many different options. But I’m truly obsessed with street tacos.
Kevin Hoffman’s session on “Why Your Meetings Suck”. Extremely interesting stuff.
Sitting with my friend Greg from Happy Cog and plotting to take over the world. Also, getting to chill with all of the people from Happy Cog that were there for the Happy Cog Hosting launch party.
The Gowalla party with Matt & Kim. So much fun.
Getting to attend two tapings of my absolute favorite, never-miss podcast, Doug Benson’s Doug Loves Movies podcast, one with Dave Foley, Kevin Pollak and Anthony Jeselnik; the other with Simon Pegg, Rainn Wilson and director James Gunn. It was as hilarious as I expected it to be, if not moreso.
The day I spent my morning working at Thunderbird Coffee, one of the coolest coffee shops I’ve seen.
I’m going to punch myself for saying this, but the energy that permeated the streets of Austin. People with hustle and drive. Loved it.

It was a lot of awesomeness to consume in the 6 days I was there. On my final day of travel, I put out this tweet:

Whenever I travel, the worst part about it is being away from Alli. I know that can be sickening to some, but it’s the truth. My wife is awesome and she was so supportive of my going to SXSW for my professional development. Considering that I haven’t shut up about it since I got back…maybe she’ll reconsider. There’s only so much nerdery that one woman can handle.

But when it comes to ideas an inspiration, I came away from SXSW with too many to count. That’s what conferences like this are great for: sending people back to their jobs more equipped and motivated to be better. Sure, the quality of speakers at some of the sessions could have been a lot better. I’m particularly disappointed in how agencies believe they know how to represent brands online. (But that’s a whole other post entirely.)

Will I return next year? It’s possible. I’m putting together a couple of panel and session proposals with some of my friends that I made this year. I’m glad I finally got to experience SXSW at least once, though.

I just wish that I could have had more breakfast tacos.

Things I’d rather have than an iPad

Posted on January 27, 2010 by Shane

A non-AT&T iPhone
A network-based iTunes TV subscription model
Steve Jobs presenting as an Avatar
Jobs not using the word “magical” a dozen times
A new MacBook
Improvements to Mail and iCal in OS X.
Something a little more than what looked like an iPhone XL

I’m not trying to be a hater here. The Apple iPad is a gorgeous device. It really is. The New York Times application looks phenomenal…it will make reading on-screen a great experience, but that’s nothing new…the Kindle already did that.

I guess I just expected a little more out of this announcement. Honestly, it’s not even Apple’s fault. Outside of the invitation, Apple had not released a single piece of information about the iPad…that was all through speculation and the rumor mill on the internet. Even speculation on the name was enough to get Gruber and the other Mac-olytes in a tizzy. The hype was out of control for this device and I shouldn’t have bought into it so much, but I did. I held out hope that I’d be able to purchase an iPhone for Sprint. Yeah…not so much.

Don’t get me wrong…if someone gave me one of these, I’d take it. But I was just hoping for something a little more. Especially that first one.

That would have been AWESOME.

The New Silicon Prairie News

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Shane

I learned about Silicon Prairie News last year when I attended Big Omaha, a one-day conference devoted to “forward-thinking creatives, entrepreneurs and innovators” (more on my trip to Big Omaha). You may remember me mentioning Silicon Prairie News earlier in the year they featured me and this blog in their 5 in 5 series.

Dusty Davidson and Jeff Slobotski have cultivated a phenomenal startup culture in Omaha and with the help of writer Danny Schreiber, they’re showing the nation that Omaha and the rest the Midwest is capable of some really great stuff.

Today, they launched the new version of their site and it’s really great. Congratulations to SPN and everyone involved in the new site for the great work. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next.

…more on the launch of SPN 2.0 from the site itself

My iPhone Experience

Posted on October 18, 2009 by Shane

For the past several weeks, I’ve been using an iPhone.

Anyone who knows me understands what a big deal this has been. I had access to an iPhone through work for my social initiatives that I was driving during the Cerner Health Conference (which were featured on KCTV5). I was controlling 4 Twitter accounts, a blog, a Flickr account and organizing a group of great volunteers.

My iPhone experience was predictably awesome. I spent about an hour getting used to it, downloading the apps I needed and then spending the money to download the apps I wanted.

There’s a ton to love about it.

The App Store

The user interface is slick and intuitive, but the biggest win for the iPhone is the iTunes store, which now boasts over 75,000 applications ranging from games to task managers to weather to about 500 applications for Twitter (not exaggerating). I downloaded several free apps and then with some Paypal money I had laying around (is that what cyber-money does?), I purchased a few other apps that I had either heard recommended or thought were interesting. Apple approves (or rejects) every application that is submitted and that is helpful in separating horribly designed apps (I’m looking at you, BlackBerry developers) from the pack.

One device for everything

I can’t tell you how much I hate filling my pockets with extra crap. I carry an iPod and my BlackBerry. While my Curve has the ability to handle music, the user experience of playing any sort of media takes far too many clicks and trackball movements. Imagine the difference between using a mouse with a scroll wheel to navigate web pages vs. navigating with arrows and keystrokes. It works, it’s just not very efficient.

It just…works

Everything about the iPhone is intuitive. From the gestures to the navigation…it takes about 10 seconds to get used to it and then you are multi-touching with relative ease.

Mobile browsing has no equal

Mobile Safari, the iPhone’s built in browser is so far past every other mobile browser on the market that it is almost unfair. And don’t even bring up your Opera Mini garbage. That doesn’t play here. I’ve used both. The iPhone browser is better in every possible way. It’s fast and awesome. It’s easy to switch from landscape to portrait browsing (just turn the phone). And you can make any of your favorite pages launchable like an app (which I did for Google Reader and Google Talk, since they don’t have apps).

BUT. There’s also stuff that kinda sucks.

Push Gmail is NOT Exchange

I don’t know if this is really Apple’s problem, but I really don’t like how Google decided to use the Microsoft Exchange settings to enable push Gmail. For people like me who want to have both Exchange email for work and Gmail email for home, I would need multiple Exchange accounts, which is not allowed. I ended up leaving Gmail as an IMAP account and using the Exchange account for my work. It made the most sense to me.

The network…UGGGHHHH

Much has been said about the complete suckage that is AT&T’s network. Not only are their costs ridonkulous, but they have completely under-delivered with nearly everything that they promised. MMS rollout took forever. People still can’t tether their iPhones to their computers. All these things are technologies that have been around FOREVER on other networks. Additionally, the 3G network doesn’t feel any faster than the Edge network and there are so many dead spots that you can never count on a consistent connection if you’re driving around.

Multiple calendars

I really like that the Palm Pre offers multiple calendars. With the iPhone, you only get one. If you want to check your Google calendar, you’ve got to go to the Google calendar mobile site (which is a nice experience in Mobile Safari, but still). I don’t get much use out of a calendar that doesn’t show me everything that is going on on all my calendars. I have multiple points of entry. This is one major reason why my next phone will likely be a Pre. (Well, that and I’m a loyal Sprint customer…)

What’s next

I’ve got a couple weeks before I can replace my BlackBerry. I’ve got my eye on the Pre, but the HTC Hero is on my radar as well. Unfortunately, I’ve likely ruined any semblance of a chance that they had at being happy with any non-iPhone device, but we’ll give someone a shot. It has to be a Sprint device for the time being.

Because I’m loyal to my local telecom like that…

But man…do I ever wish that Sprint had taken the opportunity to get the iPhone back when it had the chance.

Big Omaha

Posted on May 8, 2009 by Shane

Today, I was really fortunate to go to the Big Omaha conference that was put on by Silicon Prairie News. As soon as I heard about it, I started lobbying my manager to send me, so I could listen to the likes of Jason Fried from 37signals, Matt Mullenweg from Automattic (the creators of WordPress), Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless and the king of internet wine shows, Gary Vaynerchuk.

It was a terrific day as Jason Fried kicked us off and talked about what became a common theme for the day, failure. While there were others who thought that failure was a good thing, Fried felt similarly to the way I did:

When did “fail early and often” become cool? - Jason Fried

What followed after Fried was a Yahoo guy a presentation about Girls in Tech and Micah Baldwin, who talked at length about failure. We headed over to lunch across the street where Ramsey, Whitney and I spent time talking with the very visionary web team at the University of Nebraska, who are really doing some interesting things with their web initiatives.

bigomaha-panel

After lunch is when Big Omaha really came alive. Unfortunately, Matt Mullenweg was not able to make it because of a conflict, but we were very fortunate to have a lively panel with Fried, Vaynerchuk, Baldwin and Kalmikoff. It was all Q&A based and was a lot of fun to see these thought-leaders and visionaries on the web talking and bantering back and forth. Of particular note was their rant on the higher education system, which is a little too colorful for this blog.

That was followed up with one of the most insightful and thoughtful talks of the day by Kalmikoff, where he talked about transparency and accessibility and what they mean to Threadless as a company and as a community. His slides included a great large/medium/small fanged Pac-Man illustration as well as great insight like:

“Spend time with your community.” and “Listen. Review. Respond. Act.“

I got the opportunity to spend some time talking to Kalmikoff after the talk and I really found him to be approachable and friendly as I asked him such lame questions as “How do you apply your community models to a B2B environment?”

Kalmikoff was followed by Ben Rattray of Change.org who gave a well-polished (albeit a little forgettable) presentation. I couldn’t help but think that Rattray was actually Chris Pine from the new Star Trek movie (mixed with a little Jake Gyllenhaal). You decide:

rattray-pine

There was a local entrepreneurial panel that highlighted some of the really cool projects that are going on in Omaha, including the concert hall/non-profit 2-screen theater that they’ve got, which is very cool.

The day was closed out with a great keynote (so to speak) with Gary Vaynerchuk. Now, say what you will about Gary, you can’t ever say he’s not genuine. The guy knows who he is, knows what he loves, and isn’t afraid to tell you what’s what. Instead of doing his typical talk, he realized that much of the crowd had heard him speak before, so after a short 7-minutes, he went into an open Q&A session.

I decided that I should take a crack at asking a question. Much of what I found to be challenging about ideas presented at Big Omaha was that much of it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to apply to the corporate B2B world. That’s not to say it can’t be done, but I have a hard time taking Gary’s advice of “you can’t change them, just quit”, very lightly because I was unemployed for 3 months.

But getting to interact with Gary during the Q&A session (as well as briefly after it was over) was a lot of fun. Plus, I even got a Thunder Show wrist band!

Big Omaha was an extremely well-organized conference for its initial outing. Even down to the smallest of details. The folks at BrightMix put together a heckuva day that made the 3-hour northward trek completely worth the price of admission (a steal at $200). Many thanks to Jeff and Dusty (and all their great volunteers) for working so hard to hold such a great event. You can find my pics (and others, tagged with ‘BigOmaha’) on Flickr.

Shane Life

Pretty sure that World Peace is acheivable if everyone owned a Mac.

Category Archives: Tech