Oh but I do love my phone
 

Well I did not want to be like all bragging about technology for many reasons, but I felt like it was important for me to finally upgrade and get worked into the phone world.

I mean I may be called upon to develop something for it

So first, I put in a program of delayed gratification. I said to myself, I said, just put up with your dumb Blackberry for another year. It doesn't run any great applications, and it feels like a piece of shit now, but maybe it'll save you money not having all that cool shit, who knows.

With all that delay I began to see what I was missing, and it became more painful over time

But the nice thing is, I was able to look over the phone market, research it, read about it and understand it well before *pouncing* on precisely the phone I wanted.

(The Verizon Samsung Galaxy Nexus on 4g LTE with Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich)

With Xmas came a chunk of money that I could set aside for this item after all the regular bills were paid.

*pounce*

And I do not regret it, not one moment. The multiple techgasms I've had with this thing have made it worthwhile.

The display is a thing of beauty. I feel joy just looking at it.

There are no buttons at all on the phone. When the display is off, it's just a piece of black glass. That's very clean and beautiful, Apple-like attention to design. Buttons appear along the bottom row when the display is on, and they have figured out that a momentary vibration gives you "tactile feedback" that you have pressed a button. It feels great as well as looks great.

It's taken a month to learn everything about it, customize it just the way I like to use it, etc. That seems like a long time, and seems like it would be a pain in the ass. But no, it's been a true joy putting this thing through its paces. It's not the sort of learning where you have to read long PDF manuals to remind yourself how to get from point A to point B. It's more like play: if I push this button, what will it do?

At one point, every day I was finding amazing new things I could do, and I considered starting a thread and just calling it "the cool thing I did with my phone today". Then I thought that would just sound like so much bragging.

But you guys, sometimes it's just too cool. Sometimes you would want to know.

Yeah, go ahead and share. I'm still using a flip phone, so I will just sit here and enjoy a better phone vicariously through you.

I LOVE that part when you get new techie stuff.

Samsung seems to have paid attention to clean lines and intuitive controls on everything from the antiquated a707 Synch flip phone I still carry to the remote control menu on my 46" HD LCD TV. For that reason, after I've identified the features I want in any given product, first I'll see if Samsung has it.

OK. Some ideas are not just limited to the phone.

Live wallpaper: imagine your wallpaper background, animated. On a desktop PC, this might be bad; movement attracts your eye's attention. But on a phone, a light ripple of movement makes everything look just a little more interesting.

I found the Beautiful Live Weather Wallpaper, and I love it. It looks something like this (this is not from my display):

http://cellar.org/2012/Beautiful-Liv...roid-theme.jpg

What you don't see here is how the leaves of grass gently sway, and the clouds gently move across the screen; and it's all done very tastefully, very Japanese, if you know what I mean. It's subtle enough to be natural.

But the great thing? The scene changes to reflect your actual outside weather. Right now, at midnight, the moon is up; the display is a dark blue with stars, and the grass at the bottom is dark and colorless. It reflects real sunset and sunrise times.

And when it rains, drops of water land on your display and roll down it as if it were a window.

I can't wait for it to snow. Our mild winter has only enabled a few flurries. I need to see this wallpaper when it's snowing. I think I could convince it I live further north. But that wouldn't be zen. Best to let nature happen and I will see the different display when I see it.

I always imagine the cynics pointing out that, hey, you could just look at the window and get a real indicator of what is going on outside. That is SO not the point. The point is, having a tasteful, changing background is a really cool thing AND if it's going to be all that, having it reflect the actual weather is natural and human.

I'm so glad you're in love, UT :)

I worry that I'm so far behind on this that I'll never catch up.
I use a basic Nokia, no camera, no internet connection and not even a colour screen!

I didn't fully utilise my swishy phone, so I downgraded.
But that was 5 years ago now... The best I accomplished with it was sending and receiving photos and putting them in a slideshow.

By the time I have a good phone there will actually be a jetpack app, but I'll be too busy working our Call Waiting to use it.

Congrats on your sparkly new phone UT, you deserve it.

My phone's background has the grasses in the wind. It slowly gets darker or lighter depending on the time of day. But mine doesn't snow or rain or sunshine! I want.

Work gave me a new Blackberry Torch last year, and at the time, I was very thrilled to have it. It was (is) my first phone with a camera, and the camera is actually pretty decent. But I get so frustrated when I try to do things with it. Let's say I want to go to a website. Well, I click a link or something, and I want the phone to follow my command, but it seems to always have its own priorities. Like it wants to synch with e-mail at that particular time, or do some other crap. I wind up spending what seems like forever waiting for the phone to do its thing before it will do my thing. And it's not a connection speed problem. This will happen when I'm connected to FIOS via wifi. Stupid Blackberry.

I do like the slide out keyboard. I have the touch screen when I want just a touch screen, and a keyboard when I want to feel keys. That's the only thing they got right, IMHO.

The reason I had to have a phone: Spotify

As a dedicated music lover there are times in my life where I have bought one CD per week. That's about $600 a year to *own* a limited subset of all the music I would like to listen to at any given moment.

That's not to mention the various hauling around of crates of albums in various formats, and the buying/installation/hauling of shelving to stow it all.

Arrive the mp3 era and now it could be made portable! But converting all this into sound files took weeks of planning and execution, and at the end of it, I had 100GB of files. No portable player would load up the entire set. And now it was necessary to manage this collection, another pain in the ass. And if the hard drive takes a crap, it's all gone, unless you had the resources to entirely back it up.

Well, streaming music platforms make almost all of this suddenly unnecessary. Instead of owning all this stuff, you are renting it. Instead of $600 a year you pay $120. Instead of having access to only what you have bought, you have access to 99%[1] of everything[2]. Instead of having to sample it in tidbits over the net, you just hit play and have access to complete works.

Using Spotify has been a big personal boon to me, and I've posted about it before. This thing has opened up major sectors of music and brought back a lot of personal joy of music to me.

Now. Instead of owning a separate music playing device, one has just a phone, and Spotify streams the music to the phone. Instead of buying a shit ton of memory for a device, the files arrive as needed and are played, not permanently stored. Suddenly 99% of everything is portable[3] and cheap.

When the light went on in my head that streaming meant all of the above, that the phone could receive streams, and there was a Spotify app, well that was it; that was the moment I had to have a phone. Because I knew it would not just be a toy for me, but really improve my life, you know?



[1] 99% is a necessary oversimplification. My finding is that it is everything except Pink Floyd and the Beatles and other money-grubbing greedhead acts. I expect there is an economics reason why they are not there, such as their management still makes more money from old people buying CDs at a rate of $600 a year. But I have heard all the Floyd I will ever hear[1a], and I can play almost everything in my head from memory -- without incurring a charge for songwriting royalties. (YET. I'm sure they are working on that.)

[1a] No need for Floyd when there is Mogwai. Because Mogwai!

[2] I am not aware of the coverage of Spotify's Jazz/Classical music collection.

[3] As long as there is a data connection to your phone. People who live where cell towers are unavailable will not be happy with this new lifestyle. You may have to wait 6 months... or install Wi-Fi everywhere you need music.

I don't understand what the above means completely.
But listening to an interview with Sir Alan Ferguson last night, everyone seemed impressed that this 70 year old who doesn't "get" Twitter loves Spotify.

Personally I think it makes sense. He has no need for Twitter in his life - everything he needs to know will come to him immediately through his contacts. But he likes music. And things not really played on the radio these days.

I did find it hard to convey all the concepts involved.

But yes: the takeaway is that, phone in hand, I can play 99% of recorded music in seconds. And imagine how awesome that is for any lover of music.

Yeah. I'm a 44 year old who doesn't "get" twitter. I have a FB friend who sends his tweets to his FB wall, so I see those. He's a smart guy, but his tweets don't add much.

Cool UT. I, too, have a flip phone, a Pantech Breeze II. I'm just an old-fashioned girl in that I only want my phone to be a phone. I don't wear it on my belt, or hang it off my purse but I know where it is, assuming no one has moved it. I have yet to download ringtones, or play any of the preinstalled games or even use the alarm clock feature. I purposely turned off the data abilities because they cost an arm and a leg. I send, maybe two text messages a year, mostly because it takes me that long to TYPE THE THINGS OUT! I don't have texting in my plan so they cost me a dime each. I am eligible to upgrade to a newer phone like yours (that model would cost me tho) but I have to bump up my plan to include data and such at an additional charge that I cannot afford.

I will also live vicariously through you. Rock on!

Pam

i bought a case for a samsung galaxy S II for the kids to give to their mother for xmas. it didnt fit. she has some other derivative of that model. so i was to return it. i waited too long.

it was $40. would it fit your phone?

http://76.my/Malaysia/bdotcom-case-m...-BdotCom@4.jpg

I'm disappointed in the music spotify contains for streaming. NO tool. NO white stripes. NO led Zeppelin.

Audio Galaxy is pretty cool. have you checked that app out yet? a

No I hear their users are drummers

All legal streaming services are going to have greedhead bands that don't participate. Spotify lets you add your own mp3s into their interface and so if you need them, there they are... I think that's about all I need

Appreciate it, but this is a big-ass phone and that is one of the down sides... it doesn't fit much of anything.

There is no charging dock for it yet, in desk or mobile versions, which is weird.

:lol:

Can you give me a simple breakdown of why Spotify might be superior to Pandora? I don't use either, I've just heard a lot more about Pandora, so I wondered.

Spotify is more oriented around listening to albums, or playlists that you construct. Pandora is more like a radio service that offers you things it thinks you probably like to listen to, based on what you say you like.

Grooveshark is a less interesting interface (IMO), supports album and playlist play like Spotify, but it is thought to be illegal and may not survive legal challenges.

Google, Amazon and Apple all offer ways to stream your own music to your own phone. These support the model where you buy your music first, and you send it to them so they can stream it back to you on demand. I have only tried the Google version. It sucks and remains one of the worst Google products.

This Alarm Clock Xtreme is the stuff. (This app is available for both Android and iPhone)

You figure, an alarm clock for a smartphone, that's no big deal.

Well I tell you they have thought of everything. Here is everything:

ALARMS

You can set as many different alarms, and each can repeat on as many different days of the week as you like. You can select a different ringtone for each alarm. You can set a different message for each alarm.

You can set the alarm to start at 0% volume, and slowly increase to 100% any volume level you like.

This 0-to-100 volume increase can happen over 60 seconds or even up to 20 minutes if you like. Imagine that, your alarm gently increasing in volume until you notice it and shut it off! I tell you, it is a fine thing, I tell you!

SNOOZE

You can allow snooze on your alarm, or not. The snooze can be set for any length of time, from 1 minute, to an hour. (If you set it for 9 minutes, I pity you.)

You can have the alarm display up two buttons on the screen when it goes off, one for dismiss and one for snooze. Or, you can tell it to snooze when you shake the phone, or press a side button.

DISMISS

You can also choose to dismiss the alarm when you shake the phone.

You can also have it require you to solve a math problem, or enter a CAPTCHA, to dismiss the alarm. I have not tried these features.

SAFETY

You can force it to play the alarm even if the phone is in quiet mode. You can force it to play the alarm through the phone speaker, even if headphones are plugged into the phone.

I tell you, they thought of everything!

Ok, I've heard people say that before, mostly in commercials. :lol:
But you are a musician. You are also musically and technologically knowledgeable. So my question to you is, are you satisfied with the quality of sound you're getting from your phone/death star?

Lemme tell you, a few years ago I took my entire collection of about 800 CDs and ripped them to FLAC, which is exactly the CD in audio quality;

Then I converted the FLAC files to MP3 at various rates.

I A-B tested tons of different things, on speakers and different headphones.

Above a certain quality of mp3 (128 kpbs) I could not tell a dime's wortha difference between any of 'em.

Spotify has low and high quality streaming settings, so you can choose whether to save bandwidth or save your ears. IME the high-quality is CD-quality and the low quality is... kinda acceptable. I understand the high quality is 320kpbs OGG format. That's top notch.

Add: Spotify quality settings are documented here:

http://www.spotify.com/us/help/faq/tech/codec-quality/

320kbps high quality, 160 medium quality, 96 low quality. The first two are what they use for desktop, the last two are what they use for mobile.

I think that alarm clock was the amazon.com free app of the day a couple of months ago. I does rock. I actually like the feature that requires you to do increasingly complex math to prove you're awake enough to shut it off.

Yes, but it all depends on the quality of the device you're listening to them on. That's why I asked about the quality of the music you're hearing from the phone.

Most of the difference comes from the earbuds / speakers in my experience.

Oh, OK. I suppose the phone being all digital and shit, wouldn't affect the music much as log as it had the power to drive the buds.

By the way, did you see the hour long whyy show on Robert Trout?

Yea, it seems to me like the fine details of fidelity have been worked out at this point. I think all the ear buds are driven using rare earth magnets so it just takes a sip of power to make them go. Unlike driving a big loudspeaker where huge amounts of power are needed to make bass sounds (my personal specialty), because the speakers have to move a lot of air.

Hey but even that area is changing. I use rare earth neodymium speakers in my bass cabinets because they save weight.

And in the last decade it appears they have worked out how to make amps light too. I used to lug around a 45 lb amp in order to get 500 watts per channel, but now the power amps weigh like 15 pounds. I don't know where that difference appeared but my back is glad for it.

On the down side, last night my wife and I were out for dinner. The family at the next table was using their phone to play cheesy pop music, despite the fact that the restaurant had their own music system going.

It was very discordant, and I thought that there just might be an international incident.

Yes. It can only get worse: so many people have speakerphone capability on their phones, but don't even know it's there, or how to switch it on. The day they learn how... well it could be bad.

Google Maps + Google Navigation

All the phones have GPS in them now, and apps can retrieve your actual location on the planet. For Google Maps, this is a sudden blessing: hit the GPS button, and the map is instantly centered on you, with a "You Are Here" pinpoint.

Then, Google Navigation. Since the phone now has the same hardware that a dedicated GPS Nav unit has, the phone can now become a GPS unit, and that's what Google Navigation is.

thus no need to spend $200 on a GPS unit with a map update subscription. a smartphone is expensive, but it often saves you money...

Yesterday I suddenly got lost in a rather terrible section of town. The phone got me out of it, just like a dedicated GPS unit would. The difference: I was streaming Spotify at the time. When Google's Navigation voice came on to tell me to turn left, it politely turned the music down, gave the direction ("Turn Left onto Fox Street"), and then turned the music back up.

just like you would want it to

Oh and the phone's GPS unit gets your location really fast. I have an older Tomtom GPS that takes a few minutes to find the satellites when you first switch it on. I always curse at it at that point... "Come ON! In this day and age!" although of course I have no idea what it does and why it takes so long to receive and decode the signals from outer space.

white people problems.
(nsfw language)

Actual screen shot; it's easy to take a screen shot with Ice Cream Sandwich, just just hit the power button and the volume down at the same time.

http://cellar.org/2012/speedtest.png

This is the fastest speed test I've gotten in Verizon 4G LTE territory. The numbers are astounding to me. (I'm not bragging, I'm just talking about the tech!) This is faster than my home internet service, and that's FIBER.

It's so fast that you could outrun your monthly data plan in an hour! (luckily I have a grandfathered unlimited data plan) (NOW I'm bragging)

That is pretty good.

You can control your car from your phone.

The day is coming when you lose your phone they just void your birth certificate, because the phone owns your life.;)

Every cloud has a silver lining:
 

People are being taught to use their speaker phone capability in CPR classes so they don't have to delay/interrupt lifesaving cardiac compressions while communicating with 911 operators to call for an ambulance. :cool:

That covers the good, the bad, and the ugly is waiting around the corner when people discover speakerphone karaoke! :eek:

(You can edit out that last paragraph if your afraid the idea will spread.) ;)

Whut he said.

It occurred to me today that this is not a phone; it's a portable computer that happens to take calls.

Or rather:

To people born before 1995, a "phone" is a device you use to make calls.

To people born after 1995, a "phone" is a highly portable computer, and one of its least interesting apps is the one that can be used to call people.

I describe my iPod touch to people as "an iPhone with everything but the phone".

I've installed the app "where's my droid"

If I lose the phone, I can TXT a certain password to my phone, and it will ring.

I can TXT a different password to my phone, and it will TXT back messages with its latitude and longitude, a Google map link to where it is, and the nearest address to the device.

Even if set on vibrate?

That is awesome!

I set up face unlocking.

I don't usually lock the phone, because most of the time I'm just at home and nobody cares.

But now I'm going into North Philly regularly, so I better get with the program.

So I set it up. You take a picture of your face using the front-facing camera, from a normal arm's reach away; and then when you want to unlock, you look at the phone, and it identifies your face as being the same as it pictured before, and unlocks the phone.

It works great.

Yes, "Where's My Droid" overrides any particular settings at the time, and rings at full volume. Also I have it set to use a "white noise siren" instead of a normal ringtone, so it's unique.

It will also turn on the GPS if you have that turned off. The only thing it can't do is make sure your battery hasn't run out so that it can do all these things.

Wow. Impressed I am - and all these apps are free?

Face Unlock comes with Ice Cream Sandwich.

"Where's My Droid" uses the approach that there's a free version, which is what I set up, and a Pro version for $3.99 that will let you lock the phone remotely, or even wipe all your data and settings from the lost phone.

So far I've spent less than $10 on apps. Most of the best ones are free or have free versions.

When I take pictures or videos with the phone, they are automatically uploaded right into Google+, in a private area called "Photos from your phone".

There, I can look at them, rotate them, download them, crop them, add decorations or text, delete them, look at the metadata (including a Gmap of where the photo was taken), or share them on G+.

There is also a "creative kit" where you can immediately do a lot of commonly needed things, such as cropping, rotating, fixing colors, sharpening, and re-sizing.

got that where's my droid thing, thanks. I'm going to make my kids install it on theirs too.

Can you shave your goatee and drastically cut your hair, and see if it still works? I mean, for science and all.

truth truth truth. I almost don't even hardly ever talk on my phone. my iPhone is a "phone" only because I carry it 24/7 and could in theory make a voice call over GSM instead of 3G and receive texts at a personal identifying code (a "fone num ber" whatever that means) regardless of what service or device the person trying to contact me uses.

my iPhone is not used in a way even remotely recognizable as a phone more than ten or fifteen years ago, except for the infrequent occasions I'm actually forced to resort to talking into it, when old people or businesses resort to demanding to hear my voice by making me talk into it in response to them talking into their computers.

Phones are a strange and confusing phenomenon. I don't understand the fascination some people have with demanding remote verbal conversations when instant options like email and SMS text messaging are available.

With phrases like that, I can't blame you. One phone call could take all day! ;)

I prefer text myself, I hate talking on the phone in part because my hearing is so bad but my desire not to be in uncontrolled social situations plays into it. The phone is a very recent phenomena here. The first system in the late thirties was orphaned due to low population and phones did not return until the mid-fifties. I think phones were just a temporary technology that did help the leap into the information age but could well be on their way out. I find the new tech fascinating but don't really want it in my life. I adopt what I have to to stay in touch with my kids.

You're like some kind of Austrian monk.

I've been told that.

HA!
Right there with ya

I have an Android tablet I use for work, so it only makes sense that I continue to own an iPhone, even though I love it anyway.

There is so little Internet to this house. But I am in Verizon 4G territory, and so the phone keeps me wired. I depend on it like a teddy bear. Today I TXTd, eMaild, and voice-called J, which helped get some things done as well as to have human moments with her. The Token 888 number emailed me a voice mail from a potential client; I called him back using the hands free earphones, the ones that came with the phone; they're pretty good, actually. I listened to the Adam Carolla podcast and now I'm listening to - what else - Mogwai, on Spotify.

Because Mogwai!

So it has been a tremendous boon, except for keeping it charged during all this. The big screen and 4G combination eats up the battery pretty fast. In the long run, this can be solved with an extended battery, or now they have special external battery packs that you can use to charge your battery or run your phone.

Heh heh heh OMG

I connected this desktop computer to the Internet using the phone.

Using an app called easytether and 15 minutes of setup, I am browsing the Cellar via the Verizon 4G network. On a desktop computer.

OMG. OMG. We're not supposed to do this!!!

See, you're supposed to pay extra per month, and perhaps buy Verizon's tethering modem, if you want to connect something other than a phone to the Internet via 4G.

But people on forums are saying they are doing it without punishment, as long as they stay under 2GB of usage.

IT FEELS GOOD TO BE A GANGSTA.

I did the same sort of thing last week with my mobile, a local sim-card and data bundle and my netbook in Uzbekistan. This meant I could Skype Best Beloved at home as much as I wanted instead of feeling a little, uh, constrained, by the £1.60/minute mobile phone roaming charges on my UK sim, or the hotel wifi available only in the lobby, or the hotel landline phone charges in my room. Instead I spent USD16 for the week, and even then bought way too much data. Could easily have got away with USD10. Technology is teh awesome.
For those human moments, BB and I have found that playing games over Skype is nice, it means you can relax and just chit chat instead of thinking you must say Important and Significant Things because you are Making a Phone Call (am I showing my age here?).