My Encounters with Verizon's Exchange Policy

I have an iPhone 4 that I received for work ten months ago and I am nearing the end of my association with it (20 more days, not that I'm counting!). About four months ago, I began experiencing issues with the radio failing to pick up the signal from Verizon's cell towers. This occurred repeatedly, in situations with both excellent and poor signal strength. At the time, I resided in Washington, D.C., a location typically noted for strong Verizon service.

All this information was brought to the attention of the Genius at the local Apple Store, who promptly reset the firmware and confirmed that the diagnostics didn't reveal a major bug. A short while later, I walked out of the store and to the nearest coffee shop to allow my 100+ apps, my music, and my settings to be re-downloaded and configured. In the midst of this, the radio failed again.

I will spare you the intervening blow-by-blow. Suffice to say that, 4 replacement models later, I still experience radio issues and resultant poor service. Each of those four replacement devices have failed and each time I have been told by Verizon and Apple that they are not permitted/not willing to offer me either a different model iPhone or an entirely different device altogether.

I tell this story to highlight my principal argument, namely that, by focusing on their short-term bottom line, Verizon and Apple have frustrated this long-time customer immensely. Over the course of my relationship with them I have paid over $3,000 to Verizon and nearly $1,000 to Apple, yet this history was not enough to convince them to offer me a replacement that would have set them back, at most, $300-$400.

I think my experience is microcosmic in the grand scheme, yet indicative of a potential problem that technology vendors and service providers must be aware of. As an ever larger majority of the population forks over larger amounts of money for the latest phone or tablet and the fastest data speeds, they will be expecting that that money earns them more than a spot on a ledger. I understand that is how capitalism works but there is a way to be capitalistic without being miserly. Those companies that offer short-term care and concern for their customers will be rewarded with long-term loyalty. Those that do not will not be around very long.

These pictures below are snapshots that were shown to Apple and Verizon demonstrating the failed radio and strong cellular signal:

Not Extinction, Demotion

With the pending release of iPad 3, the blogosphere is alight with tireless examinations of the tablet's capacity to replace PCs in the life of the average consumer. I wish to contribute two anecdotes from my own experience which I think highlight the more likely future relationship between tablets and PCs. I should first offer the disclaimer that 80% of my computing time is spent on an iPad and I am constantly on the lookout for ways to further increase that number.

To say I am a huge fan of Evernote is an understatement. The service has largely replaced Office as the location for content creation and has become a back-up to my e-mail system. It is possibly the single most important app I use. I do all my graduate and professional work on Evernote for iPad, so I am using the app constantly. A major limitation in this endeavor is the lack of a capacity to create or engage with tables in a note on the iPad app.

Mint is another iPad app that I use constantly. In this case, the lack of a serious and thorough budget-creating and editing capacity makes it impossible to use the service strictly on mobile devices.

Let me tie this all together. As my examples with Evernote and Mint have demonstrated, I think there are limitations to tablet apps that prevent the tablet form factor from effecting the demise of the PC. Until tablet apps become more functionally comparable with their desktop counterparts or until RDC utilities become more stable, I don't see the PC going anywhere. Even should both these predicates become true, I think PCs will continue to have a place in the tech environment for decades to come. I advocate and wish for the tablet revolution to continue but I do not think that revolution necessarily entails the demise of the PC.

With the imminent purchase of a new computing device for my mother, I have been giving much time to researching the newest models and which would be appropriate for her limited, but growing, needs. 

This research leads me more and more often to the conclusion that laptops and tablets are on an intersecting trajectory. Unless you're in need of the capacity to do serious video/audio editing, write serious code, or have a specific and essential need for an Office program, a tablet and a laptop have become functionally synonymous. Continuing with my mother as an example, she has need of a device for the following functions: web browsing, e-mails, word processing, and video chatting. All these are functions for which the tablet app market has excellent options.

I'd like to tie the above message into the recent Canalys data concerning PC makers and the firm's decision to include iPad numbers into Apple's PC market share. The discussion provoked by this decision is misguided; the functional, and fundamental dichotomy, in the computing hardware world is between mobile and desktop computing. When viewed through this prism, and combined with my earlier comments regarding usage, it becomes difficult to justify considering tablets and laptops as essentially different.

Since the purchase of my tablet, I have rarely had cause to pick up my laptop. I know I am not alone in this fact. Let me be clear: it is not that tablets possess specs unseen in laptops. Rather it is the app market and app developers who make tablets functional laptop replacements. It is time to consider tablets to be scaled down laptops with a unique UI.

A Pitfall For Chromebooks?

As I feverishly refreshed and reloaded the Chrome tab containing my Netflix content yet again, a major issue with the Chromebook hardware and, indeed, the underlying concept, became apparent to me: The Chrome browser and the Chrome OS have significant shortcomings that imperil their ability to support a full-scale migration to the cloud.

More data is being downloaded to the web than ever before; that data requires bandwidth and a decent processor. The laptop on which the genesis for this post occurred has a 2.2 GHz processor; both brand lines of Chromebook sport a 1.66 GHz processor.

Google pushes people toward the web and toward streaming. Indeed, their long-term growth strategy is heavily dependent upon cloud services and user streaming of music, movies, and videos. Despite rumors of a desktop-based Google Drive in the offing, Google's future is in the cloud and that is where they want it.

How then does Chrome diagnostics and Google's long-term vision come into conflict? For all its goodness and my preference for it, Chrome is a memory intensive browser; a glance at my CPU usage history gives one an accurate idea as to when I am on the web and when I am not. I don't want to have to exit out of my e-mail, calendar, documents, and feed management programs whenever I want to stream a Netflix video, yet this is what currently must happen.


I feel confident in saying that the problem would be even worse on a Chromebook, given its weaker processor; that is a significant problem for Google. They must convince manufacturers to build hardware that can handle the memory-intensive browser that dominates and defines a Chromebook.

What I'm Running

Techies like tech toys and I'm no exception. Of the wireless devices in my apartment, I am the owner of 66% of them. As a point of reference, for myself and for the readers, I've decided to delineate my tech possessions:

1. BlackBerry Curve 9330
2. iPod Touch - 8GB
3. Nook - 3G/Wi-Fi
4. Dell Inspiron 1440 - 32-bit OS (Vista); 2.20 GHz Intel Core Duo processor; 4GB RAM

NB: the numbers assigned to each product are not an indication of preference or any other sort of hierarchy. I might be in the market to sell one or two of the above devices depending on how the next few months work out.

Review of All-Google Day

When juxtaposed with Friday's computing experiences (the day of the mini-crash), yesterday's experiment was a rousing success. I had my eye on two areas of potential concern: 1) Google Docs (hereafter: Docs) vs. Office 2007 (hereafter: Office) and 2) Google Music Beta vs. iTunes. I'll consider each of these concerns separately:

1. Google Docs vs. Office 2007


Google's recent face lift to Docs has its supporters and critics and this author would have to be considered in the camp of the latter. The overly minimalistic design does not endear me to the concept of ditching Office. On the question of substance, however, I find more comfort in such a choice. My Excel files are loaded with formulas and I was curious to see how Docs would operate under such circumstances. Shame on me to worry! Docs allowed for easy editing and creation of moderately complicated formulas and the capacity to call upon data from Google Finance made my investment spreadsheets more useful and less labor-intensive.

In a matter of minutes, years worth of academic and personal work was uploaded and converted to Docs formatting (which I strongly recommend, as it precludes the documents in question from counting against your storage requirement).

2. Google Music Beta vs. iTunes


From the outset, let me be clear about one thing: Google Music Beta (hereafter: Music), in its current form, is no match for the comprehensiveness and inclusiveness of iTunes. That being said, Music is an appropriate fill-in for online music streaming, as its interface is almost completely customized by the data uploaded by the user. When coupled with Podcast Player Pro, many of my music needs are spoken for. Though I intend to offer a more thorough review of Google Music at a later date, I will note one shortcoming: it is not clear to me that the marketplace for acquiring music within Google Music has been established. Thus, the music a user uploads to Google Music is the music that will be stored there.

Conclusion


There are two future developments that must occur before I will feel in a position to pass final judgment on the question at issue in this experiment: 1) the stable release of Google Music (namely to determine if provision has been made for the acquisition of music and, hopefully, podcasts) and 2) the release of iCloud. I stand by my assertion in yesterday's post that it seems silly that I use only three or four programs yet run a clunky and illogical operating system. The only question is, what would serve as an adequate replacement?

A Day in Google

Since my Dell laptop experienced a mini-crash last Friday, I have spent much of my free time evaluating options should I need to find a replacement. One that always lurks in the recesses of my mind is the Chromebook. Because I already spend much of my time on the web, I'm not that concerned with cloud based OS, with one major caveat: iTunes. I love my iPod touch, will most likely get an iPhone later this year (a subject for another post), and have an iPad on my wishlist. Therefore, the idea of not having iTunes concerns me. Austin Carr's post on making Google Music Beta an iPhone app did not work well on the iPod Touch.

Coming to today's post, I have decided to conduct an experiment: build and use a crude mimicry of the Chrome OS. For the remainder of the day, I will use the Chrome web browser almost exclusively. The only exception will be Windows Task Manager (to monitor computer performance). Tomorrow's post will be a review of my experiment.