Results tagged “phone” from KPAO

This one comes from the brilliant mind of Chris Finne, a great Ruby-on-Rails developer. He forwarded me a table from MyWireless.org which shows the state tax rate on wireless bills. It's 2 years old, so things might have changed. But it shows a range from 1.66% (Oregon) to 18.35% (Nebraska).

Since wireless plans these day pretty much all have free long distance and phone number portability, and since you can manage your entire account online, the actual address where your phone is registered is irrelevant. However, you probably do want a friend or someone you know at the registered address, just so they can receive any physical mail regarding your account and pass it onto you (or at least not send it back as undeliverable).

According to the data I have, the lowest taxes are in OR, NV, ID, DE, MA, MT, and WV in that order. Or, a better tactic might be just to go to MyWireless.org and check the taxes in the states where you have friends who's mailing address you can use.

I haven't actually tried this, so I can't vouch for the effectiveness or even legality of it, but I love the idea conceptually. I'd love to hear from you if you or anyone you know does this. Happy tax-reduction!

I upgraded my iPhone from the original 2G to a 3S. I skipped one generation with the 3G. I admit I do like the phone a lot better. It's thinner and a lot faster, and it feels like the battery life is better too.

But I am annoyed at the price. Yes I paid $199 for it, but AT&T charges tax on the full, unsubsidized value of the phone: $599. This leaves me with a tax bill of $55.40, or about 28% of what I paid for the phone.

Another annoyance: My phone was shipped ostensibly for arrival on launch day of Friday, June 19. But it didn't show up until Monday. AT&T started my billing cycle on Friday, of course, making me pay for the service for 3 days when I hadn't even activated the phone yet.

Overall I'm happy with it, tho. I'm back to a legit version on the AT&T network. With my corporate discount of 18%, it's about the same price as I was paying to T-Mobile. Plus I actually get reasonable coverage in my house. Which as it turns out is a pretty important feature. Well worth the few extra dollars a month.

And I like that it comes in white to match my MacBook.

Thanks to the invaluable help of my co-blogger David Creemer, 3 different Macs, 2 hours, the interwebs and a glass of 17-year-old scotch, I now pwn my iPhone and am happily using it on the T-mobile network.

Unfortunately it's not as good of a deal as one could previously get. T-Mobile wised up to the fact that their $6/month T-Zones option was leaving too much money on the table. It's now $25/month for unlimited data. But when coupled with their cheapest calling plan ($30/month), it's still $20/month cheaper than an equivalent plan from AT&T. I'll take it.

Sadly, the T-mobile coverage map lied. I was sure I'd get a stronger signal in my house than with AT&T, but it turns out to be worse: 1 bar if I'm lucky. I may end up back at AT&T for this reason alone. Or maybe I'll try to get something like this cell phone signal booster. Of course I could pay for 15 months of AT&T before I'd break even on this $300 gadget.

The economy sucks. I'm unemployed. We've lost over a third of our net worth in the past 6 months. It's time for a good, hard look at the monthly budget.

The thing I'm looking at the hardest are the monthly recurring bills. Any savings here is recurrent savings, and the savings compounds.

First on the chopping block was the TV service. I've had DirecTV + a DVR for nearly 10 years, but $64/month is far too much in this day and age of Hulu and Amazon's Video on Demand service, paying that much (or really anything) for TV is simply unnecessary. I bought a digital/HD antenna, and we'll use that for local news, breaking news, and the occasional TV show. For everything else, it's the internet.

Speaking of internet, my DSL needs a trim too. I'm still on the $50/month plan with 4 static IP addresses. I don't need those anymore. (In fact, I really never did.) I can get to $40/month for a single dynamic address. I might even consider going to $25/month which drops my bandwidth from 3/.75 Mbps to 1.5/.4 Mbps. Although now that I think about it, that might impact the whole "watch TV over the internet" plan. Hmmm....

We already don't have Netflix; we use the library for DVDs. And some things just can't be easily cut: water, sewer, garbage... Although for that last one, I suppose I could distribute my garbage across my neighbors' partially empty bins the night before. But I don't think I'm quite that desperate yet.

And as for my mobile phone service, it's too soon to switch. I'm an iPhone guy now, and I need my smart phone capabilities. But I am hopeful that other phone manufacturers will get their act together in 2009 and truly compete with the iPhone. Ditto for other mobile carriers vs. AT&T. And then I'll happily shop for a new phone and plan, for less money.

Unless the user experience sucks. Then I'll stick with the iPhone. After all, some things are worth paying a little bit extra for.

If the title means nothing to you, then you can safely skip this entry.

It took me a relatively long time to find this information, so here's a simple summary of my iPhone upgrade experience. I have a first generation 8G iPhone, running OS 1.1.4, which I had unlocked using the ZiPhone application. I wanted to upgrade to iPhone OS 2.0.1, but was concerned that there might be pitfalls, unknowns and errors since I was not starting with a stock iPhone.

Thankfully, after carefully following the directions, upgrading to OS 2.0.1 using Pwnage 2.0.2 worked without error. I'm once again enjoying the latest iPhone software on T-Mobile USA.

Overall, the iPhone is great. I love the integrated maps, along with the location triangulation (though the interaction can be a bit wonky sometimes trying to get it to auto-fill "current location" in the address field). I also wish it had a simple "step through the details of this route" feature so I didn't have to zoom in and scroll around while driving.

I've gotten used to checking my email from anywhere, though I've thus far resisted actually sending or replying to mail. Text entry on the iPhone is merely adequate.

The web browser is pretty nice, and the seamless transition between WiFi and Edge networks make it enjoyable to use. I don't have to think about connectivity at all. It's always available. Some is just faster than others.

I also have a longer commute these days (30-40 minutes each way) as we are temporarily crashing at another company while our new office space is renovated. The iTunes Podcast subscriptions are great. Really easy to set up and use. Though again there are some design details I'd like, such as fine control for scrubbing 1 hour audio files, especially the scenario of skip back 10 seconds.

Syncing my address book with Yahoo! is great, since that's my primary contact store these days. Though there are a bunch of contacts I really don't need in there cluttering things up a bit. Minor annoyance.

All in all, it's a great product. If the phone companies and Apple actually gets the price down to $200 with a  contract, There are very few reasons why anyone should consider any other phone out there. Nokia, Motorola and the rest of the handset manufacturers better get their act together and soon. The bar is pretty damn high now for cell phone design.

If you're a part of a large company, you've no doubt taken place in the "conference call". An often one-sided affair, the conference call is often plagued by poor acoustics, whether it be the laptop fan placed too close to the microphone, or the soft-spoken participant who is nowhere near the microphone. Often these meetings devolve into one side simply working away on their laptops until they are asked a question by the other side, at which point the question must be repeated and sometimes even the context of what the hell is going on. Good times.

There is one type of call that can be vastly improved with a simple application of free technology. The presentation call has a formal presentation happening on one side (likely with slides), and the satellite offices calling into a conference call bridge and following along with the slides (either manually or over something like WebEx). The presenter is often already miked through a PA system, which makes the traditional speakerphone a bit dicey. But it's easy to fix.

Get an old Windows laptop. Nearly any one will do, as long as it can run Yahoo! Messenger v8.1 or higher. Hook an audio out from the PA system to the mic input on the laptop. Also either turn down the volume, or plug in headphones. Now dial into the conference call bridge using Yahoo! Messenger. Yes, anyone can do it. You don't need a premium account. Anyone can call a toll-free number using Messenger from anywhere in the world.

You probably want to dial in from a phone and test the system out to make sure the levels are ok. But once that's all set up, you've now got a system that has a direct feed of the presentation's audio for optimal quality, plus any noise from the listeners won't interrupt the presentation. If you want to be able to take questions from the phone, use headphones and have someone monitor it.

Let me know in the comments if you did this and found it useful. I always love to hear feedback.

A friend recently gave me a invitation to GrandCentral.com. It's basically a call forwarding service; they give you a phone number and tools to manage your incoming calls. I'm not 100% signed up for the concept yet, but if I do start using it seriously, I wanted a phone number that had some meaning. So I turned to phonespell.com during the sign-up process to find a number with a good mnemonic.

You can type a phone number mnemonic into soft phones like Yahoo! Messenger or Skype and it will automatically call the right number. I wouldn't be surprised if mobile phones let you do that too, either now or in the near future. So there may come a day when no one needs to know your number—just the mnemonic.

For every number that could potentially spell something (i.e. it does not have a 0 or 1 in it which is only 26.2% of all possible phone numbers), I copied & pasted it into phonespell. There are a lot of garbage numbers out there that don't spell anything. I ended up looking at 100 or so phone number in three different area codes before I finally hit upon 787-4733. It has a simple, neutral, one word menmonic – striped.

So next time you sign up for a phone number, be sure to have the phonespell site handy. It can help you get a phone number that's easy for you and your friends to remember.