shahine.com/omar/

Couple of months ago I wrote about how these guys can’t get Calendar Sync to work.

Well, it’s taken us a long time (cause sync is hard), but by partnering with the Outlook team we now have Mail, Contacts & Calendar sync for all Windows Live Hotmail users via Outlook Connector 12.1.

Previously calendar sync was a “premium” feature that only worked with the old MSN Calendar service. Now it’s free for everyone, like it should be!

The Calendar sync now part of the Outlook Connector will sync “all” your Windows Live Calendars in Outlook allowing you to view them side by side or overlaid. This includes any calendars you have shared or are sharing with others giving you read/write access to your calendars online and offline.

Another benefit is you get a Birthday Calendar for all your Windows Live Contacts. This is a great way to stay on top of Birthdays (in addition to fbCal for Facebook, which you can now subscribe to in Windows Live Calendar).

Read more on the Hotmail team blog.

Download the new connector here.

PS – Calendar Sync is done using FeedSync formerly known as SSE.

There are few things that bother me more than cables and cords, especially Wall Warts. Why does my camera charger need a 6ft cable?

Well, I’ve been searching the intertubes for almost a year to find “short power cords” to use with my many chargers, dc adapters and so on. This was made difficult by the fact that I had no idea what to search for.

A few months ago my quest was complete. Behold the C7 Figure Eight Plug from Cyberguys.com. At $1.79 each get a bunch of them!

I ordered a dozen 1 ft power cords. These are suitable to replace any 2 prong AC plug (NEMA 1-15 ungrounded plug) with a C7 figure 8 ungrounded plug. I went around my house cleaning up cable disasters everywhere.

Here you can see the diversity of my long cables that I no longer use:

and this is what I replaced them all with:

I started a wiki to collect all the Exchange iPhone issues (bugs, feature requests etc). It needs better organization and layout but it works for now (using jot spot, aka Google Sites, since I can’t find any other free hosted wiki).

The reason I set this wiki up is that I’ve used a number of Exchange Active Sync (EAS) devices in the years (Nokia N61, Palm Treo and of course Windows Mobile) and am very sensitive to not “meeting the bar”.

Since Apple doesn’t use Exchange for corporate mail, it’s hard to expect they will reach the same EAS perfection as Windows Mobile, but I hope they can at least address the bugs and issues we call out.

Special thanks go Tim Heuer for helping put this list together

Wow. It has been a long time since I’ve been so excited about a piece of technology. Perhaps when I first got an iPod nano.

This is not a review. I expect to post something more detailed later. This is a more of what I know, and what I don’t know .

note: this is my first iPhone. I have been using Windows Mobile for the past 5 years since the release of the original MPX-200. I currently own a Samsung BlackJack II and prefer the “standard” over the “professional” incarnations of Windows Mobile. I own 2 iPods, a Touch and 3G Nano and have owned 8 iPods in my life. I have used almost every PDA (Zarus, Newton, Palm Pilot, various Palms, Treo(s), PocketPC(s)).

I’d also like to point out that at least 5 people I know insisted that they were not going to get iPhone 3Gs. By Sunday night each of them were proud new owners. I expect this number to grow.

The Good

It’s an iPod!

The iPhone is a fantastic iPod. Better than the Touch for a few reasons:

1. You can double tap the round button to shortcut to the iPod app
2. You can press the mic on the headphones to pause/play or double press to skip. The touch can’t do this and as such it’s a terrible iPod since you have to touch it just to skip a song.
3. Hardware buttons for Volume. Enough said. pressing the Touch to do this sucks.

And it goes everywhere with me, which my iPod does not.

It’s a Computer

The things I can do with it are awesome. Real Web Browser. Install great applications that take full advantage of the hardware (location, wifi, touch).

Everything is consistent. It’s a thing of beauty.

You know it’s good when all the Applications consistently adhere to a set of guidelines.

It Sync’s to Exchange

Yipee, for now it works well with our corporate Exchange servers with a set of notable bugs (below under the bad).

Reading mail on this device is a thing of beauty. The rendering is much better than Windows Mobile.

The Applications

The whole experience around Apps is awesome. I’ll cover my favorite applications later. Some are just fantastic (SmugShot, OmniFocus, New York Times, Apple Remote). I have many more to try out.

A big plus is that like FireFox Add-ons there is a centralized update mechanism so that you can ensure you are using the latest version (like websites!). So long 90s era check the web site to get an update.

Location

Wow, every app pretty much supports this. It’s a phenomenal feature to have baked in. From Yelp, to Maps, to GeoTagging of Photos…

The Keyboard

Much better than I thought, although it’s hard to use the iPhone in bed since the weight is pushing it out of your hands.

The Experience

The UI is fluid, emotional. The Hardware is like artwork. It’s a joy to interact with.

The Bad

Hardware Issues

It appears Apple deprecated a common way of charging iPods and iPhones. Every recent iPod/iPhone till now has supported charging via FireWire and USB. Many after market accessories have always used FireWire interfaces to charge over the Apple Dock Connector even though Apple has suggested that they switch to USB. Well, iPhone 3G removed support for FireWire and as such my 2 car kits will not charge my iPhone. Since FireWire is 12V vs USB 5V you can see why maybe the car folks weren’t in a hurry to switch. This is a bummer.

Exchange Issues

I have noticed the following bugs with Exchange ActiveSync:

1) When you reply all to an email your own address is included in the CC line. This is not expected behavior. Email clients always strip out the recipient's address from Reply-All. See Outlook, Windows Mobile 6 (previous versions of WM had this same bug) and every other email product.

2) by default iPhone sync's all the Contacts on the Server in every folder rather than just the default Contacts folder. This behavior should be modified to only sync the default folder or should be configurable for the user. To make matters worse, the Contacts app is dog slow on iPhone.

3) The reply/forward status of a message is not sync'ed with the server. When you reply to a message on iPhone the exchange server does not have the reply flag set on the message. As such in Outlook the message does not look like there was a reply. Can’t believe they missed this one.

4) No Peak/Off Peak schedule. On my Blackjack I would sync using a schedule during peak hours and use Push off-peak. This saved my battery and I really didn’t need push during the work day since I sit in front of a computer all day.

Battery Life

Hmm, it sucks. Ok? If you want Good Battery Life here is a guide on how to make your iPhone 3G exactly like an iPhone original.

I’m trying a number of things to see if I can get it to last a day. Step 1, turn of Push email. I don’t need that anyway. Step 2, turn off Wifi. Lets hope I don’t have to since I’m addicted to controlling my Apple TV with the Remote.

Performance and Stability

Not perfect. Lots of times the iPhone hangs. Loading Contacts is glacial. Unlocking entering PIN stutters.

Applications crash. Sometimes the cause the whole iPhone to reboot (what is this, 1998?). My Windows Mobile Phone NEVER rebooted because of a crash… it just stopped working and I rebooted it!

Also today my Location services totally stopped working. No idea why. I had to reset my location settings to get it working.

Pausing/Playing audio via the headphones is buggy. Sometimes the iPhone goes dead till you wake it from Standby.

Album art on the Apple Remote is flakey at best, and you can’t control the volume of an Apple TV.

Tethering

There is of course no tethering support for the iPhone meaning I cannot connect it to my laptop to surf the web like a Windows Mobile Phone. I hope an app comes out to support this in the future.

Since around 2001 I made the switch to digital flat panel displays and never looked back. My first display predated DVI by about a year instead utilizing a Digital Flat Panel (DFP) adapter.

I was always annoyed by the whole Digital <-> Analog <-> Digital process when using an analog VGA adapter with a flat panel. I found it crazy that you had to convert to analog when the display was digital to begin with. All Laptops have always had a native digital interface to their displays. So why should external displays be any worse?

When DVI hit the scene it got much easier, but it’s rare to see a laptop with a DVI adapter (that’s not a Mac of course). This always annoyed me.

Now some docking stations for laptops do have DVI, which is great, but not all (like my Lenovo X61).

The reasons why laptops don’t have DVI adapters? Size. It’s much larger than VGA. Although DVI is backwards compatible with VGA, and Apple has figured out a way to shrink DVI, PC maker still don’t bother and stick to Analog. Another excuse? projectors are mainly VGA at most companies.

If size is a problem, you could theoretically add HDMI ports (which is backwards compatible with DVI) but apparently many laptop makers don’t do this either due to cost and needing to also have VGA (projectors).

Supposedly, DisplayPort will solve this all, but I have yet to see someone like Lenovo move to DisplayPort even though Dell is.

DisplayPort is a digital display interface standard (approved May 2006, current version 1.1 approved on April 2, 2007) put forth by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA). It defines a new license-free, royalty-free, digital audio/video interconnect, intended to be used primarily between a computer and its display monitor, or a computer and a home-theater system.

[wikipedia]

In the meantime, what can you do if you want DVI on a laptop that only has a VGA port? And what are the advantages to DVI anyway? Well I like DVI because:

1. Ghost Free images (no horizontal or vertical sync)
2. No calibration necessary (only brightness and contrast)
3. Pixel for Pixel perfection

A few months ago I purchased a novel solution to this problem, a DisplayLink Adapter made by Sewell.

DisplayLink is a company that produces the chipset that supports DVI and VGA over USB and it’s licensed to a number of companies including Samsung, Sewell,

When I first got it I had a number of problems mainly due to their driver. The good news is that in the last few months, their driver support (particularly on Vista) has improved a great deal. In fact when I got the device the driver didn’t even work, but their tech support staff is extremely competent and they fixed the driver in a matter of days.

So how does it work? Well, it’s OK. The main issues I have with it are:

1. It uses quite a bit of CPU, and the CPU usage will occasionally spike which interrupts my Bluetooth mouse which I find annoying.
2. Occasionally when undocking I get a message saying the USB device is in use and I can’t undock.
3. It doesn’t work during boot of course, which means that if you need to interact with your BIOS or say enter your BitLocker PIN you are SOL.
4. Max resolution of 1600 x 1200.

I hope that in the future that Windows adds native support for USB style display adapters, but for now, these are some serious limitations.

Furthermore, USB doesn’t have the same bandwidth as DVI so no high frame rate activity like Games. Video works ok (not HD) though.

I should have blogged about this earlier, but I saw Ed Bott referenced DisplayLink on a post about using 3 monitors.

In closing, this technology is pretty good today but not perfect. If you are a VGA snob like me, then this is a viable alternative with some gotchas.

Wow, what a long day.

It started like this:

7:30 am

Drive to the Belmont AT&T store to meet a co-worker (Andy). Waited in line for 5 minutes and aborted.

8:10 am

Arrived at Stanford Shopping Center, witnessed the 500 or so person line and aborted.

8:30 am

Arrived in the parking lot of the Mountain View AT&T store, did a U-turn an went to work.

9 am - 5 pm

Was ridiculed by co-workers who were looking for my shiny new iPhone. One co-worker (who shall remain nameless) convinced his 12 year old son to wait in line for close to 4 hours and got an iPhone! Then he called me in a meeting from his new 3G iPhone to taunt me.

6:00 pm

Arrived back at the Stanford Shopping Center. Got in line and it was moving really well. after 1 hour I had moved half way up. Then it turns out that a bunch of Apple employees went off shift so the progress in the line slowed. It took me 2 more hours to move the same distance I did in 1 hour.

Anyway, while in line I was instructed to call 611 on my phone and remove my 15% corporate discount or I would not be walking out of the store with a phone. I was told I'd have to do that or else my transaction would fail. I was also told I could call back on Monday and add it back??? WTF. Weird.

Anyway, when I got in the store I answered a bunch of questions.... yes, yes, yes, yes, 16GB Black. They only had a few yet, and had not sold out of anything yet.

A few minutes later I was $550 poorer (no worries, my iPhone fund has exactly $550 in it) because I did not qualify for a subsidy... half the price my ass.

What is interesting is that they did not unbrick or activate my phone. I just walked out with a shrink wrapped box. The minute I walked out my BlackJack II stopped working. I guess they nuked my SIM. Anyway, 10 minutes later I was home, accepted the 500th Apple EULA of the year, and have a working 3G iPhone with my corporate email and a bunch of cool apps like SmugShot.

I'll post more info when I've played around with this thing.

I feel like I did back in 6th grade when I got my first Mac! (A Mac II cx with an Apple 13inch RGB monitor).

When our daughter was born and we moved to the burbs, I longed for a product that I could use to keep lists of errands and it would tell me when I was near a store that I could purchase them at.

This is basically “location” or “context” based tasks…

Looks like OmniFocus for the iPhone will do the trick.

Can’t wait till tomorrow!!!

I knew this would happen. As time went on and details emerged, my prediction of how miserable it’s going to be trying to buy an iPhone is going to come true.

You see, now that AT&T is wearing the pants, it’s doing it’s usual business of making things as complicated as possible ensuring that it’s making as much money as possible and making your job as a consumer as difficult as possible.

According to a few sites, including Engadet, there are a few different prices for the iPhone depending on your situation.

• iPhone 3G will be available for $199 (8GB) and $299 (16GB) for iPhone customers who purchased an iPhone prior to 7/11, customers activating a new line with AT&T and current AT&T customers who are eligible for an upgrade
• Existing AT&T customers who are not currently eligible for an upgrade discount can purchase iPhone 3G for $399 for the 8GB model or $499 for the 16GB model. Both options require a new two-year service agreement.

So how do I know if I’m eligible for an upgrade discount? Who knows. I can guarantee that the dude at the AT&T store is going to do everything in their power to make sure I pay the full non subsidized price. That’s been my experience for the past 6 years (starting with Cingular and now AT&T). I would sometimes even bring printouts from the AT&T website showing the price of a device with my corporate pricing etc and they would ignore it and refuse to sell to me.

So this begs the question. How are the Apple employees in the Apple store going to know how much to charge you for the phone? Are the tapping into the state of the art AT&T Siebel Customer Database? I don’t think so.

I think this pretty much ensures that I’m going to go to the Apple store to get my iPhone because I’m betting that the Apple employees are going to be more motivated to sell me an iPhone and get my but out of the store. But really, I’m not sure how this is going to work out.

In fact I am 100% certain I am not eligible for the upgrade price. How do I know this? Well I logged on to my AT&T online account and clicked “Upgrade Phone” and it told me:

 

Not sure where it’s getting the 04/15/2009 date. Apparently a number of factors picked a pretty arbitrary date. All I know is 04/15/2009 is > 7/11/2008 and that’s all I care about .