iphone Archive

I’ve always been a big fan of Starwood hotels (that’s Westin, W, Aloft, etc.) — mainly because their points system is the best for earning points. Because of the points, I get to stay at nice hotels a couple of times a year on points (like the trip this week in San Francisco).

Today I learned via an email from Starwood and inside the hotel itself that you can now use Apple Facetime on your iPhone or iPod Touch to speak with their customer service hotline. Gadling reported that the program began last month.

The Facetime customer service option is only available during the day although I was unable to find any specific Facetime information on the Starwood web site.

Perhaps having a face-to-face conversation with a customer service rep will lessen the yelling, screaming, cursing that usually goes along with many customer service calls. It’s easy to do all of the former when you are hiding behind a phone but when you are “seen” will you want to be as aggressive?

I am working hard to find you deals that will save you real cash on the tech gadgets you actually want. This morning I posted about Amazon’s iPod Touch deal and now I found a way to save a good bit of cash on an iPhone 4.

Tomorrow AT&T will offer deals on refurbished Apple iPhone 4 devices. What’s great about Apple refurbs is that they look and act brand new unlike my Dell laptop refurbs that come with bright orange stickers. Apple puts the refurbished iPhone 4 devices into new cases. The AT&T pricing is $50 less than their regular refurbished price.

The pricing (remember the pricing is available tomorrow) for the different models is:

• iPhone 4 32G Refurb – new price $299, refurbished sale price $199
• iPhone 4 16G Refurb – new price $199, refurbished sale price $99

AT&T will also sell the iPhone 3GS 8G refurbished for $79 although I would think one would want to spend the extra $120 to get the latest generation device since you will have it a minimum of two years.

OS X Daily has some additional notes about the deal. Two years ago AT&T sold the first generation iPhone as a refurbished deal for $249. And check out Jonathan Hirschman’s 10 iPhone 4 game changers.

One of the huge downsides of being an early adopter is the lack of features you generally get in the early days of a device. For me, the massive difference between the number of iPhone apps currently available and the number of Windows Phone 7 apps available isn’t that big of a problem, but there are a few apps I really miss. Following is a brief list of those apps. Please feel free to add more in the comments if you have any apps that need to be ported straight away. Continue reading “iPhone Apps I Want on Windows Phone” »

After using an iPhone 3G for about 2 years, I gave it up last week. This week I picked up one of the new Windows Phone 7 devices (the HTC Surround). Following is a brief comparison of the two from my perspective.

Table of Contents:

• Buying Apps
• Interface
• Media
• Buttons
• Web Browser
• Camera
• Email, Contacts
• Other
• Conclusion

Buying Apps

The iPhone has the famous App Store, Windows Phone has the Marketplace. While the iPhone obviously has exponentially more apps available than Windows Phone does, a lot of the major apps were available for Windows Phone from day-one. I can’t, in good conscience, say that the Windows Phone Marketplace even compares to the iPhone app store in terms of apps, yet, but things do look good for such a new system.

Both systems allow you to buy/download apps through your computer or through your device, so they are basically equal in that regard. I do think that the Windows Phone will need to find a better way to arrange and organize the apps and games once the marketplace starts to really take off, though.

One place the iPhone has the Windows Phone beat, hands-down, right now is the fact that you can’t view what apps you currently have on your Windows Phone when using your PC. You can only view and manage your apps through the phone. Continue reading “In-Depth Comparison: Windows Phone vs. iPhone” »

It’s obviously cheaper for a company to send you a monthly invoice by email than it is via paper in the mail. Going paperless is also better for the environment.

Found via SlickDeals, AT&T is currently offering up to $20 cash if you switch to paperless billing and auto-pay. The promo notes that you will receive $10 if you switch to paperless billing and another $10 if you move to auto-pay. I figured the deal was worth sharing since so many CN readers have iPhone devices.

You may be able to get $20 per AT&T account (wireless, cable, etc.) but this is unconfirmed as of the time of this post.

So the big news yesterday was that dating site OkCupid released stats that iPhone users have more sex than users of Android or Blackberry devices.  Looking at the stats that OkCupid provided, it also looks like iPhone users sleep around more than users of the other two devices. I can only wonder where my Samsung Ace would rate on the chart. It’s pretty hot if you ask me. This morning on the Scott & Todd show they discussed the survey results and were wondering where the new Droid X would rank on the sex scale.

With all of that said, I’d like to share with you the REAL reason iPhone users are having more sex than with the other devices. Cartoon artist Guhmshoo put together the following cartoon which provides the sex argument explanation.

It’s amazing how much awesome technology is available for little kids today. When I was a little kid, I had a Fisher-Price cash register and thought that was awesome. That was until Transformers came around – even today any kid would take Optimus or Starscream over an iPad. Startup advisor Louis Gray and others have posted videos of their young kids interacting with his iPhone and even at their young age, the kids seem to know which buttons to press for the desired action!

Russia-based semantic search engine Quintura has released a version of their Kids search engine for the iPad and iPhone. I’ve included a sample screenshot from the app below. The search app uses Quintura’s cloud technology to refine the results for a search query. From the overview, “The cloud features most popular concepts that we pick up from the texts from most relevant web pages. This helps you define the best direction for further searching and refine your query.”

Quintura uses a manual selection process for the search results to make sure the available sites are kid-friendly.

The Quintura Kids for iPhone/iPad app is available for an intro price of $1.99.