So… iPhone 4 hit up Canada. Yeah, I picked one up. It’s a nice little device  and I’m having a blast with it but there is just one problem… Getting it was a pain in the fucking ass. I have waited in lines before and quite frequently they are painless. In fact, most lines are better than they actually appear to be. “Your wait time from this point is 60 minutes” says the sign at Canada’s Wonderland, yet 20 minutes later we are somehow on the ride. On hold for the credit card company and it says estimated wait time if 45 minutes, and eight minutes later I’m on the phone with someone I can hardly understand bitching about my statement. It’s beautiful because you are getting more than what you expected, you are actually pleased…

But what about the Apple line. Showing up early as fuck in the morning to get the jump on the line was apparently an idea shared by many. Estimates put about anywhere from 400 to 500 people in front of us at the most. You figure you have most of the store trying to sell this product, you could easily move through this line in a couple of hours. Oh, but this is using common sense. What ended up happening was a horror story.

Before the mall opened, the line was humming along at a snails pace. Slow, but we were making progress. Everyone started making introducing ourselves. Laptops were in abundance and Youtube’s data traffic was never higher. It was the greatest part of any line. Eventually the line stopped. It stopped period. It was not moving at all.

I went to see what was up, and asked the Apple rep what was going on. The Rogers servers were down, which is understandable due to the nature of the day. “But Nick, why was the line not moving if Bell and Telus were still able to activate phones?” Great fucking question, and it is one I asked. I was told that it was unfair to the Rogers customers if anyone else could get a phone while they were waiting, so in the spirit of fairness  we must all wait for our turn. It was at this time everyone was pissed, so free water was given out.

At this point of the line, most peoples laptops had already died out, so human interaction was necessary to fight off insanity. Problem is a bunch of fat Apple loving nerds arn’t the best company to keep for long durations, so people started taking breaks away from the line. Going off at 30 minutes or so at a time to get food. I heard a group of guys actually went off and saw a movie while a friend held their spots. How this sort of thing could happen, well, when a line doesn’t move for two and a half hours at a time people can go dick around forever and come back like nothing happened.

Rogers would constantly go down throughout the day, and line’s would stop. People would crowd around the front of the store, yelling for a solution. The most common, and sensible solution, was to give out a voucher to the Rogers people, guaranteeing them a phone but telling them to come the fuck back when the servers arn’t corked. An Apple employee actually said this was “illegal” due to “copyright law” and that if we were unhappy with it we should “contact our MP.” People were pretty pissed off.

Now, about 15 hours in we were told the store was closing, and they were handing out vouchers for people to come back the next day. What the FUCK?! We were not just told that it was illegal to do this, and in fact this solution would have solved all the problems. We went back the next day and walked out with a phone in ten minutes. Why? People could come at their leisure instead of waiting the hell in line to get their phone, thus no need to line up to guarantee themselves a fucking phone.

The whole experience sucked fucking dick. 15 hours for a piece of paper telling us to dick off cause the management couldn’t handle basic human beings properly. In my picture I show a picture of the line breaking off in weird, convoluted ways. That is exactly what the fuck happened. At one point we were standing IN FRONT of the Apple store walking AWAY from it to get closer to our phones. Then we stopped for three hours cause Rogers shat the bed. Why the fuck are activations, a process which takes significantly longer than buying a piece of hardware, in the same line as anyone else. Could you imagine going to fill up your tank of gas, and having to wait while people get their engines services? It would be complete horseshit. Yet 30 minute credit check and activations are piled in with hardware sales because they perceived it to be the same. It’s not the fucking same, it’s a piece of technology compared to negotiating a contract. A FUCKING CONTRACT.

What sucks is while we were all waiting in line for the iPhone and getting fucked over, normal customers were going in and walking out with Mac’s and iPods. Apparently, when the store “opened” they only had three people dealing with phones and the rest of the Macsperts were standing around looking important or helping give tutorials on how to Google on Safari.

I don’t know what blows more, the fact that a high tech, top end consumer and business electronics company can’t simply manage a line of people on their fourth iteration of the product, or that I was in line and wasted a fucking day of my life being angry with other angry people. Sure, it was nice to get off my fat ass and feel like I belong to some sort of community, but lets be honest, it was a waste of everyones time. I’m just shocked at the whole event.

Seriously, how do you fuck up a line?

So Microsoft fucked up again and they announced the Kin. What the fuck is this thing? It’s a fucking phone target at HIPSTERS. MY MORTAL FUCKING ENEMY! Anyways, in case you haven’t heard about this phone it’s supposed to be a cheap man’s alternative to an iPhone. By cheap man I mean elementary school kids who feel the need to share with the internet what kind of underwear they are wearing at every single moment.

Basically, it is a phone with very tight social networking integration. Got something interesting to share with your over 9,000 Myspace friends? No problem, just drag it over the share icon and bam! Now everyone can see your LOLs. Which makes me wonder, if you want to do that, what the hell is wrong with a regular Facebook client?

So Microsoft tried to make things simple, but instead they made it confusing as hell. Instead of one mobile operating system, they will now have 3. Windows Phone Classic (rebranded Windows Mobile), Windows Phone 7, and Kin. Way to go Microsoft, high five.

But at least I have the ability to track where I ate what sandwich.

So Sony recently axed the Linux support on all PS3s citing “security issues.” Deep down, the “security issues” mean that it’s a gate to be able to play pirated games. So props to Sony for protecting us from the evil hackers.

What pisses me off more is that people are supporting this. If you go on the Playstation Blog you have a whole bunch of people saying “I never used it, I’m glad to see it gone.” Wait, what?! I never used it either, but it’s never good to see a feature totally disappear. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. There were others who loved this feature and used it every day. Now they are not able. How pissed off do you think they are? That’s like Apple removing the phone features from the iPhone, because we all know that no one makes phone calls anymore. It’s all about the text messaging.

So I end this post by saying: Fuck you Sony, stop removing our features. First it was backwards compatibility, now it’s Linux. What’s next? The Bluray player?

A smartphone is great because you can access the web, email, and chat from pretty much everywhere you are. So consider this, having a smartphone without a data plan. That is exactly what the Wifi iPad is like. Instead of being able to do shit from everywhere, you are limited to your house, or Starbucks. So you’re waiting for a bus and want to email your friend the information for tonight’s party. Oh sorry, you can’t do that on the iPad without 3G. Sure you can send the email from your iPhone, but that’s kind of stupid since you bought an iPad to make your life easier. It’s not a replacement for a phone, and it’s not a replacement for a computer.

You have to carry this thing along with your existing cellphone or laptop. Why bother, it’s just more weight anyways. If you must get the iPad, get the one with 3G. So at least you can make VOIP calls from anywhere.

Granted, I do bitch about Apple products a lot. But that doesn’t mean that I am some arrogant fanboy, Microsoft also has their flaws I just choose not to write about them, because they aren’t as funny. Except in this case, Windows Phone 7 Series.

First off, the name is just horrible, it’s so damn long and retarded. Yes, that’s the official name of the OS. It wasn’t enough calling it the Windows Phone 7. They had to add “Series” to the title. Can you just imagine, someone going in a store and asking “Do you guys have a Windows Phone 7 Series phone?” It’s extremely long and redundant. Microsoft already had “Windows Mobile” so why did they COMPLETELY abandon that?

Let’s get into the list of features, or therefore lack of. No multitasking, no Flash, no copy and paste, proprietary “app” store being the only way to get programs. Sound familiar? Oh yeah, Apple has the exact same reasons why I hate the iPhone so much. The only difference is that Apple eventually corrected some of their mistakes (not all, but some were corrected.) My current phone runs Windows Mobile 6.5.x and it works perfectly, it does everything. I can keep multiple programs open, so I can transfer information from one to the other without closing it. I can play flash games, and watch Youtube from the browser (perfect if someone emails you a link.) I have so many free 3rd party programs that it’s unbelievable. There are a lot of things that would have been rejected from the iPhone store such as: Google Latitude, Opera, TotalCommander, registry editor, special marketplace dedicated to freeware. It’s incredible. The Andriod has similar features, both are a really powerful OS.

So why the hell did Microsoft do this? To make the phone more user friendly. Makes sense right? Remove everything so that the user can only do basic things? I think it’s bullshit to remove some features like multitasking and copy and paste. It should be up to the user to decide whether they want the option or not. Just because Paul doesn’t need to copy a paragraph from the internet and email it to someone doesn’t mean I don’t need to.

The WinPho7Ser has some interesting features, like the Xbox integration. But I don’t give a shit about gaming on my phone. It seems that Microsoft really abandoned the business market of the WinMo days. It’s a shame really, I liked that OS. It’s time to make friends with Google I suppose.

Until recently when I bought a new WD hard drive and installed Win 7 on it. I took my old Maxtor and plugged it into this device to copy the files into the new hard drive. (I did not have enough cables to keep it plugged in) So I plug it in and within seconds I see the device start to smoke. I fucking panicked and quickly unplugged my old hard drive to hopefully save the data. Data was safe. However the thing started smoking for no fucking reason.

So I decided to do some research and read some Newegg reviews. It turns out that others have had the same problem of the device going up in smoke, while others have had the hard drives fry, and even some had the PSU of the device melt. I tried going on the Bytecc website to try to get an refund or something. Unfortunately their website is fucking created by some fucking asian guy who can’t speak any English.

“RMA service is only for campanys directly buy merchandise from BYTECC.
Not for enduser or consumer.”

I’m sorry, what the fuck is a campany? Is that like a camp? But I guess I shouldn’t be too shocked with this company and bad English. There was a sheet of paper that came with the device that read “If plug-in the connect incorrect, may cause damaged”  That really made a lot of sense.

The device itself has a few flaws. The USB cable is retardedly short. The casing of it feels like it’s going to break at any moment. You actually have to remove the casing if you want to plug in a 2.5″ laptop PATA drive. But one thing out of this really shocked me. On a regular hard drive it’s pretty damn hard to plug in the molex cable upside down. On this device you can do it with no additional force. If you look closely, you will see that there infact is a groove for how it’s suppose to go. Problem is that groove doesn’t stop it from going in. Way to fucking design something Bytecc.

Rogers is an evil giant in this monopolized world of cellphone carriers. A lot of companies have tried to step in to stop them. Fido was one, then it got bought out by Rogers. Then came Solo (Bell) Virgin (Bell) Koodo (Telus) but all of them are owned by the evil giants. Then today was supposed to be a magnificent day when the wireless world would be changed. Yeah, fat chance.

Wind came in and tried to change everything. They have a decent strategy but it is still lacking perfection. For starters, they use some really messed up spectrum (1700 I believe). They have all of 4 phones, which one of them is something decent. And their plans are really out of whack. Either you can get something REALLY cheap and good. Or something REALLY EXPENSIVE but good. There is no mid point. For example, with my current Rogers plan I have, I pay 45 a month for 150 mins, and 500MB. Going over to Wind, I’d have to pay 15 for Voice and 35 for UNLIMITED data. Sure I get more data, but I don’t fucking need UNLIMITED. I barely get to 200MB a month anyways.

I can see Wind being beneficial to some people, but I don’t see this current strategy satisfying everybody. Me being one of the people. This wouldn’t be a problem to me really, if they didn’t fucking advertise themselves as being “the first company for the people, by the people.” Fucking wankers.

Back when I first got my XPERIA I got a lot of comments on it. The ones that pissed me off the most were the ones saying “why the hell do you need a 600 dollar phone?” Well here’s the thing, I don’t NEED a $600 phone, but it’s a nice thing to have. For starters, I have the ability to check my email anywhere. If I am walking down the streets of Toronto and I get an email I can reply to it with no problem. I just pull the device out from my pocket, slide out the keyboard and begin writing. I can satisfy my Facebook addiction at anytime and I can read up on my favorite RSS feeds. Basically, it serves me as a really small laptop and sure, it’s never going to replace my Vaio, but for a quick task like posting a Facebook update the phone gets the job done.

But Matt, the iPhone is only 199 why not get that? No asshole, an iPhone with no contract is $680 for a new one. That’s even more expensive than my phone! If I wanted a contract I would have gotten one and gotten a better deal on my phone. It seems that a lot of people don’t understand telephone prices. They all don’t know that you CAN infact buy a phone without a contract and it seems like the $199 pricetag is only 199 and nothing else. Read the fine print. In order to get that price you have to sign a 3 year contract, and pay more than 60 bucks a month for service. You end up paying for more than what you need and end up losing money in the long run.

Moral of the story? Cellphones are bloody expensive and only have a ~500mhz processor*.

*On select phones.

I’m fucking tired of this Bell bullshit I’ve been seeing around. The first one is the whole “GET MORE THAN ROGERS FOR LESS THAN ROGERS” marketing campaign.  Yeah, more service outages maybe. Bell and Rogers offer pretty much the same services for the same price. Bell Internet has faster internet, but less bandwidth for the same cost. So where is all this MORE FOR LESS crap? I don’t see it. When you offer a shitty service you can offer it for cheaper as well.

Fuck Bell’s “Perfect for laptops” campaign as well. They never explain why their shitty DSL is better on laptops than Rogers. Do laptops have some sexual attraction to DSL or something? I think not. Both services work with a laptop, and the average user won’t see any difference between the two.

The next Bell thing I will complain about is there choice of technologies. CDMA, Satellite, and DSL. CDMA is so inconvenient for a customer who wants to buy a new phone. Majority of the cellphone market is GSM and use SIM cards. Satellite dishes have to be readjusted, calibrated, setup, etc. With cable I just plug it in and I have it, I don’t care if Bell has a free setup. It’s something that you don’t have to do. 

Fuck Bell, Rogers might have some bullshit like $150/month internet but Bell has bullshit like charging you for paper billing. 2 bucks a month.

Click to view full image.

Forget talking on the phone, text messaging is the ultimate way of communication. I mean, who needs a phone anyways? It seems the youth is becoming less and less social. Now, before I get started I would like to state that I DO infact send text messages. But I usually send them when I am not free to talk. So if I am at work then you will probably never get a call from me. But because sending a text message is silent and it doesn’t bother anyone, I will send one. That circumstance is the only time people should be able to send a text message. Yet, you keep hearing stories how some people send 7,000 text messages a month. No, that wasn’t a typo, seven THOUSAND. Out of that 7,000 I bet you half of them were something short and stupid like, LOL or Hi. You know, in the time you tried to have a conversation over text messaging you could have just called the person. Your 300 count conversation could have been shrunk down to a few minutes on the phone.

I sometimes heard that sending a text message is faster. Bullshit, I can talk WAY faster than you can type on your phone. Calling is so much easier, sending a text message explaining something can be impossible. You need to sometimes actually TALK to someone to get a point across. Another thing is when people text me when I am driving to go pick them up or something. Well good job asshole, I can’t really respond because I am driving. If you call me I will answer because I can just put you on speaker and not have to look at a shitty phone while driving.

Now, don’t call me an idiot. I do my research on hipsters and I know that text mesaging is more popular with girls, or that girls make guys text. I tell you this, if your girlfriend doesn’t want to talk over the phone then there is something wrong with her. Don’t be a pussy, call her and talk to her if you really like her.

So what did we learn today? Unless you are at work, or taking a shit there is no need to send a text message. Just call the person and have a conversation with them!