Jonathan Ong's Blog

Half the Facebook events I receive are where people try to get everyone’s numbers after losing their phone and somehow people are willing to post their numbers in public. I purposely ignore these invitations as retribution. Here’s a simple guide to setting up your contacts so you never lose your numbers ever again while having the most complete address book possible with minimal effort.

1. If you don’t have one, get a GMail account.
Nothing compares to Google when it comes to integration. I do have Yahoo and Microsoft accounts, but that’s only for Flickr and Bing Shopping respectively. If you refuse to use Gmail, don’t tell me because I will lose respect for you.

2. Take an hour or two and sort your contacts in Gmail.
This isn’t too hard if you never set it up, but I imported all my Facebook contacts information back when FacebookSync was legal and I had more contacts than I ever wanted. This is important because you’ll need proper names to sync your contacts with other services. This is also easy with the suggested contacts feature. And don’t use nicknames, and separate first and last names.

3. Setup Microsoft Exchange on your smartphone and on your PC.
The crucial step: this syncs your contacts, calendars, and email on your smartphone, and syncs your address books and calendars on your PC. It works for both Apple’s Address Book and Microsoft Outlook. Thus, when you set it up, all your contacts and calendars will be synchronized, and iPhones will have push notifications!

4. Download contacts from 3rd party applications.
This includes Facebook and LinkedIn. Whatever information your friends let you see, you can easily transfer it all to your phone using their applications. The only problem with this is when your friends don’t use their real names.

5. Go to your GMail and reorganize your contacts.
Use “merge contacts” since you’ll probably have a lot of duplicate entries. Finally all your contacts will be organized, the same address book will be available to you on all your devices, and you’ll never lose your contacts again.

Even if your smartphone doesn’t have data service, you can use wifi once in a while to sync your contacts.

The problem with buying goods in California and many other states is the sales tax. To make it worse, Apple is headquartered in California, so that’s basically a guaranteed 10% price increase on all their products for Californians. I’ve been searching for the best websites to purchase Macs from and I concluded that Amazon is the best since it offers free shipping and no sales tax. This table represents my calculations and takes into account whether the free iPod promotion is available.

• The first column represents the Mac. Multiple listings of the same one mean different models.
• The second column is the MSRP without an educational discount.
• The third column is the price with an educational discount. These are easy to get, even if you aren’t part of any educational institutions.
• The fourth, w/ tax, is the total price if you bought it at the Apple Store with 10% sales tax.
• The fifth, w/ free, includes the MSRP price with an educational discount and the cost of an iPod Touch and Printer. This promotion is not available for Mac Minis.
• The sixth, w/ tax, includes the fifth with 10% sales tax.
• The seventh, net cost, includes the final cost minus the rebates of $199 and $99 for the iPod and printer respectively and the cost of the iPod and printer if you sold them on eBay, about $160 and $40 respectively.
• The last column is the price on Amazon.

So the real table you should be comparing is the following table. w/o iPod & Printer, w/ Tax is the price you should be looking at when the free iPod promotion isn’t available. w/ iPod, Printer & Tax is the price you should be looking at when the promotion is available. I wouldn’t suggest getting the free printer unless you can actually use the printer because you won’t make more than a few dollars selling it.

Perhaps one of the best aspects for Amazon is a free promotion for students: one year trial for Amazon Prime! With Amazon Prime, you’ll get two day shipping for free or one day shipping for $3.99. This for sure beats buying products at the online Apple Store. Of course Apple knows this and they can’t do anything about it since there are Apple Stores in every state and thus sales tax, but this is why they have other retails, such as Amazon and Best Buy, also sell their products.

I’ve also ran across a website called PC Connection Express that has much lower prices than Amazon. The difference however is that it requires mail-in rebates which I do not like doing and it doesn’t have enough ratings for me to know if it’s a legitimate website.

Unfortunately my laptop screen broke in my luggage while flying to Maryland or driving to Vegas. I’m now stuck without a physical keyboard, which isn’t very productive. This is my experience replacing my iPad with my laptop.

No bittorrenting. I can’t just download True Blood or Mad Men to my iPad and there are no streaming applications for HBO and AMC. I guess I’m missing two weeks worth of TV episodes unless they some how end up on Netflix or Hulu. Hulu and HBO neither stream for free on the iPad, so bittorrent seems to be the only option. These are good shows too… I’m not going to stream them from some crappy website.

I can’t upload pictures to Imgur. This is important since I use it to post pictures for my eBay auctions instead of paying to have eBay post it. I don’t know how I’m going to make good free auctions without a laptop. In fact, I can’t even edit the description section of my eBay listings on my iPad. Safari just won’t let me.

Typing this and any other long post is ridiculous on the iPad and I actually prefer using my iPhone. Typing using two thumbs on the iPad requires way too much hand movement, and using all your fingers blocks the keyboard, making it difficult to type quickly and accurately. I actually prefer typing on my iPhone. The large keyboard also makes my hands tire very quickly.

Most of my work is done using ssh which unlike laptops and PCs isn’t free for the iPad or the iPhone. I had to cough up $10, though I must say that iSSH does everything I needed it to do. The interface is actually quite nice. What I don’t understand is why SSH isn’t included in the iPad or iPhone since they are based off UNIX architectures. Maybe I should’ve jailbroken… But I don’t have a computer to restore my devices if jailbreaking messes it up.

Using an iPad or iPhone for UNIX commands isn’t very friendly though. First of all, the iPad hasn’t gotten multitasking yet, so I can’t look up something on Safari, copy it, then paste it into my SSH. Very annoying. Secondly the keyboard isn’t well suited for UNIX commands. characters like / and | take extra effort to type.

But the best part is that the iPad can do other things more efficiently than laptops. I read a lot of PDFs which is better read on an iPad. Flipboard, HelTweetica, and Bloomberg are amazing applications. However, I still think a laptop is much more valuable than an iPad; iPads are just novelty items. But since I have a desktop at home, I don’t think I’ll be needing a laptop until maybe when I start working full-time, and if I do need one, I’m not spending more than $600.

I’m sorry fellow BlackBerry users, but I’m moving back to the iPhone again, but this time I’m never returning. I hoped for a worthy competitor to the iPhone, but right now the iPhone is simply a much better phone. I don’t ever plan to test out a Motorola because I’ve had them in the past and grew disdainful of them. I might try Android phones later, but I’m pretty sure an iPhone is better.

The issue with devices nowadays is not of hardware, but of software. Computers and devices are more than powerful enough to do almost anything you want, but software hasn’t been written capable of fully harnessing their power. We have quad-core processors in entry-level desktops but we don’t have much consumer software that actually benefits from having all four cores. The problem with BlackBerries is simply the software: there lacks an abundance of good free software for BlackBerries, and the 3^rd party software available for the BlackBerry are terribly written.

The iPhone has a much better selection of applications than BlackBerries. RIM seems to lack interest from 3^rd party developers since most of their main applications are written by themselves. Facebook is written by RIM which explains why its UI sucks compared to the iPhone’s. Some of their applications aren’t even real applications but just interfaces for their mobile website, for example Bank of America’s. Applications that are actually useful aren’t free for BlackBerries whereas there are free version for iPhone, such as Shazam. BlackBerries would truly be a productive device if there was, say, real Chase Mobile and Bank of America Mobile applications like the iPhone.

My main complaint is that of the few 3^rd party applications I actually use on my BlackBerry, all are very slow, especially Google Maps. It seriously has moments of lag where I’m unable to do anything but watch that black dial spin. Sometimes it seriously takes me one minute to find my current location, other times I have to reset the whole phone by removing the battery before I’m able to transmit any data back and forth from the AT&T server. How am I expected to be productive when I’m waiting for the application to load or think more than half the time?

I think the main reason for BlackBerry’s slow applications is the programming language: Java. Ever try Azureus/Vuze or LimeWire? It’s laggy, huh? It’s because it’s written in Java. Ever get those annoying pop-up errors when browsing websites? Usually it’s due to Javascript, though it’s not exactly Java. All iOS applications are written in Apple’s version of C, which is much faster than Java. Apple banned programmers to use 3^rd party programs to translate their programs to Objective C since it will just make their applications bloated too. This is the main reason applications for the iPhone are much snappier than BlackBerries. iPhone applications never consistently have moments of pure lag.

There are only three things I will miss about my BlackBerry: the ability to make the font size small, the battery life, and BlackBerry Messenger. Small font size is a matter of preference, but the option on the iPhone would be nice. However, the pixel pitch on the iPhone is down right spectacular. However, the long battery life is the main reason I switched from an iPhone to a BlackBerry in the first place, but I bought an external battery to alleviate this problem. I’m not going to miss BlackBerry messenger much though since it’s basically AIM. What would be great is if Facebook made a standalone Facebook Chat application or if it were easy to find your friends on Google Talk.

I didn’t expect actually keeping the iPad since my parents bought it primarily for patients, but after using it for a few hours I realized how useful it could be and decided to keep it for myself. Here’s a quick review of Apple’s iPad.

The Good:

1. Battery life. I might actually be able to watch a couple of movies on an airplane since my amazing laptop’s battery lasts a maximum of two hours.
2. iTunes University. I don’t ever buy movies or music on iTunes, but I’ve been downloading free lectures from MIT. If every school, especially Berkeley, posted lectures on iTunes University, I may never go to lecture again. Now I can kill time by watching something productive!
3. Better iPhone applications. Now that you have a full screen, applications such as Calendar, Contacts, Mail, and Safari are more productive.
4. Netflix. Stream anything from Netflix on your iPad! Unfortunately it can’t be HD.
5. PDFs. I loaded my iPad with PDFs, so now I can read them on the go. This is perfect for me since most of the documents I read for work and school are PDFs. No more wasting paper.
6. Books. They’re free! The only two I’ve downloaded are Sunzi’s The Art of War and E. M. Berens’ Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome. Oh, I have the Bible application to, which is actually useful. Having an iPad actually encourages me to read a book, something I haven’t done in years.

The Bad:

• Low DPI. I think it’s just me though cause I’m overly sensitive to details. I can see the rasterization of text when I read documents, but that’s also because I love small text.
• Netflix and Youtube are not in HD. The display’s resolution is 1024×768, which is right between 720p (1280×720) and 480p (768×480). Thus you can’t watch HD content at its full potential, much to my disappointment since all the movies I download now are at least 720p.
• H264 is a bitch. All HD content you download over the internet is encoded in x264 and AC3, which isn’t compatible with iPods/iPhones/iPads/Touches. You’ll have to re-encode to play it on your iPad or any other Apple device, which either carries a loss of quality or a lot of computation time.
• The keyboard sucks. It’s too small for two hands and too big for one hand. I don’t know how anyone can type a full document on it.

So how is it actually useful besides being a eBook? It astounded me to find that it could be useful since I didn’t expect it would be.

• Document reader. I basically use it as an extra screen to read PDFs, for example my homework. This makes it more natural since it’s almost like having the page on the desk. Now I don’t have to waste as much money on paper and ink or carry large paper documents.
• Portfolio. Download your portfolio onto the iPad. Someone wants to see your resume? Show them at almost full page size. Someone wants to see your art work? Show them your photos on a display that will do your art justice. Now I’ll save a little money since I won’t have to buy resume paper.
• Morning newspaper. You’ve got Associated Press, National Public Radio, New York Times, and Bloomberg applications which must I say are spectacular. Now I stay in bed a little longer and keep up with today’s news from my bed. It’s also more efficient because I can just click on what I want to read; I don’t need a keyboard to do this. But I have to get on my laptop or desktop if I want to post a comment on reddit…
• Portable DVD Player. Once I figure out how to put my own high quality content on my iPad, I’m going to use it on airplanes. The battery actually lasts a long time too, which would be very useful since I’m going to be flying this summer.

Is it worth the $500+ price tag? No. This is not meant to replace your desktop or your laptop. You can not do anything very productive on an iPad unless it’s reading. If you have $500 to spend and don’t have a laptop, get a laptop instead, specifically a netbook with an SSD and long battery life. Not everyone can find a use for an iPad. No one NEEDS an iPad. Do NOT buy the 3G service. It would be more productive to buy a netbook and a plug-in 3G adapter since then you can connect to the internet with any device. Oh, and NEVER buy warranty (unless you don’t know how to take care of your electronics, in other words, you’re a girl). I tend to sell my Apple products within the one year warranty time frame anyways since Apple products depreciate slowly and they update their products at least annually. The iPad is meant for people who have extra cash and are bored with the electronics they have, like me!