Hi Everyone. I’ve posted a few times for Gear Diary & you all know about my love of my iPhone and Apple products. That is until this past weekend. We’ve all heard the Mobileme horror stories. Add mine to the list… This past Friday: (Been a .Mac member since the Spring. My 3G iphone has Mobileme with syncing for contacts and calendars) Waiting for my girlfriend for lunch in Central Park, I’m adding contacts to my favorites on my iPhone when suddenly, right before my eyes, the contacts screen moves from contacts to the listing of my groups and then back to my contacts, but my iPhone is suddenly showing a blank contact list!!! Where are my 659 contacts? I calmly switch back to groups and back to all contacts. Nothing. I shut down the iphone and turn it back on. Not one contact. Now I’m really upset. I call my brother and leave him a message: please help me get a Mobileme support phone number; all my contacts are gone from the iPhone…… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

[Note from Judie - Stan sent this opinion piece in while I was at the ranch this weekend. I think it is still relevant, so here you go...] Hey iPhone owners-in a phrase, Apple today has screwed up. Call it as is. And I love my iPhone, my MacBook Air and just about everything Apple (see my previous posts on my love of the iPhone). Even if you have one business model that produces a widget with a fabulous end to end user experience based a beautifully married hardware & software, you can still screw up big time on huge promises that lack the back office capability to execute as planned. How many thousands of new iPhone owners are right now sitting at home with bricked iPhones? This is not a good situation. Unlike last year’s original iPhone debut, this one had a 22 country worldwide rollout. If you promise thousands of people worldwide to sell them an iPhone on July 11th, shouldn’t you plan to have the technology available to close the deal? Apple expected long lines so they should of planned for thousands of activations today. An Apple employee running crowd control said they were staying open until [...]

Morning iPhone owners! Check out this article On Electronista about Siemens Nokia speeding up the Edge Data Network for GSM cell phones to 4 times current speeds! In an unusual break from its emphasis on 3G and 4G cellular data, Nokia Siemens Networks today said it had developed a method to improve the speed of 2G networks. Called EGPRS 2, the subset of the future EDGE Evolution format adds a second carrier to the data path and promises to dramatically improve the practical speed of the connection in both directions. Continue reading on Gear Diary …

[Ed. note: Stan wrote this on his iPhone, so I have pretty much left it intact and unedited to allow him to make his point.] I’m writing this on my iPhone b/c I’m on a 6pm subway ride and not in front of a PC. I could use a pocket pc phone oh- windows mobile phone – but I don’t b/c of what Apple gives me & Microsoft never has: a full, seamless enjoyable user experience. I’ve expounded on this before on Gear Diary but today I was trying to ponder, why? Why is Apple so much better at delivering on the true mobile experience? I think it really comes down to the basic business models of the two companies and their cultures. Now I’m sure others have written much more detailed analyses on this subject so I’ll try to make it short. For example, while it’s true Apple took a very long time in developing the iPhone, it was time spent developing a user’s whole experience. That experience is how a person interacts with the phone’s hardware AND software. Apple is responsible for both and in total the whole package. We’ve read the stories about what Steve Jobs puts [...]

Hi everyone. I’m going to try to give my thoughts on people’s reaction to Palm’s Foleo. Honestly, I’m really amazed by how seemingly angry and dismissive people are about the Foleo. It makes me wonder if something else is motivating such harsh responses. I think about people’s response to Apple’s iPhone which, while not everyone feels this way, is that people have this anticipation about Jobs and Apple – almost a  “what is Apple going to do right next?” And this seems to be in contrast to, what I think, is the disappointment and frustration people have come to have over the years about Palm which seems to go something like “What is Palm not doing now?” or “how is Palm underwhelming us now?” How do I feel about Palm? Well, I haven’t used a Palm or Treo since 2003. I’ve been using Pocket PC phones since that time (the i700 and then i730). I like the Palm Pilots but don’t trust their operating system. Too many anecdotal stories of Palm Treos resetting on their own. And then there’s the turtle like pace with which Palm seems to move to offer new innovations. So this in particular seems to be [...]

Hi Gadget Geeks –I wrote Judie recently about the frustrating time I had living with a smartphone with a broken touch screen and she thought it would make a good Gear Diary story. Hope you can learn from my experience! I’ve been a Pocket PC Phone Edition owner since the summer of 2003, when I bought a Samsung i700 for use with Verizon Wireless. I’ve been using various PDAs (mostly Pocket PCs and an M100 Palm Pilot) since 1999 when I first bought a Casio E-125. Currently, I own the Samsung i730 (bought July 2005) and it’s been a good run. Well, sufficed it to say that I love my i730-I really use it all the time to manage my work day and my personal life. Whether it’s my banking contacts or the numerous meetings or deadlines I have to meet or managing what and where I’m meeting my girlfriend for our next date (sometimes even trying to figure out where that ladies’ shoe store is in Soho or the East Village or to find out if the engagement rings at Blue Nile are really nicer than Tiffany’s) or which doctor’s appointment I need to take Mom to, my i730 is [...]