Sky’s Blog

This may be just an artifact of my personal experience, but I think I’m finding that the hotels offering “free Internet” are more often the low-priced hotels than the more expensive ones. At least in Paris and London.

It’s not uncommon to find a hotel over 250€ per night that has a 15€ or higher charge for Internet access. But in the hotels I frequent—I’m fine with just a bed with barely enough space to move around the edges, a shower, and Internet connection, for just over 100€ a night—it seems to be more common to have a free Internet connection included.

Perhaps this is a reflection of younger travelers looking for less-expensive hotels and being attracted like flies (there is one buzzing around my head at this instant here in Paris’ 5^eme where I am connected while sitting in the hotel lobby preparing to take the metro to a meeting) to hotels that provide connectivity.

And the true boon is that Skype on my iPhone can connect to the free wi-fi Internet and I can make Skype calls without having to purchase those “overseas” (and overpriced) mobile phone minutes! Quite a difference to spend USD$0.02 per minute rather than $1.29.

{Part of Sky’s series on using tech when traveling}

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I guess you gotta wake up from the dream sooner or later. The iPhone was a really great advance, a phone with an integrated iPod, podcasting, visual voicemail, browsing, email and all the software gadgets. And the multi-touch screen clinched the deal. I have had a great two years with it—lots of exploration and fun. (Love those maps!)

But with the upgrade to iOS 4, my 3G iPhone is no longer usable for phone calls, and I’m having people call me on my landline, or just leave voicemail messages for me and I try to return them later on.

Can’t slide the green slide to answer button when a call is coming in. I touch it, try to slide, and it just sits there sucking its thumb. Slide, slide, slide…and it won’t budge. By the time it finally reacts, the call has gone to voicemail.

The Wall Street Journal online [July 28th] reported that (in their opinion) Apple is paying attention now and looking into the situation. I hope so, because I’m still looking at alternatives to this iPhone and to Apple in general, after 32 years of fanatically supporting (and purchasing) Apple products!

In my earlier trials and tribulations

I went to the Apple Genius bar and the genius told me to reset my phone to factory conditions. He wouldn’t even have a conversation with me about anything short of that. Just go home and reset—can’t anything for me.

Then I found other online solutions, none of which worked.

Then I started deleting apps – and after dropping about a dozen apps, the phone got better.

But I still can’t answer calls because of the balkiness!

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They’re taking a bit of an extreme position, but in an article Is Apple Making iPhone 3G Totally Unusable To Force Upgrade? TechPulse360 hypothesizes that Apple is forcing an (equipment) upgrade on its customers by making iOS 4 run so slowly on the original 3G iPhones that they’re basically unusable. If course Apple execs aren’t that stupid. But they certainly did not test enough before releasing the system upgrade.

I reported to Apple about ten days ago^[1] that my 3G iPhone was balky and not reacting quickly enough to taps, and I wrote on Friday last week that a “genius” at the Apple Store had blown me off when I told him I wanted to talk with him about why my 3G phone was so slow. He told me to reset the phone to factory conditions and suggested that everything would be fine after that. He didn’t even tell me to come back later to check in—he just said go reset my phone. In other words, go fix the product myself. He really did not want to talk about it.

I really did feel like very few people were seeing or acknowledging this problem. And that perhaps I was one of very few people experiencing this slowness. Except that the AppleCare guy did say he was hearing this a lot…hmmm.

So finally I did reset my phone. And it didn’t make it any faster. It was still balky and stuttering when I tried to touch or drag on the screen. It was so frustratingly difficult to interact with that I just wanted to trash the iPhone and get a DroidX. I was/am that mad!

However, today when I removed a bunch of apps from my upgraded 3G iPhone, it did help quite a bit. I removed everything that has/had “push” notifications (New York Times, AP Mobile, LinkedIn, Facebook and a bunch of others—13 in total) or might be running in a background mode. I don’t know that any or all of them were the culprits, but I got rid of a long list of apps. And today, on a long urban hike, I ran EveryTrail (one of my favorite apps!) and a whole bunch of other apps with only a bit of slowness from time to time. Mostly I encountered the slowness when I was trying to slide the green button to open the phone after it had been sleeping for a while…like when I was trying to answer a call, which still can be a challenge with the slow 3G and the upgraded OS.

TechPulse360 is calling for Apple to offer a downgrade path back to iOS 3 — and I certainly agree with them. I’d like to be able to at least answer calls, and currently the phone is slow enough that this is difficult to do before the call jumps to voicemail.

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[1] I called AppleCare, and a great tech took me through a discussion of why it might be slow, including suggesting that I drop some of the more demanding apps, like FaceBook and LinkedIn. And he suggested I visit the Genius Bar at an Apple Store for more help.

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I made the mistake of letting my 3G iPhone go ahead and automatically upgrade to IOS 4 (the new version of the iPhone operating system) the day it was released.

What a mistake that was! But how could I have known in advance? I always upgrade my iPhone right away, hoping that it will do more and funner things.

More and funner I’m up for, but slower I was not expecting!

Now when the phone rings (if it rings at all), and I go to slide the green button on the screen to answer the call, it’s rare that the button even responds to my touch, let alone react fast enough to actually answer the call. The phone has turned into one little spinning beachball of death^[1] with this software upgrade. [The suggested  fix is in the last paragraphs of this article, in case you want to jump ahead.]

This video was so close to my own experience I howled with laughter:

Making products obsolete used to be a matter of adding new features to new physical products until you just felt you had to upgrade to the newest phone or computer, but now… (continue reading…)

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