Our mobile telephone contract at work is coming up for renewal later in the year. I know because I’m being offered all manner of enviable never to be seen again deals by countless companies. I know who they are when they call as the call always starts with ‘how is your day today’. As if they care really?
Since the initial iPhone was introduced that is what the business has had, across the board. We are on iphone5′s at the moment; rumours of an iPhone6 abound. The anticipated release date is September – so our contract timing might be good.
I like my iPhone as it is fairly bullet proof. It also syncs nicely with all of my mac gear. It is easy. But the battery life is nothing short of appalling – I think perhaps 6 or 7 hours at best.
And it has really lost its excitement factor. It is fairly boring.
At the weekend I had a look around the competition – and the Samsung Galaxy is clearly way out in the lead. Apple must be terrified of them. The screen is better, the camera so too. OK, it doesn’t run IOS but you are not tied to the Apple Store where Apple have a stranglehold on what you download and buy.
I have decided to try the Samsung as an experiment over the next few months. I’ll let you know how I get on…
When Apple goes bad
Most people know that I am a huge fan of Apple. I have the full range of kit, an iMac, Macbook Air, ipad2, iPod, apple TV, iphone4 etc. I like it because it works. And having had years of staring at Microsoft egg-timers it was a refreshing change to plug and play!
The new iCloud?
The new iOS launched last week was going to be really interesting as it shifts much of the connectivity up onto the Apple Cloud and thus allows you to share everything you have between devices. On the face of it this sounds great (although I have used idisk for a couple of years quite successfully – and that is to become defunct next year).
But the transition has not all been good. I can forgive the long download times, because what Apple do most of the time is not provide sticky plasters – but rather the whole programme refreshed.
But in my move to the iCloud (I have an Apple Mac account) I must have pressed the wrong button. I allowed ical (the electronic diary) to merge with my work (outlook) diary. This it turns out was a mistake. Over the next few hours my work diary was reduced to blank pages. My ical is now beautifully full – and looks ugh prettier than the Microsoft system.
This is great – except that my office uses Microsoft. My PA books my appointments on her PC.
This morning that has all changed. I spent a frustrating two hours yesterday trying to undo the damage, but alas, you can’t go backwards. My guess is that Apple are just trying to educe Microsoft’s hold…
The technical forums are full of questions, but have no answers!
Sometimes Apple can be just a little bit frustrating…
Passwords – another warning
It was last November that I blogged about a Nottingham firm of agents who had their database hacked and the entire list of their visitors details dropped on the internet – you can read about it here.
A new app in the Apple store was pulled yesterday by Apple. It was Daniel Amitay, who created an app called Big Brother Camera Security, and added an iPhone-style four-digit passcode access to his program. He then got the program to report the passwords back to him! He was staggered to discover how many of them use codes that are easy to recall, but also very easy to guess. His program recorded the passwords anonymously! Apple took a dim view and stripped him of a place on the shelf in their shop.
You will see from the graph the most commonly used numbers Daniel found! The last one is interesting – it seems that many of the users perhaps use their birth years as a password?
The problem we all have is that we are all being asked for passwords for all manner of things; your phone, computer, credit card pin and the list goes on. And how do you remember them all? Some need to have numbers in and some are specific lengths. Writing them down isn’t particularly helpful. So we do all tend to use the same or a similar set of passwords. As has been demonstrated here – this could be dangerous since you have no idea who is collecting them or how secure the storage is..
We have all been warned again – if you use 1234 as your password please take your seat in the silly corner…