When the first iPhone debutted in 2007, I dragged my kids with me to the local AT&T store in my small Central California town of Manteca. It was festive and pleasant as my children sat huddled together against the windows of the AT&T store listening to a story on my iPod. The now defunct bank Washington Mutual next store added to the excitement by passing out free hot dogs and drinks! In just a few hours, I was the fourth one into the store and minutes later had my 16GB iPhone!
I didn’t line up in the following years for the iPhone on its day of release but did have to weather some lines when I finally did make the upgrade purchase. This year, however, I’d rather not spend a day in the mall hoping the Apple Store does not sale out of inventory before it’s my turn. No, this time I am ordering online seeing how it went so well with Verizon iPhone 4 orders in February. Mmm, the irony unfolds.
So, I revved up my browser at 11:50 last night and logged into the Apple Store. By 11:58, up came the notice that the store would be back soon. I found this as a good sign. Apple was gearing up. By 12:05, I realized it was no longer a good thing. By 12:15, I was becoming irritated. By 12:30 am, it was down right uncalled for.
I monitored my twitter feed to see if others were experiencing the same issue. Indeed, I was not alone. Macworld’s Dan Frakes (@danfrakes) posted, “I’ve memorized the phone numbers up to España.” CNet’s Brian Tong (@brian_tong) blasted, “iPhone 4S pre-orders are Siri-ously L-A-M-E. Thanks AT&T and Apple!” I couldn’t resist replying, “@brian_tong If I had an iPhone 4S, I’d say, “Siri, tell me when Apple gets its act together and the web page is ready for orders.”"
Finally, at 12:35, Apple brought it’s site back online for pre-orders. But the joy was short lived as Frakes posted what we all were seeing, “And stuck on the “Are you a new or existing AT&T wireless customer” page. Continue takes me back to the same page over and over”. Worse yet, if you were like me, Firefox 7 for the Mac wouldn’t render the site properly – still doesn’t as of this writing – and it was not possible to even make your selection. Thankfully, I thought to open Safari and that got me quickly to Dan’s issue. Yet, some how Chris Pirillo (@ChrisPirillo) got through the process and confirmed his order.
Frantically, I kept acknowledging that I was an upgrade client after clicking the Continue button and the same page would return over and over. Tong commented on twitter, “This is a HORRIBLE experience, site wouldn’t work. The App got to the checkout phase and then hangs, and says “We’ll be back soon”" Frakes almost made it further but got, “”Your request couldn’t be processed.” Nooooooooooo”. He thought out loud, “I’m imagining a few people at the server farm saying, “Let’s just turn on one server at first, just to screw with them,” as we all in our virtual line continued through the frustrating process of trying to get the order to happen. Tong wrote what we were all thinking, “What a tease when you get to the FINAL “Check Out” screen, and then it says try again…and it never gets past it…”
Interesting enough, Verizon users were off in bed sleeping and having sweet dreams of a new iPhone 4S in the mail as they had no issue with their orders. @pdgill teased, “@danfrakes Verizon’s new tag line: Switch to us for the convenience of preorders!”
Comments in the iPhone 4S virtual line were humorous and it’s all that kept most of us going. @MacfusionGirl encouraged the twitter line, “This is the best iPhone line I’ve been in. You guys don’t smell. You’re not annoying, loud or stepping on my feet 
”, even though it was nearly 2:00 am and most of us hadn’t showered since the day before.
Sadly, agony mounted as the morning wore on and Frakes noted, “Please wait while we pretend to process your request, raising your hopes a bit, then kick you out mercilessly.” I received the error, “We are temporarily unable to take iPhone orders. We apologize for this inconvenience. Please try again later.” Frakes blamed all of us stating that we had broke it.
Looking for other ways to pre-order, I grabbed my iPhone and opened the App Store app. I made it much further than I did on my Mac Pro; however, I still received an error message at the final screen. “Drat!” I yelled at 2:15 in the morning. Then, in a ray of hope, I searched the App Store for the illusive AT&T Upgrader that we had been hearing about all week. “Dude!”, it was there! I downloaded it, opened it after install, and walked through the steps. Amazingly it was quick and I had a new white iPhone 4S 32GB on the way!! It was only 2:30 am in morning.
As I looked one last time on twitter, I noted Frakes had made it through via the old-fashioned way on his desktop computer, tweeting, “OK, they must have turned on the other servers, because the site came back up and I completed the reservation in 30 seconds.”
After all that and a late night, I awoke early in the morning to find that my credit card had been denied! “You’ve got to be kidding?!” I mumbled to myself as I ran to my Mac to attempt a new order. Being a pro in navigating the Apple Store site, I was able to get through the upgrade pricing approval screen quiet quickly. Again, my card declined. Ugh! I used a second card and it thankfully it went through. Minutes later when I returned to the Apple Store site to verify my order, “We’ll be back soon” Post-It note had reappeared. I had just made it!
As to the failed card? Chase Fraud alert. I just got an automated call asking to authorize the denied charges hours later. Nice, Chase.
Press Release
SuperTooth, creator of the concept of a Bluetooth speakerphone that could be clipped onto a car’s sun visor, is launching the SuperTooth HD this year – the most advanced Bluetooth speakerphone on the market, with three times more power than other models and the ability to communicate on social networks all via voice commands.
“Using wireless devices in the car has been identified as the leading source of driver’s not paying attention on the road, with cell phone use increasing the likelihood of crashes fourfold,” said Yves Le Reun, Vice President of Sales & Marketing. “The SuperTooth HD gives consumers a hands-free solution to talk and text on their phones so they can abide by the law and focus on driving.”
Boasting Twin Speaker V Array Technology, the SuperTooth HD features two speakers with a 5 watt audio output and a 5.4 watt amplifier, making it three times more powerful than any other speakerphone. The built-in dual microphones pick up voices more clearly. Together, these advanced audio features produce unrivaled audio quality in both emission and reception.
State-of-the-art voice commands are designed to provide a hands-free solution for phone use to make the driving experience safer. Using just voice commands, drivers can answer incoming calls, select pre-dialed phone numbers, check battery level or retrieve voicemail. The SuperTooth Handsfree Assistant feature allows drivers to compose and send Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and SMS messages all via voice. The SuperTooth HD can also read incoming SMS and e-mail messages on Android and Blackberry phones via the specific application. The SuperTooth Handsfree Assistant is powered by Dial2Do.
The SuperTooth HD is compatible with all Bluetooth-enabled phones, including iPhones, Blackberrys and other smartphones with an Android OS or Windows Mobile operating system.
No installation is required – just clip the SuperTooth HD onto a sun visor, pair it with the phone and enjoy comfortable and safe phone calls while driving. A USB cable and in-car charger is also included.
The SuperTooth HD will be available in April 2011 for MSRP $129 at department, specialty and mobile phone stores nationwide.
Hey travalers, Navigon is giving away its MobileNavigator iPhone GPS app and iPhone Design Car Kit every day for ten days starting tomorrow March 3rd. If haven’t installed the best looking GPS application on your iPhone yet, then here’s your chance to do so for free…and dock it. Read the deets on how below.
Navigon Press Release
NAVIGON, a global leader of navigation applications, is about to launch a spring travel giveaway. The contest starts on Thursday, March 3rd, and will run for 10 days. NAVIGON’s iPhone navigation app MobileNavigator is the perfect travel companion, for international, domestic and even local travel. NAVIGON is giving away 10 ultimate travel packages that consist of an iPhone app version of choice (including all international versions for destinations that span the globe) and the new iPhone Design Car Kit.
How to enter?
It’s easy! Follow @NAVIGON_US on Twitter and Tweet #navigontravel.
Why is NAVIGON MobileNavigator the optimal travel companion?
MobileNavigator has many features that are tailored for travelers finding their way that make this app indispensable for getting around on foreign territory. The app offers maps for many countries around the globe and support of a wide range of languages, travel guides, local points of interest, speed warnings, no roaming fees when getting directions abroad (other than off-board navigation apps), social media integration and much more. MobileNavigator lets you leave your guidebooks, maps, and worries about getting lost at home.
NAVIGON will announce a winner every day at 5PM EST on Twitter between March 3 -12, 2011. We also have a dedicated page on our website that outlines details and terms & conditions. NAVIGON Contest Page.
Verizon Wireless and Pantech today announced the Pantech Crux™ will be available online at www.verizonwireless.com and in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores today. The Pantech Crux, developed by Personal Communications Devices, LLC, offers customers the perfect combination of simple, sleek and affordable features plus the reliability of Verizon Wireless’ network.
Key features:
· Touch screen with 3.0” display
· Music player with external control keys
· Widgets that offer easy access to social networking services
· Pre-installed 1 GB microSD™ card – expandable to 32 GB
· Mobile IM and Mobile Email
· Virtual QWERTY keyboard
· Home Key – Gives quick access to main home screen or allows customers to easily switch between currently open applications.
Lifestyle features:
· Media Center – Download ringtones, wallpapers and games to your phone
· Skype mobile™ capable
· V CAST Music with Rhapsody® (subscription and PC downloads) – digital music service that allows customers to download soundtracks and albums or sync playlists with a PC
· Full suite of messaging options, including text, picture, video and voice messaging; Mobile IM; Mobile Email; and Mobile Web Email
· Stereo Bluetooth® technology for wireless connections between electronic devices; connects to Bluetooth-enabled headsets and hands-free systems
· HTML Web browsing capabilities for news, sports, weather and e-mail, providing access to up-to-date information
· Social Networking Widget – Offers a single point for accessing social networking sites, allowing customers to stay connected to Facebook®, Twitter™ and MySpace™, plus more than 50 news, sports and entertainment feeds
Pricing and availability:
· The Pantech Crux will be $49.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement. Customers will receive the rebate in the form of a debit card; upon receipt, customers may use the card as cash anywhere debit cards are accepted.
· For additional information on Verizon Wireless products and services visit a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, call 1-800-2 JOIN IN or go to www.verizonwireless.com.
PicBounce is a simple yet powerful and viral app! Two weeks ago (9/27/2010) Clixtr, Inc. released PicBounce, a new iOS application, which they showcased at their TechCrunch Disrupt conference booth. PicBounce, the social camera, is a new and improved camera for the iPhone that is the simplest and fastest way to upload a photo from your iPhone to Facebook and Twitter. All you do is take a photo or choose an existing photo. Write a caption. Bounce it to Facebook and Twitter. You’re done. It’s that easy!
In the first two weeks there have been over 200,000 downloads of the PicBounce App for iPhones and iPod Touches with cameras. The service has had to scale fast in order to be able to handle the 10’s of thousands of photos being uploaded. PicBounce even past Facebook last week in the iTunes App Store: http://picbounce.com/4hnhj
Clixtr, Inc. launched the Clixtr iPhone App, their first application, as a TechCrunch50 finalist last year, 2009. The Clixtr iPhone App allows users to collaboratively share photos in real-time with everyone else at an event and people around the world are able to tune in at Clixtr.com. The Clixtr product won the Silicon Valley Business Journal Emerging Technology Award for Social Networking 2009 and the Consumer Electronics Show Mobile App Showdown 2010 in Las Vegas.
If you are running a WordPress blog and want to tell the world via Twitter about each and every new post, then get the WP->Twitter plug-in to do that for you automatically. Lots of great features like URL shortening and it’s donateware.
You get what you pay for. An old but still very true saying. While Twitterrifc is a beautiful client, it’s lacking features just make it a pretty looking client. The Premium edition costs $10 and still doesn’t bring up the feature list to par for the asking price. TwitterFon is nice and free, but with little more offering than Twitter’s own mobile web page, it’s not too worthy of icon space on your iPhones home screen. Twinkle is nice, but since it is tied into its own network, your replies sometimes do not appear on Twitter and there are other issues, such as the near impossibility of activating the application. Not much left in the App Store for you to find, but thankfully Stone Design has upped the ante from Twittelator (its free offering) with Twittelator Pro (App Store link.)
With slew of features and an interface that rivals Twitterrific’s awarding winning look, you’d have to be silly not to consider Twittelator Pro’s $4.99 price. Any Twitter user that finds themselves tweeting at least a few times a day, or needing to read others tweets, will need to have this on their first page of their iPhones home screen. Some of the offerings of Twittelator Pro includes the ability to tweet from any screen, paste links, text and images, full reply ability, tweet from within Safari (!), various themes, copy tweets, easy to read tweets, post photos, TwitPic photos show as thumbnails in tweets, delete your own tweets, read up to 200 tweets, advance filtering, in-depth user details, en or disable following, drill down into friends, super advance search, bookmarks, recent, and emergency tweeting. This is just SOME of the offerings of Twittelator Pro!
SvenOnTech has used all the Twitter clients available on the iPhone and without a doubt, we like Twittelator Pro the best. We’ve given the clients a few months to mature and the only one that really has done that is Stone Design’s client. Author, Andrew Stone, has taken the time to listen to our and other users requests and implemented them into Twittelator Pro quickly to allow it to pull well ahead of any other Twitter client for the iPhone. As of this writing, an entire chunk of new features and fixes are on their way and are only waiting for Steve Jobs (our assumption, not Stones) to okay it. Any day now you should see the following in the update:
NEW FEATURES:
- New Twitter Keys panel to insty insert cool graphics into your tweets – tap Guy Smiling
- New Advanced Setting to thread your replies and direct messages right in with your friends
- You can edit existing accounts to fix typos or change password
- Groups show where Nearby is
FIXED:
- Better memory management when memory runs low (less exits!)
- Handles bad TwitPic image in tweet (doesn’t exit!)
- Better error message if you direct message someone who isn’t following you
- Search results with unicode characters appear correctly now
- & appears correctly in tweets now
- & and quotes don’t take as many characters to encode
- No error message if TwitPic times out
- Upside down landscape photos fixed
- Failed image/tweet combo uploads let you retweet them
- increased timeout for TwitPics to deal with their success
- Fancy curly quotes are displayed correctly
Look, we’re like the next guy looking for a free hand-out at the App Store but for a mere $5, you’re getting a quality and slick looking Twitter client that you’re just not going to get anywhere else. Twittelator Pro is just plain and simple, slammin’! And yes, I’ll tweet that! 
Hey, if you’ve been wondering why there has been a lull of posts and then a burst of them, well, my day job is keeping me busy. Sorry. But with the addition to Twitter to my life, now I have — wait, less! — time on my hands.
Seriously, since many times I’ve queued interesting ideas and leads for a story but never got to them, Twitter will help with this problem perfectly. Instead of holding back on these stories, I’ll simply post something about it on Twitter. When I get a chance to flesh it out, you’ll see the full blown post right here on SvenOnTech. So watch my Twitter feed and follow me if you already haven’t. I’m 7Mary4.
I’m not going to turn this into a door step for Twitter and then simply stop blogging technology items. Nope, I plan on actually putting more time into the site; however, Twitter will really help me get MORE information to you as I come across it.
Lastly, you’ll get some insight into who the Sven on tech is. I’ll try to refrain from TMI topics, but hey, it might happen.
For all you Twitter fanatics (yes, that’s me), there is something better for the iPhone. No, it’s not Twitterrific Premium as much as I would hope. It’s called Twittelator and unlike the former, you don’t have to pay for this to get the ad-free copy. Yes, Twittelator is free.
The great folks at Big Stone have decided that we all need a better Twitter client for the iPhone, and while I’ll readily admit it’s not as nice looking as Twitterrific, Twittelator works terrific! I immediately noticed that new tweets are rapidly displayed when you open the application. One of the biggest annoyance of Twitterrific is how it NEVER remembers my last position in the tweets list, so I tested that next on Twittelator. Guess what? It remembers. Nice. Thank you!! Another issue in Twitterrific is the keyboard disappearing when you hit the tweet ballon. No issues here.
The picture tweet works awesome as well. How many times have you lost pix for upload on Twitterrific due to a poor data connection? No worries mate, you just grab the picture from your photo library in Twittelator. Again, nice! You can also take a new picture within Twittelator as well. Twittelator fully resizes your picture to look normal on twitpic (see my first twitpic for proof.) Dude, did Big Stone like fully think this stuff out or what?
If you’re wishing brightkite would hurry up with its native iPhone app, don’t worry, Twittelator will get your geo-location down for you. Not as detailed as bkite, but still, nice.
Twittelator has an easy entry method to add all your friends into a tweet, built-in search for things or people near you, as well as the ability to see everyones tweets, featured tweets, or favorite ones. The great organization and in-depth information on each user far more than makes up for the not-so-fancy interface. And really, it’s not bad; we’ve just been spoiled by Twitterrific.
Now I have to see if Twittelator will make the long haul, but man, it’s already done a better job than Twitterrific. So much so, that I’ve just deleted it from my iPhone. If Big Stone wants to charge for this, I’ll pay!
My favorite Twitter client for the Mac, Twitterrific, will be available for the iPhone upon the release of firmware 2.x. You know, the one featuring the AppStore. According to Twitterrific’s own Twitter account, “Yes, there will be an iPhone version of Twitterrific at App Store launch.” No pricing details or release date was given, but you can expect to see it Monday if the rumors are true about the AppStore being available upon Apple’s CEO Steve Job’s keynote from WWDC 2008.
It’ll be interesting to see how well Twitterrific performs natively on the iPhone as opposed to the Twitter web app clients available such as my favorite, Hahlo. What advantages will Twitterrific offer over the web apps which are offered for free? Speed and history may be the only thing that can be offered but Twitterrific may have something good for us find. Monday?