I finally made the big switch to the iPhone. I have absolutely hated the T-Mobile Dash since I purchased it a year ago. I was trying to stay with T-Mobile and get on a Windows platform when I bought the dash last year. It is probably the worst piece of technology I have ever purchased. It was slow, it crashed, its battery ran out…should I go on?  Instead of a productivity device, it impeded me doing business. I was done.

I got my iPhone on Friday. I plugged it in and synced it with my computer and guess what? It all worked perfectly. The only way I could describe the feeling was: iHappy. I am just not used to things going this way with Microsoft devices. Maybe I need to now buy Macs for my house?

This is a rant.

Meet the disgruntled customer:

We’ll call her, oh, let’s say, Katherine. Katherine sees the infinitely shiny and appealing new application store on iTunes. Katherine wants. Katherine eagerly downloads applications and proceeds to cry a bucket of invisible tears when she realizes that she must wait (oh no) a whole ten hours for Apple to release iPhone software 2.0 (the worst sort of tease).

Katherine eagerly goes to sleep, wakes up, and, lo and behold, the infinitely shinier and OMG1!1!! iPhone 2.0 update is available! She plugs her iPhone in and clicks ‘check update’ followed by ‘download and install.’ Fail. She tries again: more fail. Katherine is a little distressed, but she perseveres. Everything now insists Katherine has the latest update (which is NOT 2.0), so Katherine unplugs and reconnects her iPhone to the computer, and tries again, only clicking ‘download’ instead of install. At last the sparkly new update downloads! But then it does not install, and mysteriously disappears from her hard drive. Katherine tries downloading the software again and updating.

Uh-oh. What. NO. NO. MY BABY. WHAT DO YOU MEAN ERROR, APPLE?!

Katherine tries doing a restore (because the iPhone still thinks it has the latest version of its OS system). All seems to be going well, it’s been restored, the firmware is updating–error. Katherine’s phone can’t find the iTunes store.

Katherine’s phone has NO OS, no contacts, no ANYTHING. Katherine effectively has no phone.

Dear Steve Jobs,Thanks for your extremely unshiny update that has just Black Plague’d my means of communication with the outside world to death. I really wanted to spend my entire morning trying to clean up your aftermath.  I’ll use my iPhone as a doorstop, because that is about all it is useful for, and it even stinks at doing that because it’s too small.

Sincerely,
Katherine

What have we learned from this? (Besides the fact that not all updates are shiny, and being technologically at the front of the line is not always worth it.) If your business deals in technology, you better make it easy for your old customers to update. Do NOT force them to connect to your ONLINE STORE in order to activate the update: I guarantee you that your bandwidth cannot handle it unless you have under 10 customers. (This is made more frustrating by the fact that I can access the iTunes store via iTunes–but apparently not with my phone? What?) Not everyone buys the new and shiny things right away.

Barry says to be there when your customers are ready to buy. Katherine says to be there when they’re ready to update with something that WORKS, and if it doesn’t, send an update–if you have no problem sending me 3726 emails about the iPhone 3G (or *insert shiny new product here*), how about one apologizing for messing up, or one that says ‘we’ll have everything up and running in an hour, your updates will occur then.’ Just because you are a large corporation with many customers does not mean you can ignore your old customers (unless, of course, it’s a plot to make us all fed up and buy the new product, in which case, all hail capitalism at its finest). But don’t just give me error messages and direct me to support pages, I want to know WHY you have failed to provide me the service I paid for. Communication is important.

Being there when they want to throw bricks (better known as useless phones) at your head, is, of course, up to you.

Ah, edit: Apple fails to provide because they didn’t learn from their failure last year. Barry says that there isn’t always something to learn from failure–let’s all remember to always make sure that there isn’t.

News item from Laptop Magazine:

“Twenty percent of people say they’re spending less time having sex because of the amount of time spent online or with other [technology]gadgets, according to a September 2007 survey conducted by advertising agency, JWT. The bliss that comes from interacting with technology and staying connected matched or in some cases, even replaced the pleasure of sexual arousal.”

In the same article, David Greenfield, a psycologist says that the brain is condition to go where there is a chance of a good result. “That’s why people check their email 20 to 30 times a day, because every once in a while you get one message that is really great!” He says that the chemical released when you check your PDA or laptop is the same as what is released during sex. “There is a release of dopamine, what is a neurotransmitter. It’s a pleasure chemical..people find themselves chasing that dopamine rush by checking their Blackberrys…”

What can I say? I feel the rush….too.

I was looking forward to speaking at the Entrepreneurs’ Club in the Second Life virtual reality world..especially on April Fool’s Day when I had been invited by Cybergrrl oh. But it seems like my “second life” has some of the same problems as my first life has- crashes. I walked around Athena Isle this morning and I loved the posters advertising my speaker event. It looked like it was going to be alot of fun, but as I tried to log in before the event, Second Life was closed- emergency maintenance. Sometimes my first life needs this kind of maintenance too. I understand.

I didn’t know what it was or that I needed one until I didn’t have one. Isn’t that the way our consumer culture work?

I kept on seeing these nifty little icons next to other web site urls in the Internet Explorer browser bar….a company logo, fancy letters, designs etc. Even though they are only 1/4 inch tall, they do look cool. I learned they were called favicons (Favorite and Icon combined). So now for my web site, my favicon is an orange rubber band ball. Check it out at www.barrymoltz.com.

I could not resist this headline in the latest issue of Laptop Magazine. Now from Europe, Phone Fingers no has rubber covers (where did they get this idea I wonder?) for your fingers so you don’t always have to touch your “germ invested fingers” to your iPhone and then put it against your face. You’ll look silly but sometimes that is the price to pay to stay healthy. The product comes in small to extra large so at least for this product, you will find a fit!

Now comes along a truly amazing technology that I had wished for a long time- to upload my pictures to the web directly from my camera. We are almost there.

The Eye-Fi Card is a wireless memory card inside your digital camera that automatically uploads pictures to your PC or Mac and then to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging or social networking site.

Can uploading directly to the web through any wi-fi connection no matter where you are be that much farther behind?

Technology always adds new words to our dictionary. Consider this new word from Wired Magazine:

Faceslam
v. To ignore or deny a friendship request on Facebook or any other social networking site. While faceslamming is an effective way to keep so-called trophy friendships in check, the related practice of defriending — removing somebody from an established list of acquaintances — is the ultimate snub.

Have you been faceslammed?

It has taken to long, but I finally have video up on my web site. It is the first part of a speaker’s demo video I am distributing this fall. Let me know what you think? We are redesigning the web site for the new book and that will have plenty of video. Look for the new site after November 1!

It has been five years since I used anything but a Palm Treo for my phone and PDA…I swear that I have been holding it together with chewing gum and tape. But it finally went last week and I was forced to buy a new device. I stuggled between the functionality of a new T-Mobile PDA and the cool AT&T iPhone. In the end, I decided to stay with my carrier and buy the T-Mobile Dash.

I spent all weekend figuring it out and migrating most of my data. What a chore! These devices are so complex now. I mostly like it but with most Mobile Windows operating systems, I am not sure it belongs on a phone. The Palm OS is much more efficient. But things have come a long way since I got my last device- Bluetooth is convenient as well as faster access to the web.