I often write about how mistaken people are when they chalk up the success of Apple products to a simple case of superior marketing. As if the product itself had nothing to do with it. Sometimes, however, you just can’t deny the fact that Apple ads are a cut above the rest. Witness this ad about Apple’s iPhone.
Then witness this ad about Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8.
Need I say more?
Most Wisconsinites will know what I’m talking about firsthand, but for the rest of you, here’s a tip: Noah’s Ark water park in Wisconsin Dells is awesome fun and a pretty good value, too.
Noah’s is basically an amusement park, kind of like Six Flags or Disneyland or Busch Gardens–only it’s all water. Some rides are very roller coaster-like, complete with four-person rafts, motorized lifts, multiple drops, tunnels and g-force-pulling turns. Others are more like elaborate water slides that one goes through on one’s own, either on a mat or just on the seat of one’s swimsuit.
And, according to Wikipedia, there are 49 such rides in the park, plus other attractions, making it the largest water park in the United States. On top of that, it’s clean, the staff is helpful, and the lifeguards (all twenty zillion of them) look alert.
If you live within a day’s drive of Noah’s Ark you should start looking at your calendar right now. Find a summer weekend to drive there, maybe stay over night in one of the nearby hotels, and get seriously wet for a day or two. Bring any kids who can swim, for sure, but it’s especially great if they’re over 48″ tall: Then they can ride even the thrilliest of rides.
But how much is all this going to cost you? Adult day passes are $31.49 online right now and kids day passes (under 48″) are going for $27.99. I know, not too bad, right? Even more astonishing, though, are the food and drink prices inside: Not total scams! How rare is that? I mean, you can get a taco for a buck fifty and a beer for $5.
Here’s some more advice for your trip, gleaned from my experiences this past weekend. Bring lots of sunscreen, towels, swimsuits and a change of dry clothes. Get some shower shoes or, as I did, bring your Crocs. (And put the heel strap on. You’ll need it.) Put a cooler in your car. Fill it with beverages, snacks and even lunch. When you need a break in the middle of the day, head to the parking lot for refreshments. Eat a sandwich, re-apply your sunscreen and head back in for a few more hours of fun.
Leave everything in your car except the key and a few bills for soda and beer. Zip these in a secure pocket of your swimsuit, or buy one of those waterproof cases to wear around your neck. Do not bring a phone or a camera into the park. Keeping it dry will definitely handicap your fun in a big way. Just don’t do it. Even towels are optional; if it’s a hot day, just drip dry between rides. Shirts, hats and other non-swimsuit apparel should be considered on a case-by-case basis. If you can wring it out when wet and won’t lose it on fast rides, go ahead and bring it. It might help keep you sunburn-free. But if you’re just going to be ditching it at the start of the line for every ride, leave it in the car.
Today at 1 I’m on a panel discussion about social media. Apparently I’m to discuss (gulp!) my personal use of various social media tools.
That always gets a little weird. Not that I’ve never had an instance where my personal stuff online has run afoul of my employer or of my career in general. I just don’t think anything I write incites enough passion to get me dooced. But it still sometimes feels a little weird.
And, hey, if anyone from today’s audience is reading this, welcome! Leave a comment and let me know what you thought of the event. I’ll probably take a photo and post it on my Flickr stream.
Other concerns. I’m thinking a lot about how frightened people can be about internet communications. It’s shortening our attention span, wrecking our writing skills, leading predators to our children’s bedrooms via Google Maps, and otherwise sapping our precious bodily fluids!
Sure there are risks, and not everything has been figured out yet regarding the law and social etiquette around social media participation. But there’s also tremendous reward and enormous opportunities. I suspect one reason the uninitiated don’t hear much about these is because they are relying on the traditional media for information. Not only is traditional media prone to fear-mongering, but it also simply lacks understanding of these phenomena in a lot of cases. At least that’s my take. And I hope that the panel today can give a sense of what some of those positives are.
I never subscribed to Apple’s Mobile Me suite of online services (syncing of email/calendar, photo sharing, web hosting and remote file storage). I mean, they charge $100 for it. And I already have Godaddy for hosting, Flickr for photo sharing and a better email address than Apple’s going to give me. But I’m starting to wonder if it’s time to change my mind.
I’d like to put my calendar in the cloud so that my family can know when they can schedule events. That’s a feature I could really use. But the real killer is that new find my iPhone feature. If your phone is lost or stolen you can look on a web page to see where on earth it is, courtesy of Google maps and the GPS radio inside the phone. It even lets you display messages on the phone so that whomever picks it up will know that you are looking for it and how to contact you. $100 is pretty steep, but those two features are very nice. Still, I have questions.
I’d like to only maintain one calendar: the Exchange one I use for work. I don’t mind publishing it to Mobile Me so my wife can look at it, but I want to make sure that the publishing of an external Exchange calendar is going to be automatic and not require a lot of screwing around using Apple’s iCal as a go-between.
Also, I’ve been thinking about Google’s new Latitude service. I’d be able to use it to find my phone via GPS–and it’s free.
Maybe I’ll wait and see just a bit longer.
Lifehacker has an interesting discussion going on about what I like to call “dumbphones”–those wireless handsets which cannot be called “smartphones.” What features should they have? What should they not have? Here’s my take. A standard dumbphone should be able to
A dumbphone, in my opinion, may have a either a QUERTY keyboard or just a phone-style number pad. QUERTY doesn’t make it a smartphone. It just means you text a lot. That’s cool. A dumphone may also slide, flip, fold into an origami crane–whatever. As long as it’s relatively ergonomic and isn’t painful to hold and operate. It should, of course, have a user interface that doesn’t suck.
Even more important, however, than what the dumbphone should do is what it should not do. It should not bother with half-assed email, half-assed web browsing, or store applications which exist for the sole purpose of locking the user into the carriers overpriced ringtones, boring wallpaper and shitty games. It should not be a music player. It should not try to play video from any source. If you want to make a phone that does these things, at least do them right–then charge $200 for the unit. You’ll have to if you’ve made it properly.
Dumphones that try (badly) to implement these smartphone features just end up with a cluttered UI, constantly presenting the owner with options he or she will never use. In this case, less is more. It really is better to have a phone with 10 well-implemented features rather than have that same phone sporting an additional 15 poorly-implemented ones–even if you never use them.
The dumphone should not cost more than $50. If you’re signing a carrier contract, it should be free.
I think Kos tweeted this the other day and it’s been rattling around in my head since then. You hear a lot of Republican congresscritters claiming that “government run” health care is the worst thing that could ever happen, right? Why won’t someone in the media ask them why they are so unhappy with their own health care? After all, each and every one of them has “government health care.”
I promise to shut up about the iPhone… like by the middle of next week, maybe. Meanwhile, I’m worried.
The 3G S model was announced on Monday, June 8th. After several failed attempts to pre-order one from Apple’s web site, I finally pre-ordered it from AT&Ts web site on Tuesday, the following morning. That would be June 9th. Because I placed the order before noon on the 17th, I was told that it would ship “with overnight priority and will be processed to arrive as early as June 19.”
I peed a little when by Saturday, June 13th I received an email from AT&T telling me that my order “is being processed and will be shipped overnight to arrive as early as June 19.” It even had a URL where I could check to see if it had been shipped and, if so, see a tracking number. Logging in to that site with my order number only told me that my phone was “in process” but hasn’t shipped yet.
And I’ve checked it five times a day since then–with no change.
It’s now June 18th. It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow but it still hasn’t shipped. I’m aware that AT&T eventually sold out of pre-order iPhones, indicating that anyone who ordered on Saturday the 13th or later might have to wait a week or two before receiving their phone. But I ordered my way back on the 9th–less than 24 hours after it was announced. Surely my order isn’t part of the back log…is it?
Sure, I get that “overnight priority” means that it could ship at some time today and still arrive tomorrow. But how much do you trust good ol’ American Telephone and Telegraph? Me, not so much. Here’s hoping.
Update, 10:24 AM. My order status is still “In progress” instead of “shipped” but there is now a ship date (today!) and a carrier listed: “FDE.” Which I guess is FedEx?
Why is AT&T dragging its feet rolling out MMS and tethering for the iPhone? Because the iPhone is too good, that’s why.
So good, in fact, that people who own them actually use features like web browsing, Google maps, Youtube, downloading mobile games and various other data-intense applications. Other phones, not as much. They’re harder to use and/or the results are less rewarding.
Thus it’s one thing for AT&T to turn users of these other phones loose on its network–what are they going to do anyway?–but it’s quite another to green light iPhone users. These guys could swamp the network.
Supposedly AT&T is rolling out these features for iPhone users in the near future. One imagines that they are reinforcing their network infrastructure (more tin cans, more string!) beforehand.
Let me be plain. If there is no so-called “public option” in the Obama health care reform package, then his administration’s efforts will be a failure.
I’m one of those crazy, crazy people who recognize that the surest and most sensible way toward the goal of lowering costs while ensuring universal coverage is to have across the board, tax-funded health insurance. Put the private health insurance industry right the Christ out of business.
Or at least offer a public, Medicare-like plan available to all Americans who either don’t like or don’t have private insurance. If such a plan appears–and the soup hasn’t been spat in by anti-reformers in congress–I’d sign up for it in a heartbeat.
And if it does not appear, then, as I said, the Obama administration will have failed.
As an iPhone owner for two years, I’ve often heard “oh, I hate AT&T!” As if it weren’t for the exclusivity of the iPhone on their network, they surely would have bought one.
And, given recent events, I’m inclined to agree that AT&T sucks. But at the same time I can’t help feeling that this is missing a larger point: All United States wireless carriers are deserving of our hatred. Singling out one carrier or another seems about as meaningful as choosing one’s own execution method. Take a step back and look around: You’re getting screwed everywhere you turn. None of these guys deserve your loyalty.
I mean, do you really think iPhone owners would be that much happier if Apple had partnered with, say, Verizon? C’mon. Verizon doesn’t even offer any handsets that utilize WiFi. None. I’m sure you know the reason: WiFi provides a way for a handset owner to bypass the Verizon network and its associated costs for some functions. You think these guys are more open or more progressive than AT&T? Please. All American wireless carriers are backward, price-gouging stick-in-the-muds.
I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that other developed nations around the world have better services at lower prices than we do. Every Japanese fifteen-year-old is watching Lost on their cell phone on their way to school every morning. Meanwhile, you and I are sweating over whether our current 3G network is adequate for basic web browsing in our area–and paying $80 a month for the privilege.
I hope that Apple and their iPhone will be able to crack open the American wireless industry in the way that their iTunes service did to the music industry. If that happens, we’ll all be glad–whether we have an iPhone or not.