I’ve been figuring out what iPhone apps will be most useful to me for covering this years SXSW Music Festival, and here are my top 10:
Cause it’s so hard
To keep the dream alive
And if it all comes down to this
How will…You move me, you move me
You move me around around, I guess
Take it back your analogue
It’s on the other side of this
I was first introduced to this amazing song via The Frames a number of years ago, as they often play it on the outro of their own song ‘Star Star’:
Which led me to seek out the original by dEUS, a band from Belgium who are still going strong after 20 years:
But my all time favorite version of this song would have to go to the UK folk artist Adem, whose music i was introduced to after seeing him open for Explosions In The Sky @ The Cave in Northfield in 2004. Adem released a fantastic album of covers in 2007 entitled Takes and Hotellounge happened to be one of them:
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I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now, but this post reminded me of it.
Ah the good old Audiovox CDM4000. Not only was this my very first cell phone, but it was also the very first purchase I made when I moved to the Twin Cities in October of 1999 (followed soon thereafter by a bed & a desk). The phone treated me quite well for the time I had it. Being my first mobile phone of my own I can’t say I really had any big complaints about it. I’d imagine the battery life compared to today’s phones is probably insane.
As you can see i’ve jumped providers quite a bit, but would have to say T-Mobile is still my favorite provider for various reasons. Worst provider that i’ve used, Qwest, hands down, which is amusing since it’s my former employer of 7 years. That said, a lot of that was due to the crappy phone offerings, but their network (which is mostly just riding on Sprint’s towers) left a lot to be desired at the time. So far i’m a bit neutral on AT&T’s service. It’s not as bad as I’d expected, but it’s 3G network is the slowest between Sprint, Verizon, & AT&T. I’ve heard T-Mobile’s recently rolled out 3G service is a bit slower than AT&T currently however. The good news is AT&T’s network and the iPhone 3G can support higher speeds in the future.
Best Battery Life: Nokia 5150 hands down. I recall charging it maybe once a week at best.
Worst Battery Life: iPhone, which i’m sure comes as no surprise to anyone. The iPAQ’s battery was pretty terrible too however, but the iPhone’s usefulessness makes it more worth it.
Best Phone for SMS: BlackBerry 8120. At this point I still think I was faster at typing and responding to texts on my two BlackBerrys than on the iPhone. The 8120 wins out for the newer OS’s handling of predictive text. The iPhone with Jailbroken apps like iRealSMS, biteSMS, MySMS, etc. that can all do landscape mode and offer advantages over the built-in iPhone SMS app are definitely improving my texting experience on the iPhone however.
Worst Phone for SMS: Nokia 5150. I don’t actually recall sending any text messages prior to this phone, but I recall doing it very little because it was so cumbersome/unreliable.
Best Phone for Browsing: iPhone, even with Safari’s instability, nothing on the market touches the iPhone browsing experience, trust me i’ve tried them all.
Worst Phone for Browsing: HP iPAQ, while the E815 and V300 both had neutered WAP browsing which was pretty terrible, the iPAQ browsing experience using Pocket Internet Explorer was way more frustrating than it was worth. Honestly I rarely used that device as a phone. My sister won it at a tech conference and gave it to me to use, which I mostly did as a PDA. It came in pretty handy a few times on our Europe Trip in 2005 however.
Best Overall Phone Experience: iPhone 3G, also should come as little surprise, but i loved my BlackBery Pearl’s too.
Worst Overall Phone Experience: Samsung N105. Other than the fact that it survived a trip through the washer in my jeans, this phone was nothing but headaches for the most part. The only worse phone i’ve ever used was my friends Samsung R210 for a short while.
Unless there’s some game changing phone put out in the next 24 months, I’m guessing I’ll be sticking with my iPhone for quite a while. The only thing that would make me change/upgrade in that time would likely be a vastly superior iPhone revision with a great camera (5mp with a decent lens), Bluetooth A2DP, and a vastly upgraded battery. Not to mention that i’ve probably got close to $100 invested in various iPhone apps (granted 1/2 of that is probably just 3 specific apps), and have gotten big into the options Jailbreaking allows you. Google’s Android is looking like a pretty cool platform, but so far I’m not that impressed with the G1, hopefully there will be better hardware for future Google phones in 2009.
This is the inagural post in what i’m going to call ‘Treasure Chest’, where I feature a fairly unknown band or track that I feel deserves a much wider audience or appreciation.
The 2006 album ‘Post Rock Defends The Nation’ from Boston’s Bon Savants sadly fell below the radar of almost everyone when it was released, and still remains a fairly hidden gem. The record is filled with pop gems laid over lush arrangements and this track is probably the best example of that. Definitely a latter-day Echo & The Bunnymen vibe going on with this song. If you dig this track, definitely check the album out, as it’s filled with great songs like this.
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1974 Chevy Vega GT Wagon
While there had been a few instances of American auto-makers trying to market lame milk-getters as “sporty” prior to 1974, this one takes the cake. Were people really stupid enough to fall for the ‘GT’ label on this hunk of junk? Now I have that ‘Tom’s Diner‘ song stuck in my head… just great.
1974 Ford Mustang II Coupe
As a Mustang fanatic and a previous owner of a 1965 coupe, this iteration of the Mustang actually makes the car that almost replaced the Mustang (the Ford Probe) seem appealing. If any guy reading this ever got laid in the back of one of these, please email me.
1984 Chevy Citation
To quote Wayne Campbell “it’s not just a clever name”. I knew a lot of families with these growing up. I’m sure it was pretty economical, both in purchase price and gas mileage, but there’s some things that are worth paying for. If every guy in the 80’s had driven this car during high school, i’m guessing teenage pregnancy would have been at an all time low.
2002 Pontiak Aztek
As if you needed proof that US car makers do not learn from past mistakes, here is one of the more recent abortions. Thankfully this thing only lasted from ‘01 to ‘05, but that was plenty of time to solidify it as one of the ugliest designs to ever come out of Detroit. Have you ever seen the rear end on this thing? I’ve seen nicer looking backends on the check out ladies at K-Mart.
Hummer H2
There aren’t too many other things that scream “I HAVE A TINY PENIS” than seeing some buff and tanned dude driving one of these down a city street. The thing might as well run off dead puppies for all I’m concerned. This site says it all.
No offense to the 2+ million American auto-workers, it’s not all your fault, most of you were just doing your job. But to the executives at GM, Ford, & Chrysler, give me 5 reasons why we should bail your asses out? You’ve spent the last 30 years with your head buried in the sand. The fact that we can’t even have an average EPA rating of 30+ MPG across the board in 2008 is pretty sad. Just think if computing power increased at the rate of fuel economy? We’d all still be rocking a 366mHz Pentium 2 with 256 megs of RAM on a 28.8 baud modem.
America needs to get over it’s stigma of ‘Foreign vs. Domestic’ when it comes to car buying. Purchase your car based on quality, reliability, and fuel efficiency, not where the company is headquartered. My 2006 Honda Civic contains over 72% of parts made here in America and was built by the fine folks at Honda plant in East Liberty, Ohio.
