G1

Somebody get me a Google phone, please. I want to try one and compare it with my iPhone. Although, after having issues with gmail recently, I have doubts over basing my whole phone on my Google account. Looks like it'd be nice with contact and calendar syncing, etc. 

Email addresses are pretty important

I only just realised how important my email address is to me. It is pretty much my identity online.

I was messing around with setting up IMAP in Outlook. I have no idea what I did, but I ended up getting a chunk of spam, and some undelivered message notifications. It seems that I somehow triggered something, and a spammer started using my email address to spam people, using a spoofed “from” field. Then people think it’s me sending the spam, and I have a chance of getting my account disabled, as all the undelivered messages get bounced back to me.

I’m hoping right now that there won’t be much of a problem. Apart from the first lot of stuff, nothing further has come through. It would hurt to have to change my email address, as everything is tied to it. As I said, it is my online ID.

• Various Accounts with online stores, forums, etc
• This blog
• My Google Documents, and calendar etc
• All my contacts
• Job Applications

Everything would be lost if I lost this address. I’m starting to build a backup plan incase it gets lost, but I really like my address. It would be a massive pain to have to contact everybody with a new address.

I guess I shouldn’t use a free account as my main point of contact, and split things across various accounts. I’m thinking of setting up a domain with a few different accounts for different things.

Back to damage limitation!

iPhone

So, I got an iPhone today. Easrly birthday present off my parents. This one I’m using now is actually my second one, as the first one we bought, I got home, turned it on, and realised it had a dead pixel right in the middle of the screen. They just did a direct replacement though, so all was good.

So far, I’m quite liking it. The signal quality isn’t that great, but then again I live in the middle of nowhere. I currently have 1 bar of signal at my desk, and it keeps disappearing. It gets better when I put it by my window, though. Strangely enough, the signal seemed to get better when I turned 3G off. I’ll do a proper test tomorrow though, when I’ve got the new firmware update.

Brings me to another thing…iTunes updates. I went to download the new firmware, which is a 237MB file. I’m now on my third attempt at downloading it, because itunes doesn’t seem to have any form of download management, so if the transfer gets interrupted, it has to start again. Maybe it’s just with this file, I haven’t tried with any other files. But if I had to start again when a connection was interrupted, it’d get very annoying, very fast. Especially if I was downloading a movie or something. My connection seems to be a bit unstable at the moment. Maybe it’s the weather.

Waiting for iTunes to finish syncing my music to the phone, then I’ll go have another play with it. I’ve already downloaded the remote app, and the Facebook app. Remote is awesome, lets you control itunes from the phone. The facebook app I couldn’t get to work, it wouldn’t let me sign in. After reading up a bit on it, I decided just to stick with the mobile version of the site (http://m.facebook.com). The browser seems to handle it all very well, it’s all very intuitive.

All in all, the whole thing just seems like a nice package, and very intuitive. I haven’t actually used it as a phone yet though, apart from sending 2 texts. Will try that out a bit more when my old Orange number gets ported over.