10 Reasons to Have an Apple Watch

For quite some time, like months, I was thinking, that I'd like to have a smart watch. I wasn't really high on the idea of getting an Apple Watch, really, mostly because I viewed them bulky and ugly with the wide silicon or fabric wrist bands. I wanted something more feminine and jewellery-like. Like a bracelet with a smart watch on it. At some point I finally admitted to myself that since I have an iPhone, the only smart watch for me is the Apple Watch, want it or not.

Long story short: a couple weeks ago my sister informed me, that I can get nice bracelet-like wristbands for Apple Watch in Amazon and that pretty much did it for me. I got myself a rose gold Apple Watch 5 and ordered a nice wristband from Amazon. FTW! I had reasons to want the watch, but what I didn't know, was that I actually kinda needed it even. It makes my life better. And here's why: it frees me from holding on to my phone at all times.

I had a tumor removed from my head six years ago or so, and the operation left me half-deaf, single-sidedly deaf, to be exact. My left ear can't hear shit, while my right one has improved somewhat and compensates a lot. Still, what this means, is that I have no stereo hearing, which in turn means basically two things: one, I can't tell where a sound is coming from, and two, when there's a lot of noise it all blends into one mass of incomprehensible sounds. Apple Watch helps with these issues and much more.

1) I can put my phone into my purse in noisy surroundings 

In noisy surroundings like out in the city, in shopping malls etc. I don't need to hold my phone in order to feel it ring (and commonly miss messages and even calls anyway, if I forget to turn the phone the right way in my hand), for all of that can be felt on my wrist with the watch haptics.

2) I can use softer ring tones and lower ring volume

At home and work (and wherever), I don't need to have an abrasively loud ringtone and volume on my phone anymore, as I'm not reliant on my hearing to know my phone is ringing.

3) I don't need to hang on to my phone constantly indoors either

It is actually also just quite convenient to be able to answer the call on the watch; no need to hang on to the phone when going to get some coffee at work and so forth. Has nothing to do with hearing conditions, just a convenience to begin with.

4) Paying with the watch is just easier

It kinda goes to the same category of not needing to carry your phone around everywhere (heh, really just at home when paying for the delivered pizzas ;) ), but more like to the convenience of not needing to take my wallet or my phone out in stores to pay for stuff. Double-click on the side button, hold the watch near the reader. The wallet on the phone with the touch id confirmation etc. is in my opinion a bitch. Always fumble with it and paying takes more time than showing the card or tapping in a pin code. With the watch, different story.

5) Voice messages on the go

I know my husband hates them, but I love them, especially when I'm on the go somewhere. I really don't like phone calls much, but also hate typing long messages on the phone. iOs just got the voice messaging to messages on the phone too, true, but I have found it increasingly convenient to just tap my phone a couple times and start talking into it to send a message. Unfortunately the Whatsapp Chatify then again does not support voice messages on the watch. I guess you just can't get it all... The touch type is really easy to use too.

6) I can control our home light system wherever whenever

Most of our home lighting is built using the Ikea smart light system (Trådfri, which is the Smart Home now or something), connected to our Home on an iPad. All of the manual switches have long since stopped working (no points to Ikea for that!) so really the only way to control lights is using the phone (or walk to the iPad in the library). When getting up in the morning to make some coffee, I don't take my phone with me so if I forget (and I usually do) to turn on lights before I go, I'm in the dark unless I return to the phone or walk to said iPad. With the watch, the control system walks around with me.

7) Controlling my Spotify

Spotify is also mirrored on the watch so no matter where the phone, you can skip songs, set them as favoritse, select songs and adjust volume with the watch. Just excellent, is all.


8) Cycle Tracking

As a woman, one of the most unfortunately unavoidable things to monitor in my life, is the menstrual cycle. I have used paper calendars most of my life, obviously, and then I started using Clue. Now with the watch, I took the Cycle Tracking into use and my, is it the most convenient thing ever! I kept forgetting to mark my flow in the Clue, but Cycle Tracking is on the watch. I can mark my flow days right there in the toilet at the point when I remember it.

9) All the health stuffs

Really for me, the moving goals, standing goals, heartbeats, EKGs and all that are just a nice to have feature set, on a watch mainly used for other things. However, I know they're important for many, if not most.

10) And don't forget the talking Mickey/Minnie Mouse ;)

I, on the other hand, am always a sucker for something a bit cheesy and childish for I refuse to grow up. So I have talking Minnie as one of my watch faces, the one I mostly use, actually.
[Edit: it was until I figured out that I can use a slideshow of my own images as watch face!]

To sum it up, I'm really glad I got the watch! Should've got is sooner.

Quick time frustration

They say business is dirty. They say Microsoft doesn't play nice with other kids. They say Apple is such a charming son-in-law and practically a saint. They say with Apple, things just work. Oh yeah.

Last spring I did some careful consideration about my phone options. As I then wrote, I ended up getting my very first iPhone and up until this moment, this morning, I have not regretted. Right now, however, I couldn't be much angrier at a faceless corporation than I am at Apple.

Apple is notorious for going it's own way - as is Microsoft, but when MS does it, it's called nasty behavior and when Apple does it, it's called ingenious pioneerism - and right now, today, my unholy matrimony of an iPhone and a Win10 PC is seriously frustrating me.

One word: mov.

I mean, seriously! Why can't Apple devices record videos in mp4? Or at least provide a safe software for converting them so that I can actually use the videos, e.g. edit and combine in Camtasia Studio etc?

First, Camtasia informed me that Quicktime is required in order to use .mov files. After a lengthy search, I finally found the Quicktime download for Win10 and regardless of multiple posts about how it doesn't install on Win10, it actually did. I was able to import the .mov files to Camtasia now, but did they work? Noo-o-oo! The application crashed after fruitlessly trying to play one of the three videos and won't even launch anymore.

I decided to resort to money, but apparently my money is not good enough for Apple. Futilely I searched and searched the interwebs and clicked the Buy Quicktime Pro in the Quicktime and whatnot but could not find a place to buy me a registration code. Finally I stumbled to a page where someone had asked this very question and received the frustrating answer: no can do, it is discontinued (for Windows).

Really? Really, now?! What are my options here now? Upload unedited videos only, straight to Youtube? Take my chances with a free converter (they scare me because most of them are adware at best and malware at normal)? Forget about videos?

I have always likes still photos better anyway. Sometimes, however, videos would be the way to go, but apparently I'm back to the stoneages with my combo of an iPhone and Win10. Thanks, Apple.

Adapting to iOs 7.1

So, after putting my iPad back to AppleJail yesterday, it feels like I have a brand new iPad. I jailbroke it from iOs 6 and unbroke it to iOs7(.1). It is different. No other way to put it. I mean, I had to google to even understand how to kill apps! But after an evening of fiddling with it, I started to get a hang of it. I think it'll grow on me, just like any other new os has before. I mean, I am a happy Win8.1 user now too, even though (long term MS person as I am) Win8 had me pretty much on my toes at first!

There are several really cool things about iOs7 - things that originally were part of the reason I jailbroke my iPad in the first place - but there are agravation points too. Let's do a little break-down of these, even though I recognize that I'm already a bit late in this game, iOs7 being old stuff already ;)

Category cool: new swipes

1. Pinch with four or five fingers, halfway (or up) to get to the open apps cards view, all the way to get to home screen
2. Swipe with four or five fingers to switch between apps - this is the best thing in my opinion!

You can turn these off in the settings if it happens to be an agravation point to you.

Category cool: the open apps cards view

Even though it annoyed me at first, that I had to KVG (Finnish acronym for look in the effin' google) how to kill the open apps, I actually like this new view! And, for those of you who ended up here because you needed to google this same issue, here's the answer: you swipe the app up and over the edge to close it.

Category agravating: the wallpaper zoom and move around

This was the first thing I noticed. My wallpaper was moving around. I don't like moving around stuff, it makes me motion sick, so I went to the settings and more guessed than new that it could be turned off in the wallpaper settings. It's the not so obvious Perpective Zoom setting (you need to the wallpapers settings and tap the wallpaper open to preview), that needs to be turned off if you don't want the wallpaper to be moving around.

Category agravating: the flying windows

I have this kind of stuff turned off in my Windows too. I don't like my apps to be flying this way and that when I launch and close them, I want them to appear and disappear. So far, I have not found a way to disable this on the iPad though, so I just need to learn to live with it.

Category *meh*: the overall design

I don't really like the flat, grey, thinline design, but can't say it would exactly bother me either. I mean, the icons are pretty ok, but the title row e.g. in Safari is, for lack of a better word, boring. It goest to the same design as the new Facebook look and feel. Seems unfinished. Like it's missing some CSS or something. Don't like that either, for the record.

Category cool/agravating/*meh*: the controls panel / highlight search / notification swipe down

Where-ever you are, you can swipe out the controls (music, camera, flight mode, wifi...) from the bottom of the screen. This is one of those things that was missing in iOs before (esp. the wifi, bluetooth etc. controls) and one of the reasons I jailbroke my iPad, and now, there they are :) Swipe from the bottom and you get them :)

Highlight search is mostly a nuisance to me. I don't really use it, never have, and now it pops out in the top of the screen just by a simple mis-swipe of a finger on the screen. Oh well, goes to the category of "learn to live with", I guess.

As for the notifications, I mostly hate them and don't use them, so it's only calendar appointments and new email, that will ever be visible in my notifications swipe down (I believe it has some other proper name, but I can't remember it). Anyhow, it falls nicely from the top of the screen and opens a full black screen with whatever notifications you have (enabled).

***

Ok, what else? I had some trouble with certain apps after the update, and whether the reason was the unbreaking & restoring or simply the updating, can't know. Anyway, Instagram and iKeepass had some glitches.

Instagram, well, it so happened that at the same time their server was down and I was unaware of this, so my troubles might have been non-existent. Anyway, I did some googling and found that some other people had had problems with Instagram after updating to iOs7, so again, who knows?

iKeepass had me for a time there too - it launched nicely, asked for my master key when I tapped to open my database, but after typing in my key, it gave me blank. I so totally rely on my Keepass for passwords that this was a major issue (even though I can access tha database on multiple devices). At that point I decided to try the reset all settings -trick to get my apps to work properly.

I'd been reluctant because of the extra work that means, to go through your settings to reconfigure everything after the reset. But it worked. iKeepass revived and Instagram too, as soo as they had their server running again, that is.

All in all, I'm quite happy with the iOs7 so far, if you disregard the couple things that go into category "learn to live with" (I have found live in general is easier, when you learn to live with the stuff you can't change). It gives me most of the same things as jailbreaking did (since the multi-user thing actually pretty much broke after a month or so).

 

Un-break my iPad

It's not like my iPad was broken broken (other than that screen, but not referring to that now), but as I have written before, it was jailbroken. And I loved it. Mostly. I loved the little features it gave me. In the end, after more than a year of having a free bird iPad, what weighed in the scale most, was the annoyance of Safari crashing all the time. For no good reason. So, finally I had enough and decided to un-break my iPad.

That's not a huge big deal to do. Connect the iPad with iTunes on a laptop - Macbook or Win, either is fine. But, have I ever mentioned how much I dislike iTunes? I don't get the UI. Though, I have to admit, that when it actually started to do something, after waiting and wondering for several minutes after connecting the iPad, the backup-update console was straightforward enough.

My iCloud has been full for a long long time already. So first thing I did, was to backup my iPad in iTunes before attempting the return to the Applejail. That took quite some time, and after that I also transferred my un-bakced up photos to my Dropbox (which requiered ejecting the iPad from iTunes, should've done that first!), just for good measure. The iCloud photo sync still is not really realiable and not up to date today either.

Once this was all done, I re-plugged my iPad to the laptop, and iTunes launched automatically, asking me to update the software. I clikced Download and update, and the process started. After some time - during which I walked to the store with the dog - iTunes informed me of an unknown error and told me to restore the iPad. So Restore and Update I did.

After only a few minutes, iPad rebooted and iTunes prompted me to proceed with restoring the iPad from the backup. After several reboots and iTunes operations of syncing and such, the iPad was finally up and running again. With iOs7.1.

Everything seems to be running smoothly. I miss that top bar swipe menu a bit, but otherwise the iOs7 seems ok. Then again, haven't been using it yet more tha a cursory glance to check that all is well in my iPad.

Changing the iPad2 Screen

There are a bunch of tutorials on how to do it, I know. But after doing it twice now (the first being the learning experience and the second one to correct what went wrong the first time) I believe I have something to contribute to the subject. Things that I didn't find in the tutorials I read when doing it for the first time. But since it is quite agravating to read a list of tips and a separate tutorial, here's the full process, with the tips included.

• Order a digitizer screen full with the toolkit even though it has a bunch of stuff that I at least didn't need at all, for it is quite convenient to have the exact right size screwdriver and those plastic sticks are rather handy too. Besides, in Amazon, it was cheaper too than only the screen (which also would not ship at all to my nook of the world...).
• Order a roll of 3M adhesive tape, for the strips that come with the toolkit were a pain in the butt to be placing on the iPad. Much easier to cut small stirps and place them all around.
• Get some pure alcohol for cleaning the old glue off. I didn't actually have that, so I used nail polish remover, girl that I am, and it did work ok too.
• Once you have all the appliances, choose the time to be messing with this wisely. To do it properly and without hurry, try to make sure you have no immediate time limit and peace and quiet around. I spent a good two hours with the second shot, just taking my time and being through. Also, be prepared to not use your iPad for a few hours after screen changing, to let the glue stick properly.

With the preliminary tips said, on to the actual process:

1) First off, you need to get the old screen off. The iPad turned off, use a hair dryer to heat the edges of the iPad, and pry the glass off (between the glass and the plastic rim) little by little, working around the edges with the help of one of the plastic tools (guitar pick or one of the stikcs).

2) When the glass is loose, open the iPad like a book. The screen is attached to the mother board with a cable, and next you need to get to that. So, with the screen out of the way, loose the screws in all four corners of the inner screen, and then lift that screen up, like turning a page in a book since it is attached to the motherboard too.

3) The motherboard exposed, see the digitizer screen cable in the bottom left corner. There's two small black latches that lock the cable in place, pull them gently with the flat small screwdriver or similar tool to release them. Once the cable is freed, your broken screen is free to be removed.

4) Now, clean the old glue from the iPad rim carefully. Any lumps of glue will make your new screen uneven and easily break again - the part I cheated on the first time round, impatien ADD that I am. Don't do that. Use that pure alcohol (or nail polish remover ;) ) and some q-tips to rub the glue off. The plastic stick tools are helpful also.

5) Prepare the new screen.

Unscrew and detach (use the blow drier again, if needed) the home button from the old screen and using a couple small pieces of the 3M tape, attach it to the corresponding spot on the new screen.

Detach the camera lense piece from the old screen (glue, again) and attach it to the new one.

6) Cut pieces of the 3M tape and place them on the iPad rim, not the screen. I have 1cm (0,4") wide tape and mostly I cut out a 5cm (appox. 2") piece and then cut it in three slim slices. That worked quite well overall, and then I jus t patched the rest of the spots with right size pieces. Tweezers are a good help, as you don't want to get finger grease on the tape.

Be careful not to get the tape on the white/black plastic rim, for that again results in an uneven screen taping and easier breaking.

7) Attach the new screen by sliding the cable between the iPad body and the inner screen, and pushing the pin end to its place and locking the latches.

8) Turn the inner screen back to its place and secure with the screws.

9) Before exposing the upper glue side of the tape, turn the digitizer screen to its place and turn the iPad on to test that everything works. Do at least these tests:

1. the general working of the screen (unlocking the lock screen already does this)
2. the keypad - open up a notepad app or web site etc. and do some typing to check that the keypad works ok
3. open a web site to test that the wifi antenna is still working - if not, you need to order a new one and replace it
4. home button - test that the home button does what it's supposed to in more than one scenario
5. camera - try out the camera too

If there are any glitches, try to figure out the cause and correct it. E.g. first time out, I had the tape too close to the home button, preventing it from working fully.

10) When you are sure everything works fine with the new screen, turn off the iPad again and use a microfibre cloth to wipe the inner screen and the insides of the digitizer screen. Trust me, the occasional finger print is really annoying when you can't get to it. Even now, as carefully as I tried to wipe these clean, there is a little something left in my screen, that I did not notice when cleaning the screen.

11) Peel off the protective papers from the tape strips - tweezers may be helpful here too if fingernail don't seem to do the trick. Place the screen carefully in its place inside the plastic rim, and press the edges gently to attach properly. Try to make sure the screen snaps inside the rim.

12) Test out the screen again. With the off chance that something is amiss, this is your best opportunity at starting again, when the tape is not yet fully stuck. If you need to remove the screen again to do some fixes, do start again with the cleaning out the old glue. Even if it would happen to stay in place some way, chances are that it gets wrinkled and most probably does not hold well anymore. You also cannot simply add new tape on top of the old one.

13) Place the iPad on a soft flat surface (on top of a non-scratching cloth) screen side down, and place some heavy books on top. Let sit there for a few hours to give the tape glue time to attach properly before starting to use the iPad again.

Good as new? Ought to be :)

 

OneNote for Free

Definately worth a share: Microsoft offers OneNote (one of my very favorite apps ever, both in work and personal use) for free on all the most common platforms, except for Unix and Linux. That is, for PC, Mac, Windows tablets, Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Android, and the Web. The free version lacks some corporate features like e.g. connections to SharePoint and Outlook.

OneNote is excellent for keeping your notes organized and shared between your devices. I myself use it on PC, iPad and Lumia (820), sharing&syncing the notebooks via OneDrive (Pro) and it works excellently. I have my travel plans, the kids' school schedules, work projects, work notes etc. all in OneNote workbooks and it's easy to find what I'm looking for and check things wherever I am on my phone etc. Sales pitch ;) But I truly do love it!

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/03/17/microsoft-launches-free-onenote-mac-freemium-onenote-windows-onenote-cloud-api-apps/#!Aw8tf

Download OneNote: http://www.onenote.com/

Agravating Photo Sync

After getting the camera kit for my iPad, I have happily been mostly juggling my photos via the iPad. So convenient to be using a little bit of PhotoShop Express to enhance some pics and creating some nice collages with e.g. PicCollage or InstaCollage and then using them in blogs, uploading to Flickr etc. iPad has all the right apps for all that activity (minus the adding videos to blog posts in Blogsy...).

My active photographing - whether it be with my proper Samsung or my Lumia, which I have been using increasingly lately since it's so readily available in all situations - and fiddling with the photos in different apps for different purposes, results in approx. 10000 photos a year (and this was the case even before the iPad...). Which means that my iPad quite frequently is running out of space and I need to delete some photos - ok, a lot!

But never before copying them to my hard drive, of course. Usually, I have done this via iCloud and my photostream. But the iCloud has a mind of its own, and I cannot control what is in the photostream and what is not and what and when is available on my laptop. And this agravates me big time. At least when it is not doing what I expect it to do.

I have accepted, that it has its own operation queues and my photos are not necessarily available on my laptop immediately (or even almost) after taking them (unlike e.g. the autoupload to OneDrive from my Lumia). Mostly, I can live with that, for be as it may, mostly, the photos have been available at some point. At least on my work laptop. For whatever mysterious reason, the photostream mostly refuses to sync itself on my personal laptop.

A few weeks ago, after having been on sick leave for several weeks, I opened my work laptop to do some of this photo transferring. But the iCloud would not sync. Eventually, I disabled and enabled the whole iCloud sync, and, well, it synced. but not the whole 1000 photos as it should. Now I have 300 photos in my photostream and a couple months missing from both the stream and my hard drive. And iCloud will not sync them - nor the newer photos again...

So, yey, I had two options:
1) connect my iPad to my laptop and fiddle with iTunes or
2) copy photos to Dropbox on iPad and then transfer them from Dropbox to hard disc on laptop

Guess which one I went for? Did I ever mention that I hate iTunes and all the other similar apps that are meant for convenient backupping etc. of the devices, but seem to do whatever they please instead of letting me be in control, and have a confusing UI & UX on top of it? Yeah, I added approx. 800 photos to Dropbox. 670 remaining to be uploaded. We could have a faster wi-fi, you know.

I would be cool to be able to connect the usb hard drive straight to the iPad. And it would be cool to have a working cloud sync. OneDrive offer autoupload of the iPad camera roll nowadays too, did you know that? But it still does not include th camera uploads from my Smasungs to the iPad, and some app-modified pics either. In many ways, the logic of what is in "photos", what in "camera roll", whart in "photostream" and how all of these are linked and cloud synced, is still a total mystery to me on the iPad.

What to do with the Jailbroken iPad?

A few days ago I jailbroke my iPad, after watching my boyfriend and his jailbroken iPad for a couple of weeks, to determine that it actually was "safe" to do it. I was slightly worried that it might cause problems, and besides, I've still got a full year of warranty left on my iPad. But the temptation grew too big. I too wanted to have separate user accounts for my girls and some other cool stuff, like those handy toggles in the message area etc.

I didn't go through the whole operation of downloading the jailbreak etc. for my boyfriend already had the stuff needed on his MacBook. So I simply hooked my iPad to his Mac and tapped a couple of icons. Or something. After a few minutes and a couple restarts, I had Cydia on my iPad and could start getting all those things I had been wanting to have for some time already.

1. Multiple user accounts

The truly number one reason for me to jailbreak my iPad. So the first thing I did after freeing my dear device from its Apple jail, was to download the iUsers app from Cydia. It makes a new setting "Users" in the Settings of the iPad, with which you can then create new user accounts. The first one you create will be the current account, the administrator. The other accounts get their own new profiles when switching to them for the first time.
There are a few things to understand when using the not-alltogether-bugfree iUsers (iUsers v.1.0.2 on the iOS 6.1):

• even if you give different passcodes for different users, they will not take effect; the administrator passcode is forced on those accounts too
• the first time you try to log in to a different accounts (with the users icon in the lock screen), it takes quite some time because of the profile creating (an hour or so even), and then takes you through the initial "creating a new iPad" wizard
• after the initial log in, changing the user still takes a few minutes and does something funny that puts the iPad in safety mode (displayed on the status bar), so then you need to reboot the iPad in order to get the proper full mode again
• the app data of at least some apps is not split to different users, so e.g. my accounts in Blogsy are visible and usable in my daughters' profiles too. This is a bit unfortunate, since in many cases that sort of beats the whole purpose of having multiple users

2. Notification bar toggles
One of the things I missed in the iPad from what I'd been used to with my Android Galaxy Tab was the ability to toggle things like the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, brightness etc. in the notification bar. With a jailbroken iPad you can have those too! You need a couple of apps for that, though:

• the WinterBoard
• and the SBSettings app

Then, with the SBSettings you can configure those toggles. It has a set of default ones, but you can also extend them by getting more toggles from Cydia (there is a button for that in the SBSettings).

3. Multitasking gestures
With the SBSetting you also get this Activator app, where you can adjust and change the iPad gestures to your own liking. I didn't really feel the need to do much, but I did download this addition for assigning multitasking gestures for my iPad. So now, instead of always needing to use the home button for switching between apps, I tap on the left/right corner of the status bar to go left and right. Not always the most convenient gesture because of some app buttons being too close to the status bar, but hey, the screen is already pretty full and most gestures already assigned.
4. Get the date and other stuff on status bar
Also in the SBSettings you can set the date&time&other data to be shown in the status bar.

5. Fake the user agent
Ever annoyed that you can't play your favorite videos in Youtube on the iPad (or iPhone)? Or that you are forced to a damn mobile site because you're using a tablet or phone? I have been, definately. So one of the first things I did was also to download the User Agent Faker. You can set the user agent of Safari and almost any other apps according to your preference, e.g. to appear like Chrome when sending request over the Internet.
6. Um... SSH, rooting and stuff
Now I'm not a Unix person in the least, so I really didn't find any need to be installing those things (at least not yet, we'll see if some reasons come up at some point), but since my boyfriend is, I know that's the thing quite many most probably would want, maybe even as the main reason for jailbreaking the iPad. But as it is, I'll point you to my boyfriend's blog for information on that.
7. Oh, and all them themes...
They're like skins for different parts of the iOS and the Cydia stuff and there's a lot of them. I only tried one for the toggles, but it didn't work. Apparently some of them require the WinterBoard mode, some the traditional SummerBoard mode. And they don't really say which...

The jailbreaking hasn't really caused any true problems for me, but sometimes the stuff seems to function slightly strangely:

• The SBSettings and Activator icons seem to be a bit elusive; every now and then I'm missing them from my screens completely... But they usually re-appear when restarting the SpringBoard (the Cydia)
• Once when I updated an app or addition or smtg in Cydia, I got 18 icons (things that should be hidden) on my screen, seemingly the Setup wizard bits and some Cydia stuff and e.g. game center duplicate :o They did vanish after a reboot of the iPad, though.

But still, I'm happy with the jailbreak. It allows me to customize my iPad so much more!

[Edit. April 12th 2014 - At some point the Safari on the iPad started crashing now and then. And then more frequently. And today, I had had enough, so I ended up un-jailbreaking it again, and updating to iOs7 at the same time.]

Keyboard for iPad

Got myself a new toy, the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard cover for iPad. I've got to say that it seems to be the best thing since buying that Camera Kit last spring, which, by the way, has been in use a lot.

Originally I thought I'd probably "need", or have use for, the cover only on trips and e.g. seminars or so. But now that I have the keyboard, I notice that since I'm an active blog-writer etc. the keyboard serves me very well at home too!

Compared to e.g. the generic bluetooth Apple or other keyboards, this cover has some serious advantages over them:

• the stand - most and for all, the iPad stands nicely on the keyboard when typing, so you don't need to be fixing the iPad separately anywhere
• the cover-attachment feature - it just tags along and locks the screen too
• proper keys - well ok, this is actually an advantage over the Surface keyboard
• the inbuilt chargeable battery that lasts for hundreds of hours

I really like this little lightweight addition to my toy collection!

The Ancient Feel

My Galaxy Tab is only 18 months old. It should, by standards of a time already apparently long gone, still be in its prime, a perfectly modern device. But as technology in this stuff goes, it has already started to feel ancient. It's not the size of the screen, nor any sort of bulkiness of physical design. It's the touch experience, the pre-Win7-like-symptoms of the system, the UI deficiensies. It is, de facto, a first generation tablet.

The last real update the Galaxy Tab got, was the Gingerbread. I can sort of understand, that if the technology of a device is insufficient, there is no mind in pushing the newer versions of the operating systems to it. It would only result in even more user frustration, when things only get worse. In some ways, I feel like even updating to the Gingerbread was a mistake. My Tab used to be quite smooth and trustworthy - nowadays it crashes quite frequently and feels somehow tacky to use.

Not only that, but I am quite disappointed by the browsers for the device. The built-in one? I ditched it long ago. I tried Skyfire, Opera Mini, Firefox mobile and latest and currently the Dolphin browser. Dolphin is my favorite one, and so far has been more or less the one to fullfill my needs. But even so, the browsing experience is nowhere near the built-in browser of the iPad, the Safari, of course.

Before buying my iPad I scouted out the other options, i.e. the newer Android based tablets since that was what I'd been using already for a year or so, and there still is no Windows tablet available. Even though they definitely were more sleek than my poor Tab, and - at least in the store ;) - not at all tacky, I still got myself an iPad, and felt defeated. I don't have anything against iPads per se, as I have stated before. My problem is the hype around it, and the loads of sh*t Apple gets away with, simply by being Apple (and, as for now, the maker of the undeniably best tablet so far).

I have high hopes for Win8 tablets. Android as a UI is like Windows in its XP's. Gives you a lot of modification options and enables you to arrange your icons as you like etc. But in the long run, it gets tiresome. In the end, even I just want my apps available with as low maintenance as possible. The iOS does this - but it is high time they get a worthy competitor. So does WinPhone7. And I myself, after using the WinPhone7 UI on my Lumia for these past months, really hope Microsoft in Win8 tablets will redeem their promises. For I like the UI even better than the iOS which I admit to liking quite a lot!

As for my Galaxy Tab? Is it at the end of its lifecycle already then? For sure no! Ok, it's not as sleek and cool anymore as it used to at least feel, but it is still a good device. My iPad is not 3G, but I can insert my second SIM in my Tab. The Tab is more lightweight and slips easily into my purse. I like it as a Kindle device much better than the iPad (holding it leaves dents on my palms...). It's got some cool apps like the Cartoon Camera, that you don't get on iPads. It's got some games my daughters like to play, that you don't get on iPads.

No, time has not flown by my "age old" Android device just yet. But it is a good reminder of how fast the technology is advancing now. And I don't even have a "new" iPad, I have the iPad2. We'll see how old that feels in a year or so.

Article: Apple forcing IT shops to "adapt or die"

As for mobile devices, it is not only the iPad raising these concerns about unmanagability and individuality. I have heard many IT department people say that they cannot let their company's employees have Windows phones for the same reasons - even though in Finland we don't even have a culture of the super-managed BlackBerries (they don't exist here, we have Nokia).

Apple forcing IT shops to "adapt or die"
http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2012/013112-macworld-apple-shops.html?page=1