The Chronicles
October 2011
Salutations dear readers and fellow Laurentian neighbors,
G’day again. So, where were we? Oh yes, Intelligent Phones. Let’s start off by looking at the iPhone. After all, it was the first, The pioneer. Congratulations to Apple. They did it. They revolutionized the world. Three cheers to Steve Jobs and his team. Hmmm … three cheers? Let’s look into this a little further.
As I mentioned last month, I got an iPhone when it first came out and over 2½ years I had a few different versions of it (one lost or stolen!). I was subjugated. Every night I would go to bed early with my phone and study it for a couple of hours. First I examined how the Contacts and Agenda applications worked, the most important aspects of the iPhone for me. I found nothing wrong, nothing in the actual iPhone. Until I realized that I had to synchronize the phone through iTunes to Microsoft Outlook in order to back-up my data for safekeeping. I was using an Apple device and pairing it to a Microsoft machine. These "enemies" (two technology giants vying to dominate the computer world) had to get along in my computer in order to safeguard my data. Hmmm ... did I have reason to worry? Only time would tell. Well, time went by and I was all the more enamored. I bought all my childhood songs on iTunes, put them on my iPhone and listened to them in the car on the way to my clients for courses. I put all my favorite photos on the iPhone to share with people anytime/anywhere. I studied close to a thousand applications and chose a couple of dozen that suited my needs. I am an organizational "freak" and the iPhone helped me save HOURS by functioning as the central point of access to all my information. I LOVED it. What I didn't love though were the constant updates: updates for iTunes every other week, but worse the BIG updates for the iPhone Operating System. Then one day, IT happened: during an upgrade for the iPhone, upgrade I later learned through an Internet Forum was "faulty", ALL my calendar data was wiped out! GONE!!! Adios and Ciao!!! Lucky for me I knew what I was doing; otherwise I could have kissed Mon Ami l'Ordi goodbye. Lucky only because I had a backup on my External Hard Drive. But that's not the point, is it? In fact, that was the end of my love affair with the iPhone. I had to find another solution and FAST.
An option was the BlackBerry (designed in 1999 by the Canadian company Research In Motion-RIM), but I had become an avid user of applications and this was not their forte. I also wanted a system with a touch-screen I could operate with my finger and not a slideout keyboard. The former sooo much easier to use. And lastly it was absolutely out of the question to have to synchronize my critical data via a desktop program. All roads then pointed to a "new player" on the market: the Android System (made by Android Inc. and bought by Google in 2005). I am a Google user right across the board: I use their Search Engine, their e-mail box (Gmail), their Calendar, their picture program Picasa, etc... So for me, Android was THE answer. It is true there are still synchronizations to perform for music (unless you use a Cloud), but for my critical data (Contacts and Calendar), whenever I add (or delete or modify) data on my Phone or on my Computer, it does so automatically on the other device. It is also all backed-up on my External Hard Drive AND at Google's. No chance of ever losing any information ever again. It is fair to say that I started a new love affair about six months ago ...
Just a last thought. This same principle applies for those of you out there using other e-mail providers such as Hotmail ... no sync required. Cool hey?
Take good care of yourselves,
questions.monamilordi@gmail.com
This article originally appeared in Main Street – The Laurentians' English Language Community Newspaper.
