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All day I've been reading about the Verizon iPhone to figure out what's going on. I deliberately set about to study which iPhone makes more sense, but it's a quandary. What really seems to matter is whether an iPhone owner can talk on the phone at the same time they're using the internet. That can't happen on any Verizon smartphone of any brand because of the standard they use works.
The argument seems to boil down to whether or not a smartphone user might change over to the Verizon iPhone from the AT&T iPhone depends on how good their connectivity is with AT&T. The Verizon iPhone is the same as the AT&T iPhone except it is CDMA instead of GSM and it can work as a hot spot because of iOD 4.2.5.
I do know my brother has been waiting to decide whether he wants to change to Verizon because he loses a lotta calls using his iPhone with AT&T. This area doesn't get 3G locally yet. He has to settle for EDGE technology which is much slower than 3G, unless he goes to a large city. That makes it hard for him to ignore he is getting substandard service as the city dwellers, and yet, he has to pay the same price.
Most of my reading was done at the forums at MacRumor. They have a very active group of comment writers there:
http://www.macrumors.com/
The other reading I have done comes from the e-mails I get over a Yahoo Groups discussion group on the iPhone. Between the two of them I seem to have got the big picture of the Verizon announcement. One of the main focus of the comments and discussions has to do with "mi-fi" or tethering. Verizon will offer it on it's version of the iPhone, and the writers are betting that will force AT&T to offer it too.
I just went to the MacRumor's site to copy the link, and they have a new article on the possibility. They also announced that Apple will include the firmware for a mi-fi hotspot in their next upgrade to iphone. I haven't read it yet.
This news may change the way both companies do business simply because if the competition having the new option will provide. Another technical point I became aware of that I wasn't sure could happen is that the iPad with 3G has a GPS radio in it so that the various GPS software programs work in iPad. I may get an iPad and not buy a smartphone. That was the one feature I was told you couldn't get on the iPad, and it turns out I was wrong.
My brother bought an iPad when they first came out. He did the same thing with the iPhone. He's not exactly a Mac fanboi, but pretty close. Of course, he can afford these toys, but it's not so easy for me to get impulsive about these things. I'm bad enough about buying gadgets as it is.
If the weather stays cold the way it's forecast to it's gonna be the coldest January in a long time, just like it was the coldest December here ever. It's not just here that it's cold. The storm that dumped six inches of snow and a half inch of solid ice here is headed up the Atlantic seaboard toward the big cities in the northeast as I write.
They're gonna get over a foot of snow. Considering the snow storm they had last week, they will probably be miserable for the next week or so. I finally left the house to go out and get my mail. My brother had driven around my house with his 4-wheel drive pickup to break through the ice coating.
It is too cold for the ice coating to melt much. I didn't have any problems driving out to the paved road and back because I followed in the tracks made by the heavy truck. The sun is supposed to shine all day tomorrow and the temperature is supposed to get warmer. But, just for tomorrow. Then it's gonna go back to being in the low teens. Brrrr...
Chipping a half inch of solid ice off my outside stairs was a lot easier, I figure, without the snow under it. I tell myself that after the fact. The snow wasn't under it because I had kept the fluffy snow brushed off my decks and outside stairs with a broom. When the precipitation changed from snow to ice and sleet it stuck to the deck so strongly my broom couldn't move them, and I had to stop and wait to see what it looked like this morning.
The work I did to keep the decks and stairs clear of snow and ice was fairly strenuous work for an old man. I didn't have to do it, but once I got started I kind of enjoyed doing it for the sake of work alone. I do sit around too much. I have to force myself to get up and move. In this case I told myself I needed to do it in case there was a fire I needed to escape from.
When I was first starting to build this house I put down the underpinning and then the floor before I did any more to it. In reflection I think I did that just to get something up for show. To prove to myself I could build a house by myself just because I decided to.
Everybody who visits me here gets around to telling me how good the place will look when I finish it. I get their drift. They're telling me I live in a rathole, and it's a reflection upon my careactor. None of them built their own house and lived alone in it. It's not easy being green.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
