The iPad Tour: In France, It’s nice (necessary) To have friends
 |
“Welcome to the most expensive service in the world!” my UK friend Andre (who helped me get my O2 service last week) had trumpeted to me in a text message as I arrived at my first hotel stop in Nice, France, late Monday night (gleefully happy to tweak the French— apparently the hundred years’ war not yet quite over!)
There was more than a grain of truth to all of this— as I found out, getting local service of any kind was not so easy in France.
My plan was to continue in France what had worked in the UK— get a local sim card, this time from Orange, and instead of paying $100 for 100 megabytes from AT&T, get a decent USA sized chunk of service for many less euros, and fill in the gaps with my $7.95/mo Boingo wifi service.
What I quickly found out was that Boingo didn’t seem to work anywhere in France (their maps claimed otherwise) and Orange had a strange policy where 3G data could be used for anything other than e-mail!
… And one other small detail… to get a micro-sim of any kind in France, one must have a French bank account! (Why, said Andre, “because they’re French!”)
A good friend, from my contracting days for Digital Equipment (parts of which now known as HP), no longer a software developer, but a beekeeper, lives locally here in France, and offered to use his local credentials to get me online.
A little research, and we ditched Orange for SFR, which offers a 1GB ‘unlimited’ account for 29€. A short wait in line at SFR, some contracts signed, a sim password, and a cash transfer later, I’m now data enabled until my return to the USA in about a week and a half.
Setup was simpler— instead of applying through the app, it was done in store, with a sim pin. There is a no-term contract, which my friend has to cancel after I leave.
At dinner tonight, a woman at the next table (UK based photographer) upon seeing my iPad got up and walked over to my table, and asked if she could look at her website— which had just been converted to support the iPad.
“You must be mad for this iPad… Is the network always this slow?”
Mad perhaps, but frankly, I was glad to have any network at all.
My iPhone seems to be shrinking in my hand as we speak
Yes, I am now the owner of a new iPad 64GB 3g as of last Friday, the 30th, 6:30pm.
I have had almost a week with it now, and here is my story (so far).
My good friend Dr. Wu (her father taught Donald Fagen Kung Fu in Ohio back in the 70’s and she claims the song is named after him) and I decided to buy our iPads together— but we did not pre-order. We intended to become part of the ‘scene’ at the local Apple Store.
When we arrived at the store in Chestnut Hill MA at 6:30pm on Friday there was indeed a velvet rope line running about 150’ back from the door to the store… except there were no people actually in that line.
Where were the lawn chairs? The people selling their spots in line for $1000? The giddy fanboys? Camera crews, the funny hats?
What happened to ‘The Scene’?
Two Apple store employees at the door insured us that there had indeed been a ‘scene’ at 5pm— the line ran outside into the parking lot… but that had all passed and was done (I guess at that point we were the scene).
The Apple store prides themselves on providing personalized, friendly service— and there was plenty of that, but also something a little more subtle— an easygoing but firm ‘hard sell’ to try and convince you to buy additional things.
I got the hard press on MobileMe— even when I told them I had my own servers online, and indeed I run my own mail service they asked “How many servers do you have?” before finally giving up.
I suppose I prefer this kind of thing to going to a big box electronics store where the employees are untrained and clueless— but to some extent I found the whole experience just a little intrusive. They did convince me that it would be a better ‘deal’ to buy the keyboard today ($30 off bought with the iPad— is Apple a little worried about the screen keyboard?).
It was not all bad— the good side of all this was that they activated the device for me, walked me through adding the 3g service, and our devices had a full 100% charge when we walked out the door.
We were happy. Wallets lighter, but happy.
The iPad is everything that everyone else has said up to this point— I won’t beabor the point that it’s fast— very fast, slick, easy to use,and just the best personal web browsing experience you’ve ever had while lounging around your home.
3g adds to the iPad the extra benefit of providing the best Google maps experience you’ve ever had— a portable road atlas in a readable size.
In fact, anything with a map— weather, road, air traffic, package tracking is really, really slick on an iPad.
The first instinct you have after syncing your iPad to iTunes for the first time is to figure out which ‘iPhone’ apps you can update to ‘iPad size’ — as the compatibility is great— but the upscaling experience, not unlike watching standard definition TV on an HD set.
Here is my list of ‘must have’ apps for the iPad:
- At Bat 2010 — ($14.99) In game baseball stats, radio, and video highlights for every game, every team on a big, big screen.
- Goodreader for iPad — ($0.99) read all your PDFs on the iPad. This is pretty awesome.
- Netflix — (Free) If you have a Netflix account, Netflix on Demand on your iPad! (Columbo never looked this good)
- iSSH — ($9.99) full sized ssh terminal client. The iPad keyboard needs a ‘ctrl’ key in the right place!
- BBC News — (Free!) I find myself leaving this up during the day, and listening to the included ‘BBC World Service’ radio feed (in fact, I am listening to the BBC right now)
- Wundermap — (Free!) Weather underground full screen google mashup for iPad.
- Weather Bug Elite for iPad — (Free) weather maps, video forecasts.
- Weather Channel HD for iPad — (Free) data and video content from the weather Channel.
- Delivery Status Touch — ($4.99) full iPad sized package tracking. Cloud syncing of data for your mac, iPhone, and now iPad.
- Filterstorm — (Free) iPad sized photo editing app, and free too!
- Chess Wise Free — chess is great on a large screen.
- Marvel Comics - (Free) Andy Inhatko was right— comics are a killer app on the iPad!
- Night Stand HD — ($0.99) full screen clock and alarm for your iPad in its dock at night.
- iSip — ($5.99, but a free version that does not use your phone book) This is an ‘iPhone’ sized app… but if you have a SIP voip service account, you can make phone calls from your iPad (even on 3g). Google bought my favorite SIP provider— Gizmo5. Expect at some point that there will be SIP credentials you could use here.
There’s a whole class of apps to do flight tracking, air traffic, even shipping traffic in the harbor near you that I have spent time with as well, but are of not things you’d generally use, unless you were looking for that specific type of information. I think this class of app, truly delivering contextual data in real time, out in the field with a readily available, standardized hardware will be very important on this device.
The most interesting thing about having an iPad— As if I’ve been somehow irradiated by aliens in a bad 50’s Sci-Fi movie, my iPhone suddenly seems to be shrinking. When I take it out of my pocket and look at it, it is tiny in my hand.
It shockingly seems to shrinking perceptively smaller seemingly every time I use it.
How odd is that?
Acela WiFi = Epic Fail
First, as a disclaimer, let me say that I love Amtrak, and Acela. In fact there’s probably no other way I’d like to travel in the northeast corridor, and I am a regular, happy rider for many years. The crews, trains, experience are all cool, and to boot, I get a lot of work done onboard, with power conveniently available at my seat. In fact, I am on Acela right now, enjoying a train travel mile upgrade to first class. Riding the train for me harkens back to an earlier, perhaps more elegant way to travel.
So you can imagine how happy I was to hear that Acela would soon be offering free WiFi on all their Northeast trains. Free, as linux folks like to say, as in beer. This is likely in response to competitors like the Bolt Bus who provide free WiFi to riders, at a much lower overall price. They even came up with a cool little logo, and if you go into any Amtrak station, the signs are everywhere.
I can even use it on my iPhone, awesome. What could be wrong with that?
Turns out, a lot.
I was sent a survey by Amtrak back in February by Amtrak asking me what I thought of various options— would I be interested in various movie rental options, paid downloads, etc., while on board.
No, I answered— don’t try to sell me crap I don’t want, I’d just like the free, reliable internet access, thanks. I’d even pay a little, if it was reliable, but free, much nicer.
So it looks like they partially heard me—once the service launched, there are no paid services, but they also didn’t hear my plea for reasonable, reliable service— because, to put it in a phrase that my 12yr. old would understand…
Acela wireless = epic fail.
I actually rode Acela to NYC just a few days after they started the service, and there were a number of problems. Here I am a few weeks in (March 19th) and things are not much better.
Truly, this service is not good for much else than reading mail, and (waiting a long time to) view some commonly used news and information sites. 3G on my 3Gs iPhone outperforms this by a huge factor.
For anything else, it’s not happening.
To give you some metrics on how bad this is, check out this graphc of the speakeasy speed test:
What you say, there are no results— that is exactly, and precisely my point… the speed test never ran, after waiting about 10 minutes.
Even worse— when I tried to view a ‘twitpic’ from someone I follow (actually a new friend whose iPhone I charged at SXSW (I am still the most interesting nerd in the world)) I was greeted with this page:
Banned for a download? Download? I was trying to view an image. There is indeed a disclaimer on the free signup page when you first load the service that says something to the effect of “this service is not for watching streaming videos” but banning photos seems a bit egregious. I wasn’t planning on running bittorrent, but this is a bit much.
That for me, was the last straw. Luckily, I have a borrowed AT&T 3g wireless card from my business partner, and that is how I am writing this review… and viewing photos and some youtube videos (Weird Al just posted his home movies to YouTube, awesome stuff).
As I am a postive person— I am hoping that we are still in the ‘startup’ phase of this project, and Amtrak gets this right, but you’d have to imagine they tested this out a bit beforehand, so something has gone not quite right.
But at the moment… Acela Wireless = epic fail.
