Phone fun Revisited, A month and a half with Sprint and another phone (Samsung SPH-M520)

Now that i’ve had some time with This plan and Sadly enough i’ve gone through a few phones , I figure I’d update a little bit. The katana lx is no more, the phone had issues that drove me nuts (no ability to mess with the phone at all).

About a week after my post i had given up all hope on the katana, Its a nice phone for someone who just wants a phone.. but if you like tinkering the katana is no mans land. So I headed back to the store i purchased the phone and stepped up a bit on the phone. I ended up getting the Samsung M520 ,

As far as the M520 was It is a good phone with one glaring problem. The battery.. Now i dont know if i ended up getting a crap phone or just the phones battery lasts for a time shorter than it takes to sneeze.

From the time of my last post and my expectations of a phone have changed a little bit due to changes in my phone plan and experiences I’ve personally had, before it was

basic requirements for a phone.

  1. to make calls
  2. that the phone is somewhat configurable
  3. can add/make own ringtones.
  4. Durable

Since i’m on a contracted phone plan now I have moved my expectations a bit higher since its something I will have for as long as the contract lasts, which the revised list is.

Requirements for a Phone

  1. to make calls
  2. The Phone is configurable
  3. good battery life
  4. add/make ringtones
  5. Applications that don’t cost a years pay for a small 3rd world country
  6. Durable

The Samsung M520 Meets 1,2,4 and 6 without a problem and 5 conditionally , but the glaring problem was number 3, battery life. the first week with the phone seemed ok, but after each night the phone would be maybe 1/3rd dead, As time progressed it seemed like the phone would not last more than 3 days on a charge with the light usage.  On my trip to California the 520’s weaknesses showed badly, but as a premptive thought i had purchased a second battery for the 520 which ended up saving the day. reason being is all that day I had been calling people when I touched down in each airport and just using the phone to keep in contact with people to keep them up to date, fairly light usage overall. When I got off the plane in San Jose in the airport i turned on the phone and It instantly died just saying “Recharge battery”. No when i had left chicago I was fairly sure i powered down my phone. but, without a phone and meeting friends for the first time in person, it can be a troublesome thing if you have no way to communicate with them. Thankfully the second battery came into play and I was able to make a call.  All that week i found myself having to recharge the phone whenever i could which to me is totally annoying. When i had left San Jose to go home I had the phone on the charger till the second I left California, When I had got back to Rhode island the phone pulled just about the same thing which was the final straw for the m520.

Figuring that it may of just been a fluke i tried a second M520 and to no avail the battery seemed just not to favor me, Either the store i had got the phone from had a shitty shipment of that phone or otherwise. but, there’s No way I’d go for another M520.

As far as the Phone goes the battery is the deal killer on it , I don’t want a phone that needs to be hooked up to a power outlet every night. but as far as Feature the phone was inline with everything i wanted with a phone with exception to battery life.

Back from California

Back from California, the wedding was a blast, it was a crazy week overall. I’ve seen more of californias roads than Ill see in my next lifetime but all in all it was fun. the first day was just getting settled and just seeing around. we ate at a burger place that was interesting, basically you get a list and pick out what you want on the burger , well me not sure about anything I followed the lead of keith and ordered the 2/3 pound burger not knowing what to expect. Little did i relize it was his first time ordering from there as well so we both got surprized by this monsterous burger.  Its a good thing 1 pound burger was not ordered.

Continue reading →

Off to California !

Well as of today I am off to california, I do not know what to expect but it should be fun . Ill update this as the days i am there . Since i’ce been up all night i ended up getting one of those coffees that could Jumpstart a nuclear reactor. Ill sleep on the plane =p . Anyways i could use a break from the 10+ inches of rain we have had in the last 2 weeks here.

Phone Fun .. Katana LX mini-review

I was on a Pay as you go plan for AT&T and it worked out well if you made next to no calls. but then again there were times you were forced to make calls. That got expensive quick, the silly rounding rules for minutes killed off money faster than anything. After signing up to sprint on there low plan  29.99 for 200 minutes.

The Katana lx is decent looking phone but looks do not make up for its problems. the problem maybe more from my point of view, but moreso they tend to be things I look for in a phone and i have basic requirements for a phone.

1. to make calls
2. that the phone is somewhat configurable
3. can add/make own ringtones.
4. Durable

well the phone right out of the box passes only on #1 and #4. I had started with a bluetooth connector the phone connected right up but after that the phone really as far as accessing data and such was worthless, the best that could be done is a tether if you had a DataPlan.

Another issue i have with sprint is the fact that the phones dont use Sim cards which makes programing your phonebook a pain in the ass and you look like an ass doing it with 2 phones in hand. As Far as a Dead basic phone the Katana LX is just that.

After the bluetooth try i figured maybe the USB Cable would be more fruitful in getting the phone to be somewhat responsive , I was wrong, as Far as drivers from Sanyo – Good luck with that. It took me two days of looking and when i finally did get it working , the phone did Even less than when connected to bluetooth.

But for being a basic phone it does have its pluses , You can hear it ring from jupiter on its loudest setting.  The T9 texting was decent..  but overall it was not what I would personally want in a phone.

So after talking to the rep at the sprint store I ended up returning the Katana after a good weeks use and learning its up and downs.

The phone would be good for someone who just wants to have a phone with not many bells and whistles.

Cuil sucks ..

Cuil A new search engine that came out, On the day it was released they plastered every site possible that they had come out with this. The company says that Cuil is Irish (Gaelic) for knowledge, It should stand for pile of shit. really what it seems is Cuil maybe knowledge but in no way experienced, there search just doesn’t make sense. Just a simple test will prove that. Cuil claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. ok that’s stretching it there.. BADLY The only way for them to index that many webpages (4 times as much as googles index ) is to take every irrelevant page and index it , but thats cant be it , because why is it anything you search You get absolutely NO results relevant to your search, Dunkin donuts brings up the providence civic center. there Storage method for finding pages is insanity. you could Probably search what ever your looking for than type in moose balls in anger and find what your actually looking for .

Maybe someday this will be the next google but as far as knowledge that cuil claims to have its just not there. they basically make it where if you had a set of encyclopedias, and you searched “Car” the result would not be the “car” your looking for but rather opening up a random encyclopedia and finding a random Car stuff in under something completely irrelevant like the Carina constellation because it contains the word car.

from there site..

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Translation: blah blah blah we’re jealous of google, cuil blindly picks out words we think are related, More useless filler words because we don’t know what the fuck we are doing, We like adding big words and make it sound really personalized to you!

That’s about the right translation.

Now that I’ve typed out this clusterfuck Lets see how Cuils Search Picks up on this and i BET it wont show up under cuil sucks or cuil sucks monkey nuts or cuil sucks buffalo ass.

One more Test

Cuil = 12 results for cuil sucks
Google = 9,330 for cuil sucks. (0.14 seconds)

seems strange for the lack of cuil  not indexing 9318 pages..

Yahoo Not-so Unlimited

Yahoo Music Unlimited i used to use that as a primarly everything for music , Itunes tunes is like a bad hooker everyones had a ride on with a bad deasease. I had tried Itunes and saw how much crap it installs on your system everything from a browser hijack to shit you will never use. I could complain all day about ITunes all day .

yahoo music was not that bad. but what there doing is silly there shutting yahoo’s servers down and basically leaving people out to dry.

Wacky weather fun !

The last two days have been fun with the weather, Start off the day with a thunderstorm than have a happy tornado warning

Todays Weather is not any better , woke up this morning to the sound of a stream which i put 1 and 1 together to equil 6 , My pool was overflowing.

Today’s fun after getting a coffee and almost loosing my hat is ..

FLASH FLOODING.
514 AM EDT THU JUL 24 2008
URGENT – IMMEDIATE BROADCAST REQUESTED
FLOOD WATCH…CORRECTED
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TAUNTON MA
514 AM EDT THU JUL 24 2008

…TORRENTIAL RAINS EXPECTED AGAIN THROUGH THIS EVENING…

.TROPICAL MOISTURE WILL STREAM AHEAD OF A SLOW MOVING COLD FRONT
THROUGH THIS EVENING. NUMEROUS SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS ARE
EXPECTED IN WESTERN AND CENTRAL MASSACHUSETTS…FAR SOUTHWEST NEW
HAMPSHIRE…AND NORTHERN CONNECTICUT…AS WELL AS RHODE ISLAND AND
MUCH OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS. SOME OF THE THUNDERSTORMS WILL PRODUCE
PERIODS OF VERY HEAVY RAIN…BRINGING THE POTENTIAL FOR FLOODING OR

…FLOOD WATCH IN EFFECT THROUGH LATE TONIGHT…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN TAUNTON HAS EXPANDED THE

* FLOOD WATCH TO INCLUDE PORTIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS…SOUTHERN
NEW HAMPSHIRE AND RHODE ISLAND…INCLUDING THE FOLLOWING
AREAS…IN MASSACHUSETTS…CENTRAL MIDDLESEX MA…EASTERN
ESSEX MA…EASTERN NORFOLK MA…EASTERN PLYMOUTH MA…NORTHERN
BRISTOL MA…SOUTHEAST MIDDLESEX MA…SOUTHERN BRISTOL MA…
SOUTHERN PLYMOUTH MA…SUFFOLK MA…WESTERN ESSEX MA…WESTERN
NORFOLK MA AND WESTERN PLYMOUTH MA. IN SOUTHERN NEW
HAMPSHIRE…EASTERN HILLSBOROUGH NH. IN RHODE ISLAND…BRISTOL
RI…EASTERN KENT RI…NEWPORT RI…NORTHWEST PROVIDENCE RI…
SOUTHEAST PROVIDENCE RI…WASHINGTON RI AND WESTERN KENT RI.

* THROUGH LATE TONIGHT

* A COLD FRONT MOVING VERY SLOWLY TOWARDS THE WATCH AREA WILL PRODUCE
NUMEROUS SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS THROUGH THIS EVENING. SOME OF
THESE THUNDERSTORMS WILL PRODUCE TORRENTIAL RAINS OF 1 TO 3 INCHES
PER HOUR.

* WIDESPREAD RAINFALL TOTALS OF 2 TO 4 INCHES ARE EXPECTED…
BRINGING THE POTENTIAL FOR FLOODING. ISOLATED TOTALS UP TO 5 INCHES
ARE POSSIBLE. GIVEN THE POTENTIAL FOR TORRENTIAL DOWNPOURS…THE
THREAT FOR FLASH FLOODING EXISTS AS WELL… ESPECIALLY IN URBAN
AREAS.

YOU SHOULD MONITOR LATER FORECASTS AND BE ALERT FOR POSSIBLE
FLOOD WARNINGS. THOSE LIVING IN AREAS PRONE TO FLOODING SHOULD BE
PREPARED TO TAKE ACTION SHOULD FLOODING DEVELOP.

HAPPY FUN!

HAPPY FUN!

this is gonna be a fun day with storms.