Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: Products

Word This in Chrome

An experiment in using the Word This extension in the Chrome browser.

I started on my Flickr homepage, so this is the link  it auto added to the post

Flickr: Your Photostream.

Now lets add an image

Wow that was neat! & quick

Seems pretty good for adding posts about a website.

However, it seems to lose the post if you change the webpage mid stream 🙁

One thing about Chrome is the extensions are installed instantly! So far I’ve added XMarks, Lazarus, Evernote, Google Mail and of cause Word This.

Maybe I will convert from Firefox which seems to be getting slow and crashes quite often…..

ps I forgot to add a title 🙁 it defaulted to the inserted link, manually changed it now

iPhone on T-mobile in the UK

If your iPhone contract has run out (or about to) then you can ask O2 to ‘unlock’ your iPhone. Once unlocked you can get a PAC code and transfer your existing number to T-Mobile.

Advantages

  • The £10 a month unlimited internet and texts for life is a great deal for anyone, like me, who doesn’t make many voice calls.
  • Since its pay as you go when you travel abroad you are no longer faced with a horrendous bill on your return. You can get one of their £5 roaming bundles easily by text whilst you are away.
  • Topping up is a delight, they send a message when you are running low you can send a free text back with the last 4 digits of your previously registered credit card  the amount and three security digits, and away you go.
  • The itemised billing is excellent, totally itemised bills to the last K of data transferred and instantly available on the web.
  • 3G Coverage so far is awesome!

Disadvantages

  • If your phone breaks and Apple replace it then according to the local Apple store it will be locked. Will O2 unlock a phone if you have no contract? When I asked at Apple they just said speak to O2 and yes O2 say speak to Apple. Maybe this issue will clear up as more iPhones get legally unlocked and Orange etc come to the market.
  • At the moment  if I put the iPhone in Airplane mode the iPhone asks to be unlocked again by iTunes (to do this you have to remove the SIM, take it out of flight mode, reinsert SIM and then iTunes will unlock it).
  • You get the silly Content Lock screen (in picture) if you access blogs 🙁
  • The iPhone seems to eat the battery in 3G mode. I guess with O2 it never found a 3G mast!

Conclusion
Its great to have an always on internet, even in the depths of cafes and lecture theatres, so I’m sticking with T-Mobile until either I buy a Nexus or the latest toy from Apple.

iPhone unlock problems

I recently had O2 unlock my iPhone prior to me transferring my number to T-mobile. I wanted to test T-Mobiles unlimited internet and texts for a tenner a month.

All went well until….
I’ve now discovered that putting the iPhone into flight mode  locks me out of the iPhone totally, insisting that it has to be connected to iTunes to be unlocked as the SIM card has been changed 🙁

To make it worse plugging it into iTunes  says the iPhone is ‘damaged’ and needs to be taken to an Apple store 🙁 🙁

I’ve now discovered a work around. To get access to the iPhone menu’s, Remove the SIM card. You can then access the General menu and take it out of Flight mode. Replace the SIM and unlock with iTunes if you have remembered to bring a laptop with iTunes on it.

Oh, and iTunes is total bloatware – installing it on my little Eee with its 4GB drive consumed 500MB of space. Windows XP pro by comparison fits in 3GB.

Another annoyance is, away from home,  I cannot do a full iPhone sync. As on any other computer I use it will lose all the music, contacts and applications if I sync.

Now if only I could order that Nexus…..

Plastic Logic display and Apple?

A thought occurred to me after reading this Twitter from Mark Littlewood.

What if Cambridge based Plastic Logic’s new screen is going to be the display for the often rumoured Apple Tablet?

With investors pumping 250 million dollars or so it would seem to me that they might have a big company ready to start taking their production 🙂 and the display is certainly sexy enough:-

Here is a youtube video of the display in action!

It would certainly kill all other Netbook devices on the market!