They advertise 4G like it is pretty much everywhere. Here is the complete list of cities that have 4G in California as of today.

I have been an AT&T customer for almost a decade. Well, I came to AT&T as a Cingular customer. I am not terribly unhappy about AT&T but there are few areas I think they keep ignoring.

Every time I complete the contract and go to a new phone, my old phone becomes a paper weight. AT&T doesn’t seem to have a policy on unlocking the phone once the contract term is complete. I would like to give away the phone, like my iPhone 3G to someone outside US. Sure you can find ways to jailbreak and unlock it. But I prefer a simple mechanism to do that. Apple doesn’t seem to help either. This is not an environmentally responsible policy from either AT&T or Apple.

AT&T’s call quality (this could be the fault of iPhone as well) is not that good. AT&T 3G in the Silicon Valley is terrible. I am tired of submitting reports through that app. All the places I have had 3G or coverage problems, I still have the problem. May be Silicon Valley is not a priority for AT&T or the local governments do not cooperate with them. Either way, I do not get a good voice or data service from AT&T.

I did not like iPhone 4 design. The flat back side and sharp edges are not for me. I am a Windows user and iTunes is not really good Windows citizen. I also don’t like an application requires a few background processes even when I don’t need them.

Here are a few things I would be looking to if I make a switch, in addition to the above 2 primary requirements.

iPhone on another network could be tempting. Hopefully without those sharp edges.

No need for a computer to download and sync. May be it is not a big deal but iTunes turned me off from the idea of updating and syncing via a computer.

I prefer the OS update comes from the OS vendor, not the hardware or service provider. They do not have enough motivation to keep my phone up to date. If the last supported update to the phone comes 6 months to an year after the phone release, then it becomes a paper weight.

When you connect to a different team foundation server which has a project with the same name, you may find that your work items suddenly disappeared or you may find new work items. It is also possible that you get authentication errors. Many of these problems are due to the cache that the client keeps.

Delete the cache and most of these problems should go away.

On Windows XP, the cache is at
\documents and settings\username\local settings\application data\Microsoft\Team Foundation\Version\Cache

Close your Team Foundation clients like Visual Studio or Team Explorer, make a copy of this folder elsewhere and then delete the “cache” folder.
Now try again and it should work in most cases.

Here is another case against iPhone and Apple controlling the ecosystem. This is message pops up as of today on Grooveshark web site for iPhone.

Grooveshark Is Not Supported On The iPhone

Right now there is not a Grooveshark application for iPhones through Apple’s iPhone App Store. Unfortunately at this time, Apple is unwilling to work with Grooveshark to approve our application. This means that iPhones are unable to download Grooveshark for iPhone unless they are jailbroken. We are sincerely sorry to be unable to offer Grooveshark to all iPhones, as we’ve done everything in our power to have it included in Apple’s App Store.

If your iPhone is jailbroken, you are able to download the Grooveshark app. Read our blog post to find out more.

That is lame. I don’t know the reasons why the app is not approved. This is what holds me back from buying more Apple products. I definitely have plans to buy an iPad but whenever I see something like this, I really wish there was a good alternative.

I wanted to use Orb for streaming video to Xbox 360.
- Orb did not even show videos that are played by default windows media player streaming.
- Pictures and Videos categorized in subfolders in a drive never appeared on the xbox 360 console.
- WMVHD videos that I can double click and play on PC could not be played through orb on the same PC.
- My system became unresponsive all of a sudden and CPU fan started running full blast.

Here are some features that would be attractive to me.

Simple domain setup. I guess home group will do that. That is fine with me.

Ability to host my blog. I think I can install Apache and MySQL. Need to run some experiments.

Simple DNS. Again, open source software may be for the rescue.

Simple DHCP.

Simple mail server.

Google Buzz is a good idea that has a few problems. Until they fix those problems, I am off. Not sure how much harm is already done. Hope it is not not much.

My gmail account is personal. A lot of my family and friends are listed there. When I open up it doesn’t mean I am opening up the profile of my friends and family. I also do not want any one to follow me and get access to my non public information.

The default setting for any application in this century should be a closed one. Unless it is a stand alone one where you explicitly open a new account, like twitter. Facebook is pretty closed. I like it that way. Twitter is open and I like it that way. Buzz right now is neither and I don’t like it.

It feels like buzz was rolled out in a hurry unlike all other stuff rolled out by Google. I don’t remember seeing any closed beta for it.

As soon as I enabled buzz, I posted on twitter that “Not everyone considers friend and follower the same. Do buzz differentiate those?”. Now it sounds like the whole web is saying the same thing.

For now buzz is turned off in my gmail.

Update 2/15/2010: Just re-enabled buzz. On that later.

On the preferences->devices tab, I have checked the prevent iPhones and iPods from syncing automatically. I do not want the sync kicking in every time I connect my iPhone to the computer. It stops the playback of whatever I am listening to and won’t go back and continue playing whatever I was playing before the sync kicked in. It is an annoyance. At least it should provide an option not to auto sync when I am playing something or running an application.

So, here is the problem. Whenever I connect my iPhone to the computer, iTunes does a short sync of sort even though I have disabled the auto sync. I don’t know what it is doing but it does reset whatever I was playing. All the podcasts I listened since the last sync are reset back to the state of the last sync.

I do have a workaround though. I close the iTunes before I connect the iPhone to the computer. Once I connect and the iPhone beeps/vibrates, I can open the iTunes. Now it won’t do that short sync. The problem is I keep forgetting to close the iTunes before I connect my iPhone to the computer. Most of the times I just scrub through the podcasts I already listened to get around this. When the number of podcasts I already listened are large, I have to listen a bit to figure out if I already listened them.

Update: This workaround doesn’t work! I just had one instance where it did sync and mess up my podcasts.

I have no guesses on what is the real purpose of this sync. If this problem does not appear on iPod Touch, my guess would be something pushed by AT&T through iTunes.

I also don’t know if the same issue occurs on the Mac version of iTunes.

If I was in charge, I would scramble to get a multi touch navigation mechanism to Window 7 for multi touch enabled screens. Current start menu sucks for multi or even single touch. Not even for bigger screens. Forget about small screens of smart phones or MID.

That would be step number one. Once you have that, third party developers can fill in true multi touch applications. At least single touch applications. The OS itself should do basic multi touch gestures. I haven’t used a lot of multi touch on Windows 7. My only experience with Windows 7 multi touch is the HP touch smart all in one PC at Fry’s Electronics.

It is not that Windows 7 is bad for tablet. But there is no good hardware out there. A keyboard is always good to have. Built in is even better. It doesn’t have to be out all the time. Anything more than 1/2 inch thickness including the keyboard is not acceptable for the small form factor tablet.

Get a better screen resolution. I went to NewEgg.com  to check the resolutions of all Windows tablet PCs. Many of them have screen resolutions of 13+ but the resolutions are maxing out at 800 lines vertical. That’s lame. That is much lower than HP touch smart desk top. Google Nexus One has a vertical resolution of 480. That’s for a 3.7 inch screen. And all those tablets are old school.

Use almost all of the devices height and width for screen. Don’t leave bars on all the sides. That makes the device bulkier than it need be.

Get some serious content. One of the problems with Windows Media Center all along was that it lacked content. Even today, the excitement wears out in a day. I didn’t want to go to Windows Media Center after seeing that BP ad over and over again after each video.  All the partners on Windows suck big time.

Apple can find partners for books, videos and music. On Windows there seems to be a decent content for Zune users. Integrate it with Windows. If that requires a separate Windows 7 SKU, let it be. A tightly controlled SKU built on top of some version of Windows 7.

Have 3G/4G and get at least one partner for unlimited data. This will lead to things like NetFlix streaming along with Zune streaming. Why not extend Zune pass to videos and movies? May be buy NetFlix and integrate it into Zune ecosystem. One pass to rule them all. How about books? If I have a Zune pass I can listen to all the music, watch all videos and movies (only streaming) I like and read all books and magazines in the store. I could also decide that I only need music and the price will $10, add videos at $15, movies at $25 and everything at $50.

It is a big iPhone. Really big one. If you love your iPhone, you are going to love this one. I am looking at the iPad home page at Apple. Steve Jobs proved himself wrong by creating a computing device that starts at $500. Sometimes proving yourself wrong is a good thing.

This is going to be the best YouTube player on the go for a while. Clam shell designs are outdated. They make the overall size while use uncomfortable. Nobody took that clue from cell phones, until now. Also an inch think tablets are not comfortable for lot of purposes, like reading books and magazines. The user interface is made for multi touch. Not just adjusted to multi touch. Touching on text to get things done is lame. Text should be there to assist when needed.

It is very thin. Thin enough to hold while lying down to read a book or using while traveling.

There is no clam shell to flip open. That is a no no for bed time, travel and such. I would rather carry a phone to do my computing than to carry a flip open computer while traveling.

No convoluted navigation to launch applications. iPhone already has a reasonably intuitive way to list applications.

App store. All your apps you purchased for your iPhone will download and work on iPad. There will be apps specifically designed for iPad as well.

iBooks. This is a huge improvement over what exists out there. The format is ePub. Now you don’t need to carry two devices for computing and reading. Let’s not go to the argument “you could always read on PC”. Since the format is ePub, you should be able to read books from multiple providers, technically. I see my Sony e-book reader going away. It is black and white and its battery doesn’t last this long.

Maps. There is definitely a big advantage to having a bigger screen for maps than on a phone. If Google can get the turn by turn navigation on to this one, it is an instant winner.

The iPad Case is has an amazing design. It allows you to use iPad in various positions to watch video and type.

The WiFi only models may appeal to some but in my opinion you may miss out on great apps that will require GPS. From what I understand only the WiFi+3G have the GPS.

I am an audio/video nut and the specs for iPad video specs doesn’t appeal much to me. It should have been 1080p. I know that would have meant lower battery life and higher price. May be a future version will have that.

The biggest gripe I have is same for all Apple products. No standard output connectors. Only the proprietary Apple connector. It solves the problem of having too many ports though. May be when we get to streaming everything, it wouldn’t matter. For now it means more accessories and cables.

Other OS vendors and their “partners” can start working on tablets now that everyone knows how a tablet should look and work. All they have to remember is what is important is not what is on the surface.