Posted by pianowow on August 11, 2009
PushMail is a new iPhone app that gives you push notifications for any email address with forwarding capability. That means I get instant notifications for any email sent to my gmail account, which is awesome.
I just installed it this morning, and I’m loving it! Before, I had the mail app check my email every 15 minutes, which kind of got me push notifications, but up to 15 minutes late. Now within a minute, I always get notified.
Sure, you can get push email through Mobile-Me, but that’s $100 a year. This is a one-time cost of $5, and it works beautifully. I just set it up on my phone, and it’s perfect.
There are basically no privacy concerns here. You setup an account with the app that creates an email @dopushmail.com. No mail is stored on that account. And you don’t have to give your user name or password to your other account to PushMail.
This is how I configured my gmail account:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10957
I recommend this to anyone with an iPhone or iPod touch with OS 3.0.
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Posted by pianowow on January 27, 2009
Yes, I seem to be falling farther and farther towards the dark side. Sunday, I bought a 16GB white iPhone from a local AT&T store. I’m sure had I gone into an actual Apple store, I would have wasted much more money than I did.
Actually wasted is the wrong word. Apple makes some amazing stuff. So spent is the word I was looking for.
Ever since buying my iPod Classic a year ago, I have become more and more enamored with the Apple brand. In December, I bought an iPod Touch, and was fascinated with the accelerometer, WiFi connectivity, and multi-touch screen. None of those features had I ever seen in any pocket-size device, period.
I sold my iPod Touch like 3 hours after I bought the iPhone. It basically sold itself. I told my friend I got an iPhone, and his girlfriend was immediately interested in my iPod Touch.
I had been carrying around my iPod Touch, my iPod Classic, and my Treo with me almost everywhere I went. The Treo was out of place; it had to go. With an iPhone, the touch was no longer necessary. Now I only carry my iPhone and my iPod Classic. My pockets love me again.
The iPhone is basically an iPod touch with a built-in phone, GPS and camera. iTunes ported my settings/apps/data directly from my touch into the iPhone. It was super easy. Apps I have that use the iPhone’s mic (like Midomi, iSteam, Zippo, Lie Detector, etc) no longer need the mic/earbuds combo.
In summary, best purchase I’ve made since my Rhodes.
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Posted by pianowow on December 28, 2008
I recently bought an iPod Touch after seeing how cool my roommate’s was. Hands down, I think the best feature is its ability to connect to WiFi networks to access the Internet.
Beyond that, however, is another very interesting feature. It can access Skyhook data from WiFi access points. This basically turns the device into a GPS unit, as long as it is connected to the net.
I’m at the airport, right now, writing this from the WordPress app. Just a few minutes ago, I was blown away when the wireless location feature even knew what terminal I was in. Amazing!
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Posted by pianowow on July 15, 2008
So XBox announced yesterday that everyone with a XBox Live Gold membership and a Netflix account can stream Netflix movies to their Xbox 360 exactly like the Roku box does. I want to test this as soon as it is released, which is supposed to be late fall this year.
So my feelings on this are mixed. I paid $100 for watching movies 4 or 5 months earlier than I could for no extra money on my XBox. So that’s not a good feeling. BUT, Roku has been saying that there is an upgrade in the works that will allow the Roku to stream content from other providers, which might make the thing worth the money I spent.
Then again, the 360 is supposed to have a deal with NBC, and they’re actually disclosing this new content. Roku has said next to nothing about what other content providers they’ll be adding. They’re just myseteriously “Big name” as a descriptor.
In the end, I hope my Roku box will end up doing something that the 360 can’t… just to prove my money hasn’t been wasted.
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Posted by pianowow on July 12, 2008
Well, Friday afternoon, FedEx dropped off my lovely, new Roku Netflix player. I immediately opened it, and I had it up and working in half an hour. Most people have been able to get it working in less time, as little as five minutes, but there was an issue with my router. Apparently Belkin sees the activity the device generates as a denial of service attack, and blocks it completely. The solution was to disable the firewall. Not a great solution, but I’m not sure I was actually using the firewall in the first place.
My first experience with the box was very surprising. The video quality is excellent. I’d like to know if anyone can tell the difference between this and cable. I even experiemented with limiting my Internet connection. I had my computer using a lot of the bandwidth, so the box could only get 1, 2 or 3 dots out of 4. I was unable to find a difference in quality, really. The only difference was a lack of sharpness. At 1 dot the video simply looked blurry. The frame rate never seemed to drop, and there were very few “buffering…” moments, even though my computer was competing for every bit of my Internet connection’s 6 mbps. I’m very impressed.
My only complaints so far are to do with the service Netflix provides. The box works flawlessly. I was even able to setup my Logitech Harmony universal remote with it, after a small amount of searching on their website.
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PushMail is a new iPhone app that gives you push notifications for any email address with forwarding capability. That means I get instant notifications for any email sent to my gmail account, which is awesome.
