First 24 Hours with the Galaxy S7 Edge and Gear VR

So my prior phone was nearing its payoff point and so too was the brides, her’s was a LG G3 and Sprint announced a buy one get one half off S7 with the Gear VR on pre-order.  Being a fan of the SD card, this was a no brainer.

My phone arrived yesterday the 8^th and we set it up in the Oak Harbor Sprint store and since I was the first person to pick his up, they wanted to check out the Gear VR too.  After a bit of playing around and taking some pictures, I got to take my loot home.  First impression I had was how smooth, futuristic and sleek this slab of glass was, very sexy and curved and it felt like silk in my hands.  It came with a little tool to push a button on the top that opened up an almost invisible slot that pops out which holds an SD card and a SIM card. 

The camera settings are pretty impressive, in the pro mode, it even has RAW settings, 800 ISO, shutter from 1/24,000 of a second to 10 seconds, I’ll have to explore these more later.

I opted out of buying either of the two heavy duty cases they had at the store, one was an Otterbox and the other was another heavy duty model.  I don’t think either would have fit inside of the Gear VR and removing phones from these armored behemoths on a regular basis would have caused more wear and tear than anything I could have done.  If I decide to opt for a case, I’ll make sure it will fit inside of the Gear VR first.  As for the screen protector, they get marks and scratches on them which get magnified with the headset so no there too.

Okay, there is supposed to be a Gear game pack that comes with it but I have yet to figure out how to get it.  All of the stuff online is rather vague and doesn’t mention what the games are.  I’m not worried yet, I’m still exploring the 360 videos and pictures, haven’t touched a game yet (haven’t had time, cleaning the house and getting ready for a baby soon to be arriving).

I did notice a bug this morning when I awoke, last night I put the S7 on a Foneso charging pad and this morning, my alarm went off alright but the phone was acting funny and the keys weren’t working so I restarted it and when you restart, you have to manually enter your password or PIN if you went that route.  Here’s where I say the fingerprint reader is amazing compared to the S5, no swiping, you just touch it and it works, whatever part of that finger you scanned before.  Anyhow, the keys were locking up, so I shut down all of the way, let it sit for a couple of minutes and started it again and the keys worked.  I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the phone but I think the pad might overcharge it and cause it to heat up.  Something to watch out for, also, I noticed what reading white script at night, the white seems to pulsate, I’m sure it’s a software bug but Samsung if you are reading, perhaps it’s something you should check out.

I took the Gear VR to work today and let my coworkers take it for a spin and all of them were impressed, mostly, they saw the 360 videos which are unlike anything most of the world has ever experienced.  It is like stepping into the future but the resolution could be a bit better.  Improvements I would recommend are individual focusing per eye.  I had surgery in the 90’s to correct my vision and my eyes are a little farsighted and are slightly different so one eye is always a little worse.  But still way cool, offering in the bundle is a great marketing ploy.  Putting it out to the masses make people want to see how well it works.  Well, tomorrow, I’m going to research more on how to get the free games that came with the bundle deal.  Overall, even with the very minor glitches, I’m very happy with my little piece of the future and I think most of you will be too.

Lenovo z570 Core i7

Back in 2008, I needed some more processing power to put together my squadron's deployment video and purchased a Toshiba gaming laptop which worked great for what I needed but lately, I've noticed that it struggled with processing HD movies and handling what my new camera put out. The thought of a new laptop was lurking in the back of my mind.

Well a couple of weeks ago, one of my dogs (I believe!), knocked over a beer onto the keyboard and my trusty Toshiba wouldn't turn on. So I field stripped it, taking everything apart and cleaning it with alcohol and put it back together and it worked well, except for the keyboard and had to plug in a USB keyboard. So I back up everything on an external and started thinking about my next portable brain.

Last weekend, we came up to San Jose for the Fourth and went to Fry's Electronics (if you don't have one in your area, it's a geeks Disneyland) and I went to the tech gal and asked, "What's your best deal on an i7 processor laptop this weekend", and she said, "we just got a truckload of these Lenovo laptops that haven't even hit the floor yet" and I said, "Sweet!"

So a grand later (the laptop was 799, got a two year doggie warranty and a CD for the bride), I was the happy owner of the laptop in the title of this post. Here's my Amazon review of the same system.

Great deal for the price, July 7, 2011

PROS-
At the time of printing, this might be the lowest price Core I7 laptop on the market, solid metal body which does not feel cheap at all. A huge 750 gig hard drive, keys were felt smooth to use and not too much bloatware. The sound is great and I was a little upset by the loss of a fingerprint reader until I realized that it had built in facial recognition software called Lenovo VeriFace which turns on the camera and it puts a Borg circle thing around your right eye and automatically logs you on (this StarTrek gear impressed me and my coworkers)

No USB 3.0 (at least I haven't found it yet) which should be automatically included with any I7 processor, the mousepad takes some getting used to with the pebbled surface, while I like the keyboard, the number keys and the keyboard are squished together. The metal surface is nice but a fingerprint magnet. No Blueray player and only 4 gigs of RAM. Also, finding stats on the Lenovo website such as max RAM, what exactly is under the hood, those guys need to do some work on their web development, a polished product like this should be backed by good customer support online and PR, instead, you have to fight in circles to dig out gold nuggets of information. Also the included documentation in the box is skimpy.

Overall-
A great buy for the price, beautiful and quick laptop with a top of the line processor for half of the price I paid for my last laptop. So far it seems to do my HD video processing well which is why I upgraded. For a big purchase like this, so far I've had little buyer's remorse and would likely make the same purchase again.

First Post from my Blackberry Curve

I'm still digging down to the bottom of this piece of tech goodness, my last phone was an LG Rumor and I wore out the cable in the slide which caused the screen to turn green. I'm with Sprint right now and to upgrade my phone, it would have cost close to 500 dollars. So I looked on Amazon and found an unlocked Blackberry Curve for 350 by one of their sellers Lux Case.

There was a small problem with my order, they were out of the Red so I opted for another color which did delay my order a bit. I finally got it turned it on and it was in spanish. With the help of an online translating tool, I soon had it spouting out english text.
For some reason I wasn't able to register the phone online so I went to a Sprint store and had it turned on and my contact information transferred.

My take after the first 48 hours? I really like the free google aps, maps work great, I have both the Myspace and Facebook aps but actually like them better going through the phones web browser but both come in handy for uploading photos and status. Sprint has a TV app that I tried out but it slowed down the entire system so I pulled it. For some reason the audible.com app doesn't run smoothly, clunky in the playing of books and slower in downloading so I deleted that too and plan on continuing to use my regular MP3 player.

I'm still working on making this second nature but as with anything, it will take a little time. My Rumor was idiot proof but slow, while this is a complicated toy that James Bond's Q would have traded his left something to own. (It also has spellcheck' bonus!)

Surgery on my Acer Aspire One

When I picked up the new computer, I noticed reading online that it said you could replace the installed 512 ram chip with a 1 gig module and since that gig module was only 12 bucks on Amazon, how could I go wrong and pressed the one click button. Then I started looking around for directions and ran into this YouTube video and cringed. And started going though the message boards. It was split 50/50 between the people who did it and the ones that were too scared to open up their machines. I was torn till the card showed up in the mail and I couldn't help myself, I'm no mouse when it comes to fixing gadgets (and my percentages for fixing them grow higher each year).

You see, you need to take off 8 screws on the bottom including 2 under the rubber feet, unclip the key board, unplug that, unplug the touch pad, then take out 7 tiny screws and pull off the top faceplate. The mother board is jammed and only held in by the shape of the body and two screws and 2 cables and the wireless card plug. When I got to this part, I discovered that my model was different, I had a regular hard drive that was actually attached to the motherboard and the edge shoved under another metal panel, so had to unplug everything and pry up a corner and pull everything sideways then up leaving the hard drive attached to the motherboard then turned the motherboard over to get to the RAM located on the bottom. RAM is RAM, I popped out the old one and slipped the new one in. Being an ex mechanic, I‘m well versed at taking things apart and putting them back together again, everything went back together smoothly and it turned right on. It took about half an hour, I don’t recommend doing it unless you‘re good with your hands and people call you geek behind your back. After putting it all back together, I’m thinking that I should have videotaped the entire process, oh well, next time.

As far as use of the Aspire goes, this thing is better then sliced bread. I’ve got used to the touchpad and between XP and Vista, XP has it for speed hands down. This boots up in under a minute, with my card, it takes around 2 minutes to get my wireless modem to configure on Vista, this, it’s about 10 seconds and XP hasn't jammed up with Facebook yet. I think Microsoft needs to come out with a patch that strips Vista the crap out of Vista. The netbook runs cool on the lap, I have a 3 cell model it lasted for 2 hours and 10 minutes playing movies, probably more if I had turned off the WiFi. It’s amazing that you can get this much tech for 350 bucks.

Rumor

I have a rumor and I won’t share it.

A week and a few days ago I was at Knott’s Berry Farm having a grand old time riding a roller coaster called Ghost Rider and the forces of gravity reached up from the center of the earth into my jacket pocket, grabbed a hold of my cell phone and flung it off into space never to be seen by me again. Which left me disconnected from the world for days, DAYS I say!

On the long drive home that night, I called the phone company to disconnect my phone. With my niece Kate in tow, we got home and logged on to the Sprint website and started shopping around for a replacement. Considering how many texts I’ve been getting lately, I wanted to upgrade to something that had a keyboard.

So with Kate’s advice on what’s cool, we picked out LG's Rumor and wonder why I waited so long, I can check my email whenever I want throughout the day and texting or emailing is a breeze.

What’s really cool? I had a two dollar a month contact back up plan, a couple of minutes after activating the phone, I had all of my phone numbers back. That's worth a couple of hundred dollars in itself.

My issues so far? It doesn’t have a multiple text delete tab, it’s not EV-DO, (Evolution-Data Optimized, which is sort of like broadband for wireless), it uses the old regular network. You also need to buy a separate USB cord to hook it up to the computer a but even with those issues, its worlds better then anything I've ever owned.

Have a happy Turkey Day everyone.

I wish I had an iPhone

Being the tech geek that I am, yes, there has been a part of me that looked at all over those iPhone owners out there with envy and longing, I wanted to reach out and stroke their new little toy and make the buttons light up. But if you’ve read me for a while, you know most of my tech investment over the last few years has gone towards cameras (have I mentioned that I needed one?), computers and external hard drives, the basics that I need for blogging. As far as cell phones go, I’ve always gone for one of the cheaper cell phones that Sprint is offering, you know, that one they’re promoting that is next to free for signing up for 2 years? Yup, that’s mine. Every MP3 player I’ve owned has been has are definitely non-Apple in design and unique. Face it readers, I’m a cheapskate and I didn’t buy more then what I needed to business.

Then this beautiful piece of art comes out that does everything, plays movies, music, surfs the web, makes phone calls, takes pictures has a sleek beautiful interface and that has my secret little boy inside jumping up and down yelling “mommy, I want that!” I could blog, check out the news, map directions even more important, I could be cool and maybe it would make me happy for a while but that's the flawed logic of a child.

Being an adult, I’m much better at slapping that child down, “WHACK!!”, which I did using the logic of “Holy crap, a 600 dollar cell phone, how many cell phones have you broken, lost or dropped out of cars?” Lots, I tell you. I would cry great crocodile tears if I broke a 600 cell phone and believe you me, after the past couple of weeks, I don’t need to be crying about anything.

What brings this up this lovely Saturday morning? I saw this story on Computer world titled “Top 10 – plus one – funniest iPhone YouTube videos”. If you have half an hour to spare, check them all out. Want to see if an iPhone blends? Oh yes, a very great site that guy runs show called “Will it Blend”, now I know what I want to do when I grow up. You want to be one up on the cool kids with the next great Apple product? Well the secret is there. What about that gorgeous VLogger girl iJustine who got a 350 page phone bill? Not all bloggers are as nerdy and geeky looking as I. Problems you can encounter using an iPhone while driving? These videos won me over from the dark side and reminded me that, hey, I really don’t need this phone right now.

Mr Cheapo camera phone is still working just fine.