My Mobile Life

This post comes to you from beautiful Byron Bay. I’m lucky enough to be staying with friends this weekend and I’m sitting on the balcony looking out over Byron and the ocean as I write this. It doesn’t get much better than this.

On to the topic at hand though… contact management problems on the iPhone. One of the first things I noticed when I got my shiny new iPhone several weeks back now, was that as soon as I sycned up my contacts there was a noticeable lag in bringing up contacts from the SMS or Phone functions. Given that those two areas are where most of my time on the phone is spent, I found this quite frustrating.

This morning I found a discussion thread on Apple’s website about this problem which suggests a number of possible work arounds and resolutions, however I’m not overly convinced that any of them guarantee a permanent solution.

So far the most promising solution I’ve found (thanks to the iPhone Atlas website) is to use the Google Mobile app available for free through the App Store to search your existing contacts on the phone. I’ve just installed it and I can say that it is significantly quicker then using the default contact manager.

The main draw back with Google Mobile is that it asks you if you want to allow it to use your default location when you first start up the app. However, I suspect you may be able to get around this by turning off web searching and/or the Safe Search option from the apps settings screen.

I suspect this will speed up performance as well, allowing you to use Google Mobile as your default contact search tool. Once you bring up a contact in the application you see the same screen that you do in the default contact manager which gives you options to text, call or email the person. While this means that you’ll probably have to get used to going to Google Mobile instead of the SMS and Phone apps, I think the time savings will make it worth the switch. At least until Apple have a chance to resolve the software issues that cause the delays.

I came across this news item the other day about Internode offering free wi-fi for iPhone users. While this will most likely benefit South Australian users where Internode is based, there are a few wi-fi hotspots around other states (VIC, NSW, QLD and the NT). Check out the Internode Wireless hotspot page.

While the free wi-fi doesn’t necessarily allow you to do all that you can do normally with your iPhone it will be pretty cool for users in the right area, who either a.) have used up their existing data allowance or b.) don’t have a data plan for their phone.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been planning to put together a post comparing the iPhone plans that are currently available in Australia but it turns out APCMAG have already done it for me. I found the article today and to be honest I doubt that I could do a better job of comparing the options so check out the article for all the details.

To give you a bit of a synopsis (which might be handy for those who don’t have time to ready the whole article) it looks like Optus is providing the best value for money with some of their plans, though for heavy data users you may want to check out Virgin Mobile. Whatever you do, don’t go with Telstra (unless you live in the bush in which case it’s kinda your only option, ouch).

It’s interesting to note that 3 are offering iPhone users an incentive to purchase an iPhone with other carriers (as they don’t have a deal with Apple yet) and will give you $300 to bring the phone over to their network.

A couple things to add to what the article says. If you’re with a carrier already and don’t want to change, you may find that you can use a plan which isn’t advertised specifically as an iPhone plan and just add a data pack. This is what I did with Vodafone. So rather then going onto their cheapest iPhone plan (at $69 per month) I stayed on the $49 plan I was on which offered the same value in calls ($310 per month). I then added a 100MB data pack for $11.95 which gives me more data than I would ever realistically use (my billing month is almost up and I’ve used less than 40MB) considering I already have 3 or 4 other internet connections available at work/home, etc…

One other point that may be worth noting* is that so far Vodafone seems to be slightly better than Optus at providing customers with information about how much of your plan you’ve actually used. With Vodafone you can dial 1512 and get a breakdown of how much data you’ve used, how much of your phone allowance you have left and how much of your reward product you’ve used (i.e. Best Mate rewards such as a 100 free sms messages). Whether this is worth paying more for, I don’t know, and it may well be that other carriers will soon provide this service if they aren’t already doing so.

Note: this is from my own experience and discussions I’ve had with a friend who uses an Optus iPhone plan.

So far most of the posts I’ve put up on the blog have been about the iPhone, but today I thought I’d touch on a subject which relates more to lifestyle design. Outsourcing!

When I first read Four Hour Work Week in December last year one of the things I got most excited about was the idea of outsourcing tasks that I don’t necessarily have to (and/or want to) do myself. While there is a cost to this of course, for most people living in Australia or the first world today, there is a great deal of benefit to outsourcing some if not most of the simple and menial tasks that we face on a day to day basis.

At the time I first read the book, I didn’t really take on the concept however. There were too many reasons why it might not work for me, even if I could see that it might be a good idea for someone else (like Tim Ferris).

That was until a couple months ago when I met a guy named Matthew, through a seminar I was attending. Matthew had told me about a web related project that he was working on and he mentioned that he was looking at outsourcing the creation of the site. From there I mentioned Four Hour Work Week and ended up lending him a copy of the book which funnily, he hadn’t read yet. When he did Matt loved it so much he ended up purchasing three copies, one for himself and two to lend to friends.

From there Matthew started encouraging me to take on more of the outsourcing ideas in my own life and business, which I finally started to do with tremendous results. It started with outsourcing my ironing, a relatively simple project. While i used to iron a shirt whenever I wanted to wear one, I now save probably 10-20 minutes a week by taking a stack of shirts in to be ironed once or twice a month (average cost is about $1.80 per shirt) and that frees up at least an hour a month, which I can charge out at 5 times the cost that I pay to have the shirts ironed, or simply use to free up more time for myself.

From there it moved on to getting a cleaner in. I’d been living with a flatmate who had very different ideas to me on when and how often we should clean the house. We both agreed that it should be done regularly, but where I preferred to do a little regularly, she liked to clean the whole place at once, even if it was only one time a month. So to take the frustration out of the situation and with a recommendation from Matthew, I hired a cleaner who now comes in 2-3 times a month and does all the cleaning I can ask for at less then what I would charge for 1.5 hours of work. Time saved? Approximately 10 hours a month and boy is the house clean.

After those two moderate successes I thought I’d try the idea on my own business and I haven’t been disappointed with the results there either. I now try to outsource most of the technical work in my business, which I’d often found hard to find time for after working a full day at the office already. Now, I spend most of my time making new contacts and chasing up leads, while others work around the clock (and the world) developing the sites and software that I spec up. End result, turnover is up by 300% and I don’t spend much more time on my business then I did 3 months ago.

Okay, so many of you will be wondering, where do I outsource too? Well the opportunities are pretty endless, from outsourcing your cooking by eating out, to outsourcing car maintenance or yard work. However, I can probably provide a few links that might also be useful to get you started:

http://www.odesk.com

http://www.elance.com – outsource design, programming or web related work
http://www.tooeasy.com.au – a local site for outsourincg your more mundane tasks

Have any sites that you use for outsourcing and can recommend or would just like to tell us what you’ve been outsourcing, register as a user and leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear your experiences.

Yesterday I came across an interesting web app for the iPhone called Buzzd. Listed as: 

A location-sensitive city guide and social network on the mobile device. buzzd answers the question, “What’s going on around me right now?” by allowing consumers to get up-to-the minute information on what’s happening at any venue right now, rate events and connect with friends and other people in the area. buzzd delivers content from Citysearch, Flavorpill, Time Out and ZAGAT. 

The application allows you to set your location and create a profile for yourself. Once you have done that you can then add and invite friends or make new ones.

Right now Buzzd seems largely focused on the US market and I must admit I was a bit disappointed with the lack of events in Australia, particularly in Brisbane, my hometown. However I think this is exactly the sort of application that users are looking for to enhance their mobile lives. Particularly when you’re in a new city or country. I mean how many of us have been in the situation where you’re in a new city, like Perth for example, for work and you have no idea of what to do and would use a service like this to suggest something cool to check out on a Friday night!

The user interface for the iPhone is better for US users then the one you get as an international user, but I suspect this is becaue the site for international customers is relatively new. In any case I look forward to seeing this app take off,  as it provides a cool way to find out about what’s going on our local cities.

Over the last couple of days I noticed that when I tried to sync up tasks on ReQall I would get a failure message indicating that a connection to the Internet could not be established. The message did suggest that I test the iPhone’s internet connection using Safari, though I didn’t get a chance to do that initially.

I also noticed that when I enabled WiFi (I tend to connect to the Internet at work via the network in the office) the connection would very quickly be lost. I thought this was a bit odd but I didn’t really connect the two issues, until today when I decided that I needed to figure out what was going on. After trying to connect to the web with Safari, it too I found was unable to establish a connection to the internet.

So I had a quick look on the web for iPhone troubleshooting tips and I found this useful page on the Apple website about iPhone: Basic Troubleshooting/kb/HT1737. One of the suggestions it offers for resolving such an issue is to put the phone into flight mode, wait 15 seconds and then turn flight mode off. This resolved my issue, however I was also happy to find a quesiton that I had been wondering about; “How do I turn the iPhone off?”

Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button on top of iPhone for a few seconds until a red slider appears, then slide the slider. Then press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple logo appears.

Prior to this I’d heard some anecdotal evidence of others having issues with connectivity on the iPhone but this was my first experience with it. I’d be interested to hear from other iPhone users on their findings and whether this is a common problem that others have encountered so please register and leave a comment on this topic.

Tonight I’m back on a plane to Melbourne, having been bitten by the snowboarding bug on my first trip to Mt Buller two weeks ago, i couldn’t resist another opportunity to come down for the weekend and get up to the  mountain once more before the season ends. But that’s tomorrow’s plan. Right now I want to tell you about a great little application I came across this week.

If you’ve been reading my previous posts you may recall my despair at the lack of a task management/to do list manager on the iPhone. In the same post I mentioned purchasing a little task management application which I have been using for the last few weeks… that is until I found ReQall. My primary reason for trying ReQall was that it allows you to attach reminders to your lists, something that I normally use quite regularly with my task lists.

ReQall, currently a free download from the App Store, is the ultimate To Do list manager for the iPhone. You start out by setting up an account which you can sign up for on the web or from your phone. Once you have your account set up you can create or manage tasks again from either a web browser or from the application on your iPhone.

When you create a task ReQall understands keywords such as “Call”, “Buy”, “Meet”, etc… and arranges your lists in to “To Do” items, a shopping list and appointments for example. It also recognises words like “today” and “tomorrow” and automatically adds due dates for further categorisation of To Do’s, providing you with quick access to the things you have to do today, soon, or further into the future. This means that you have the option to manually set a due date for items or let ReQall figure it out automatically based on the way you say or type the task description.

Which reminds me, you can create To Do items by voice via a phone number that you call and leave a message on. Though I think it’s only a US based number that you is provided right now, so unless you’re using VOIP this may not be an attractive option.

When you create a new task item, the application automatically synchronises with the server ensuring that the website list is maintained in sync with your iPhone lists. Likewise if you’ve created your lists via a web browser the iPhone application will occassionally sync the task information back down onto the phone. This may leave you wondering whether all this sync’ing is going to make a sizeable dent in your download allowance, as a programmer who’s familiar with data quantities, I don’t think this is something the average Joe needs to worry about. Unless for some reason you’re using your iPhone without a data plan (unlikely but possible) in which case you’re probably in for a bit of a shock with your first bill as I experienced last week.

Another interesting little bit of data I came across the other day when speaking to an Optus sales person was that Optus are currently the only provider to offer the iPhone for sale without a plan. The phones are $729 for an 8GB phone and $849 for the 16GB. A bit of a rip off if you ask me considering the same phone’s are $199 and $299 respectively in the US and our current exchange rate has been close to parity with the US dollar in recent months.

I’m not 100% clear on whether purchasing an iPhone outright from Optus would allow you to automatically use it with another carrier, or whether you’d have to pay a further fee for that right, however I intend to follow up on this point in the near future.

One final note, the optus sales person who told me about these prices, mentioned that with iPhones selling rapidly, she did not expect that these phones would be offered for outright sale for too much longer. So get in while stocks last.

A couple of days ago I went to pay my mobile phone bill from July and while I normally do this on the web, I thought this time I’d call up. You can imagine my surprise when the digital voice on the other end of the line tells me that I have an oustanding balance of over $460. Yes, that’s right my first iPhone bill came in and it was almost 10 times what I would normally spend.

So I called up Vodafone and got them to look into it for me. In the process I had the opportunity to ask about why there are no totals in the call history (well at least none for data, something I covered in a recent post). The support person told me that even Vodafone staff have to export the list of data to Excel, and then calculate the totals using a spreadsheet. Unbelievable for a major teleco, but I figured that is what I’d do. Somewhat to my surprise however, the totals from the spreadsheet didn’t match with the figures on the bill! More confusion…

While examining the bill I realised that I had been charged full freight for each instance where I’d used data from the iPhone. Given that I’m meant to have 100MB of data to use each month, I had expected to see mostly zero’s in the cost amount next to data usage. When I pointed this out to the person on the phone they explained that I did not appear to even have a 100MB of data on my plan and this was why I had been charged the maximum rate for data usage. I was informed that I would have to fax through a copy of the contract I had signed when purchasing the phone and I resolved to do this today.

As it turns out the contract says nothing about my data plan, so I went back down to where I’d purchased the phone. Sure enough there was a record of my data plan in the notes for my account and the manager at this local Vodafone store was able to set the billing department straight on what I had signed up for. I was informed that I would receive a $126 discount to my bill. Only a slight relief considernig that still leaves me with some $335 to pay.

One handy number I have learned in the last few days through all of this, which may come in handy for other Vodafone users is 1512 (a free call from your mobile). If you call this number it gives you the details of how much of your monthly budget you have left in calls, free texts (if you chose this best mate reward option) or data usage. For Telstra and Optus users, I would recommend asking if your carrier provides a similar number or service. I’ve heard that Optus are no better than Vodafone when it comes to determining how much of your data you’ve used (via their website) so I suspect that this may be a current issue with all three providers.