Review of Fever self hosted RSS web reader

I talked about the Google Reader demise a few weeks ago, and the search is on for a replacement. In an attempt to assess the current solutions, I'm going to write a couple of posts about the different ones I've been trying. One of the intriguing near term solutions (available today) is Fever, a self hosted web based solution. Several geekier types in my social circles had already switched to this prior to the Google Reader announcement, and it works somewhat seamlessly with the Reeder app for the iPhone, which I was a heavy user of with Google Reader.

The self-hosting part of Fever is a bit of a challenge for me, seeing as I did away with my hosting a few years ago because I didn't have the time or wherewithal to continue to deal with it.

I stumbled across this 2010 post from MacStories which motivated me to try it out - seemed low risk and relatively inexpensive, and in the near term, I wouldn't have to deal with the crushing load on some of the other alternatives. So I took the plunge and installed it on a Nearly Free Speech instance. It took a little bit longer than 10 minutes, but not much.

I'm pretty happy with it so far. The web interface is slick and well designed with keyboard shortcuts for just about everything you could possibly do in the program. It has a sharing interface with a few key services built in and the ability to add more as long as they support a share link (I was able to add Google+ in a few minutes and it's as seamless as Reader was). This is key, as I want to be able to add services besides Twitter and Facebook and most other services don't bother or give you the interface.

You can set it up through cron to refresh feeds periodically as well - this was easy on my host as they have a GUI to add scheduled commands. I'm not 100% clear on if it's working all the time, but it does seem to usually come back with feeds somewhat updated if I haven't visited for a while. The downside if you don't do this is that you'll wait for the feeds to refresh for a few minutes if you don't have anything cached already. This is particularly noticeable on the iPhone clients. I think you could also just leave it up in a browser window on a running computer and it would refresh every 10-15 minutes.

I'm Feeling Kind of Warm
While Fever can be used as a straight feed reader a la Google Reader, it's unique feature is that it bubbles up hot topics into a Hot List using a degree scale based on the temperature of the human body (hence the name "Fever"). It does this by dividing feeds into two groups - the Kindling and the Sparks. Kindling are your must read feeds, and Sparks are other feeds that you'd want to influence your Hot list but not necessairily read all the time. I haven't used this feature much yet and haven't added any sparks - Gabe over at MacDrifter tries to quantify this feature and his review is worth a read if you're considering Fever.

Some of the suggestions for using sparks I've seen elsewhere include putting mostly link blogs there, or putting a feed from Pinboard or Instapaper or other services there. It's something I may or may not get to, but as some of the other reviews point out, it's not necessary to use Sparks to use the service mostly as a straight reader.

Mobile Devices with Fever
Shaun Inman, the Fever developer, is a Mac/iOS/Web guy so there's no support for Android devices - a showstopper if you're an Android user. He admits this in his Google Reader fallout post (a few other caveats there to be aware of as well - he's full time on another project right now so his support is minimal). I'm currently an iOS user, so no issues there. I hooked it up to Reeder on my iPhone and also bought Sunstroke, another iPhone only Fever client.

Both Reeder and Sunstroke are good clients - Reeder is the same experience on Fever as it is on the Google Reader back-end (except it takes longer to refresh if you don't set up the aforementioned cron job). Sunstroke handles the Fever specific features of the Hot List better than Reeder, but that's the only major difference.

Sadly, there is no viable native iPad client.  The iPad Reeder app is not compatible with Fever yet - it's due for a refresh and I'm sure that might get pushed out a bit as the developer of that product figures out what else he can use as a back-end with Reader's demise. Adding Fever functionality to this client would be a great solution for me in the short term. The web interface is passable in Safari on iOS, but this is definitely a gap that I would run into sometimes. I'm hoping with Reader's demise that we get more apps that will hook into Fever's API as an option, but I'm realistic in that this will probably never be a big enough userbase for some clients to support.

Conclusion
Fever is not for the casual user, or for someone that doesn't have any server side self hosting experience. But I don't have tons and I was able to figure it out, and once you set it up, there's nothing terribly technical about maintaining it. The host I'm currently using is inexpensive, at the most I should have to pay a dollar or two to self host. I'm planning on firing up full service hosting at some point in the next year and I'll move it over there if I'm still using it.

Fever is also probably not a good idea if you're a heavy consumer of feeds on your iPad, at least until a native client comes along.

If you primarily consume on your desktop and iPhone, though, this is a viable solution - which you will not have to worry about scaling or going away anytime soon. It's in your complete control.

I'm going to keep using it while continuing to check out other services. I'll write up the other two services I'm trying, Newsblur and The Old Reader, in the coming days. I'm also intrigued by Feed Wrangler, which should launch in the next few months.

Goodbye Google Reader, it's been real

By now, you've probably seen the announcement that Google Reader is being retired effective July 1st, 2013. Over the last 7 or 8 years, it's by far been my most used web tool, and increasingly was the back-end for a couple of apps on iOS both on my iPhone and iPad.

Quite a few people dismissed Google reader a while ago, and were not phased by this announcement (even saw a few "People still use Google Reader?" around the internet). Many preferring to load up Twitter or some other source with content to page through and draw links from, allowing the good stuff to bubble up to the surface. I've never gotten into this method of consumption - I only follow 250 accounts on Twitter at any given time and mostly individuals, not many companies, or RSS type feeds from blogs. I find that Twitter has sub-par tools for managing too much noise, and isn't really interested in developing them at all.

I still prefer subscribing to a lot of things, organizing and ordering them in a way that allows me to skip the heavy traffic sites when I don't have time while still seeing all content from my friends and other lower frequency blogs that matter to me. Reader was always really good for this once you had it optimally set up.

So to say that Google Reader shutting down was a bit of a fork in the cog of my information consumption is an understatement.

No Surprises
It also wasn't (or shouldn't have been) that big of a surprise to the loyal users of the service. Back in 2011, Google removed all the social features built into Reader (and used by a small but hardcore base of people) and forced everyone to share with Google+ as the main sharing mechanism. I'd say 10 out of the 40 or so people I interacted with on the old Reader social platform moved over to G+, the rest stopped using it at that time. People were mad. Google Reader was a great product back then and it was consistently iterative. Now a clunky redesign and a complete neutering of its features didn't bode well for the service.

But some of us continued to use it. I explored alternatives - NewsBlur looked promising but not many people went there and I was after a better social experience. It also cost money, and Google Reader didn't have any implicit costs to use. It's hard to compete with that anywhere, especially when the product is so dominant. There were not many other options that allowed you to use a web interface which doubled as a back end to other applications. So with Google Reader I continued despite the annoyances.

I got into Google+ sharing as much as could be (and for those of my non-reader friends that follow me there, I often have them tell me that I'm the only one that posts anything in their feed.) and I'm still a moderately heavy user of the service. At the same time this was going on, a contingent of people I used to follow on Friendfeed made their way over to G+ and started using it as a replacement or compliment. Between these two crowds, I have a small but active group that I follow there.

What do we do now?
So what to do in a post Google Reader world? There are several competitors being built from the ground up. They all got slammed the other day in the wake of the announcement. Newsblur is still trying to get back on its feet, and The Old Reader and Feedly are spotty as they get hit with several times their normal load. Several other services have been announced including a promising one from iOS developer David Smith called Feed Wrangler, and there will probably be a few others that come into this space now that they barrier to entry has been removed.

Personally, I took the plunge with Fever, a self hosted solution that is pretty solid. More on that in a future post.

Necessary Lifestyle Changes

I've never been particularly skinny. I was a tubby kid growing up. When I hit a growth spurt in middle school I shot up to 6'3" and that was the slimmest I've ever been. This mostly continued through college. Since college, it's been a slow decline. My diet has gone through periods where it was atrocious. The health issues I was starting to have and the continual pressure on my waistline and pants were just depressing. I've never made a serious commitment to a dietary change to support myself being healthier. I haven't gotten consistent exercise. I've tried and failed a few times. I've read lots of books about the subject, but I've never been motivated enough.

Having kids changes your perspective and also makes you realize that you want to be around for them and see them grow into adults. The history of heart disease and cancer in my family cannot be ignored, and while I'm already at genetic risk, the things I was doing to my body were not helping.

It was time to do something. Christmas was a great time with family. It was also rock bottom for my dietary habits. Cookies and candy out the wazoo. Processed foods, baked goods, just lots and lots of eating for a week. The only things healthy I ate were the meals my mom cooked for dinner. At the end of my vacation, I stepped on the scale in my parents guest bathroom and was appalled at what I saw. I weighed 306 pounds. My mom made a deal with me to lose 40 pounds by July when we have our mini-family reunion. I accepted her challenge.

I got home and immediately fired up SparkPeople.com to track my food intake. I've had moderate success with it before but never stuck with it. It pushes the restricted calories and exercise approach, but doesn't get too drastic with anything.

I started out with that for a week, trying to hit the ranges it recommended, but not doing any other restrictions otherwise. I had one or two bad days, New Years Eve being one of them. But I figured I had cut my calorie intake by at least 30-40% from what I was eating during the holidays. A good start. I also started drinking lots and lots of water. I've always had hydration issues so it's probably good to work on that also, and it does help you feel full and contributes to faster weight loss.

After a week, I had already dropped about 8 pounds. Having been through this before, I know that was a lot of water weight, but it was encouraging. Things were going well, but I knew I wanted to do more. Straight calorie restriction works for me for a while because it steers me away from most foods I shouldn't eat, but I've had issues sustaining it in the past. And from reading various books like Gary Taubes Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It and other resources about Paelo and low carb diets, I knew that I wanted to also try to severely restrict carbohydrates.

Modern diet literature comes at dietary structures from many angles on what you can and can't eat. Despite their different angles, they all share one thing in common - refined sugars and processed carbohydrates are bad for you, they are toxic and inflammatory and will potentially shorten your life span and increase your risk of disease and cancer. Unfortunately, we live in an era and in a country where billions are made selling crappy food to us. And I think most Americans get sucked into that, and there's a large machine protecting it. The reality is, in a shift to low-fat over the past 30 years, we've loaded everything up with sugars to compensate, which is even worse. I have Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease by Robert Lustig in my queue to read. He also put out this video which I have yet to watch, but it's along the same theme. This stuff is everywhere right now, as doctors discover that 30 years of carb loading is screwing us all. Most of Taubes' book is about this dietary shift and what we need to do to reverse it.

With that in mind, and after a lot of research in various places. I decided to try cutting out processed carbohydrates and refined sugars out of my diet as much as possible. So for the next two weeks after the initial week, I tried that. I kept fruit and higher-carb vegetables in my diet. But no more sugar or artificial sweeteners and no more grains or starches. I cut sodas, flavored waters, juices, breads, baked goods, pasta, ice cream, and basically anything with refined sugar or processed carbohydrates, and any root vegetables. I was hovering around 100g of total carbs and 60-80 net carbs (net carbs subtracts carbs from dietary fiber, good carbs, if you will).

Refined sugars are pretty easy for me to cut out - I already wasn't drinking regular pop, or eating much candy or baked goods (tending to binge on these things when I did ate them, which was causing me heartburn issues galore). Other processed carbs like breds and pastas are harder. It's a chunk of my family's diet and pasta was a staple for meals.You do get pangs for this stuff the first couple of days/week that you try to eat this way. It's tough.


The results have been great. After a month, I'm down 18 pounds to 288 from my peak of 306 just after Christmas. I feel so much better already, pants are already fitting better that were basically goners in my closet. I'd switched mostly to pants with that elastic waste-band cheater thingy. Won't need it much longer. May even go down a pant size or two. My heartburn is basically gone. I feel pretty good. I have more energy. I'm sleeping better and I'm not getting sleepy during the day.

I started out going back to the gym and I've stopped for a few weeks, mostly because I wrenched my back and aggravated an old injury getting too aggressive on an elliptical machine. I will go back in a few weeks, and may have to make some adjustments to my diet to have the stamina to do it.

I still have a long way to go. My immediate goal is to drop 40-50, but if I could drop closer to 100 and be around 200, that would be amazing.

In the past week, I've decided to further reduce my carbs now that I've gotten over the grain hump, and I'm starting a ketogenic diet (aka Low Carb/High Fat). This is a diet that severely restricts carbohydrates in order to switch your body to burning fat. It's a diet that's emerging as a healthy weight loss diet which is easier for people to stay on. The nice part about it is that you can still eat animal fats and other healthy fats and protein in decent quantities, so I can eat a big part of my meals with my family. I first heard about this diet from Dez, who is on his own weight loss journey and doing very well with it. It sounded like something I could get into given my dietary habits and food preferences. After reading r/keto for a few weeks to get ideas and understand the diet, I decided I was ready.

I will write more about these changes as I go - as I've found other people a great source of encouragement in this journey so far, and I also think it will help hold me accountable.

Book Update December 2012

I read 29 books in 2012, and for the first time I probably read more books digitally than I did in paper. I also read countless articles in Instapaper, on the web and in magazines.

I received an Amazon Kindle Paperwhite for Christmas and I love it so far - I can tell it's going to increase my use of digital books. I was a late adopter of digital book tools, but I don't regret that - the tools have really matured and they still have a ways to go, but Amazon makes it really easy. The local Hennepin County Library has a decent lending library, and using it with the kindle is easy as long as the publisher doesn't make the book USB only, which many of them still do (but otherwise, it's a plug in, click and drag thing, so it's not a huge deal, but still - having to plug it into a computer seems like old tech). Most of my reading was done on my iPad 3. It's retina display is a huge step forward in reading off an LCD but at the end of the day it's still an LCD display and it makes me bleary eyed. So the e-ink Kindle will come in handy.

I'm proud of my 2 books a month average. I could probably read a book a week or just over 4 books per month if I really put my mind to it, and watched less TV and read less items from the internet, but I enjoy the balance. I also take breaks from reading books and seem to go through spells where I read more.

I didn't read that much that was particularly memorable. I nearly completed reading the "Prey" series by John Sandford. An easy reading thriller/mystery series set in the Twin Cities and featuring a strong protagonist in Lucas Davenport. Some of the later books in the series were starting to get old hat, and somewhat repetitive. It's probably good that Sandford is going to hang it up on this series after another book or two. But it's been a good run. I'm in the middle of Stolen Prey, the last Prey novel. I read some other Sandford books too - I started into the Virgil Flowers series and I read one of the Jason Kidd novels - The Fools Run (which feels horribly dated - it was tech focused but written in the late 80s-but it did give me that nostalgic feeling). Look forward to more from Sandford.

Other notable books I read this year include Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - an enjoyable novel about a futuristic virtual reality world, The Ghost in the Wires - Kevin Mitnick's autobiography, and I started the Lost Fleet Series by Jack Campbell (and hope to finish in 2013!). Trying to keep my reading varied and split between fiction and non-fiction but I definitely read more novels this year.

Upgrading an old PC to repurpose as a file server

Back in 2005 I purchased what was, at the time, a near top of the line Dell Desktop, a Dell Dimension 9100.  It was a great computer for a number of years as our primary desktop.

It ran Windows XP out of the box, which until recently, I'd never touched the installation of, despite having upgraded other computers to 7. It had a decent size drive for the time, 250GB and 1GB of RAM out of the box. It came with what was a top of the line Pentium 4, a chip that still holds up reasonably well for general computing today. The beauty of this machine is that it is a expandable dream with a great case. I'm a little sad that it was one of the few models ever produced in the failed BTX form factor that never really took off, because it would be a great case to continue using well into the future.

Over the years, we slowly replaced it as our day to day computer with laptops and such, but it was always my central repository for files. When I took baby steps into using Crash Plan a couple of years ago, it was the first machine I set up for backup (I've since converted to a family plan because we got another laptop that my wife uses). I've tried to keep all my photos on this drive, as well as a backup of my entire music library.

Over time, I've done upgrades - the original DVD drive was replaced with a burner back when that stuff still mattered. That drive died recently, I haven't bothered to replace it, even though I could get a replacement for 20 bucks, you really don't need them anymore-booting from USB keys is easier anyway, and I have two other burners on laptops on the rare occasion that I need to burn something (usually a DVD of pictures for my mom). In 2009, I put another 2 GB of RAM in and replaced the video card with a more modern version (which is still holding up well today - and works better with windows 7 then the discrete GPU in my 2008 era laptop).

Most recently, I decided that I was done with XP on this box, wanting to be able to utilize Windows 7 for more modern file sharing and management. A friend also talked me into installing Ubuntu which I'm also experimenting with. Microsoft is going to stop updating XP soon as well, and it's just time to upgrade or retire this box. I looked into building or buying a new box, but it's still cost prohibitive given our other financial priorities.  I would like to dip into the Mac universe again at some point, but not for a file server that would be used primarily with Windows laptops (and also a cost prohibitive option right now).

So, the domino effect of upgrades began. The nice thing about this box is that it has the modern PCIe architecture with multiple open slots. I updated my router to gigabit ethernet recently and replaced all of my switches with gigabit, so only natural that I'd pick up a Gigabit PCI Adapter Card for the main file server box. After that, I bought a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade . I considered upgrading my laptop to Windows 8 and trying to transfer the copy of 7 over to the desktop, but decided I wasn't ready to mess with Windows 8 yet. I will eventually upgrade my old laptop to Win 8 as an experimental device, but not yet.

Incidentally, bought and tried to install Windows 8 initially on this old desktop at the low upgrade price, but the installation failed and it reverted back to my XP installation. I didn't try it again - the other thing that started happening is the hard drive was clicking during the Windows 8 install. Behavior which I did not hear once I went back to Windows XP. But it was pretty obvious that something was either incompatible with Windows 8 or this drive was on its last legs.

When the Windows 7 upgrade showed up, I installed it from a USB Key. I made a back up using the Windows Easy Transfer program. It was very easy. (just wanted another duplicate to have along with Crash Plan). Immediately, the disk drive started clicking. Not in a good way. I restored all the files to the C drive with the transfer program. But, by the next day, the system booted into the recovery partition and wouldn't boot or re-install windows. I tried installing ubuntu but that also failed. I know a drive that is toast when I see it. It was the original 250 GB drive from 7 years ago, so I'd say it had a good life. It made it a lot longer than the external 750GB drive that died on me earlier this year.

Deciding that I wanted to continue using this machine as a file server for as long as I could, I purchased a 1 TB 7200 RPM Western Digital Blue drive from Amazon. I also bought a USB 3.0 PCIe card to use with the USB 3.0 external drive. Once all that arrived and I installed, I loaded Windows 7 back up to the new hard drive, creating a separate partition for documents and leaving space for Ubuntu. I also installed Ubuntu but I haven't used it much yet. Eventually, I'd like to run a file server off of it, but that's going to take some time. I had to use a registry workaround to install Windows upgrade media on a fresh drive, but it worked like a charm.

Instead of using Windows Easy Transfer again, I recovered from Crash Plan, to a folder on the desktop. The easy transfer program was nice and easy but it also scattered about many files that I didn't want anymore, and I wanted to isolate them. The recovery process on Crash Plan is pretty straightforward, once you figure out how to re-link an archive on an external drive (which took me some time, not an obvious thing in the software or in the restore directions on Crash Plan's site). It also took a bit of searching to figure out how to re-enable the ability to "adopt an old backup" functionality (comments in this post) once I had restored, and I'm still not 100% sure if that's working properly.

Adopting a backup with Crash Plan is supposed to take all the files and match them up to your existing backup, even if you've moved them around (which I have). I want to avoid sending another 100GB through my internet connection if I can avoid it, and so far, so good with that.  (although there is little information about how this process actually works for the more technically inclined). It was still chugging away at processing the backups a good 12 hours after the install, but it didn't seem to be adding to the archive again so far.

With the installs and upgrades out of the way, I'm moving all of our photos and documents onto this computer to serve as the central repository. I have pictured scattered over 3 machines, the same Apple photo-streams gone wild on multiple boxes (which I am going to consolidate into one on this box), and a lot of duplication that I am attempting to de-dupe. My approach is to move everything onto the documents partition on the server box, and then run a de-duplification program to identify and delete duplicates. This is going to take some time, but I'll come out the other end with a full set of data.

I'm pretty happy with the performance of my newly upgraded box. There is a noticeable performance improvement with the 7200 RPM drive. (so much so, that I'm contemplating putting a small SSD drive in to stick the OS on) The USB 3.0 card makes transfers to and from the external drive a breeze and it's really fast (so much so, that I wish the laptop we just bought last spring had USB 3.0. Sadly it doesn't.) The Gigabit Ethernet card is making file transfers on and off the box really fast from either wired or wireless connections. The processor and system bus are truly the limiting factors on this box now. It even runs Aero Glass on Windows 7 without a problem - the video card that I upgraded a few years ago doesn't choke on it at all.

All of this upgrading and Hard Drive replacement is significantly easier with Crash Plan and a large external disk drive - I wouldn't have wanted to try and do this even a few years ago, but now the materials and backup solutions have become so cheap and easy to use that it's easy to upgrade the hard drive and be back up in running in a day or two.

Barring motherboard or other major component failure, this box will probably last me another 3-5 years as a file server, and it's even quick enough to use as a general web browsing computer in a pinch. I don't think MSFT will discontinue support for Win 7 any time soon, considering some large enterprises (like my own) are just finally moving everybody onto it. Really shows you how much things have slowed down - my previous desktop only made it a bit over 4 years before it got relegated to the trash pile.

I'm going to upgrade that last Gigabyte of RAM in the Dell box to take it to the max of 4GB since it's only $25 to do so at this point, and I may mess around with the storage options a bit more since there's space for a second or third drive. In the end, I've been able to make a bunch of cheap upgrades under $300 total that have served this machine well, with some parts that I can likely bring with me to the next PC rebuild. And in the process, I've re-organized my family's files so that it's all in one place.

Cutting the cord is an abject failure

I can't quit you, Comcast, I can't quit you.

Last year, when we were headed into a period with a shifting cash flow as my wife started her in-home daycare business, I made the decision to try and switch to USI Wireless. I wrote it up here. I think it must have been working pretty well when I wrote that, as I seemed pretty satisfied with the service.

And quite honestly, we made it through many months with the service. There were sacrifices, like streaming video didn't work very well, and you'd have to wait 10-20 seconds for a youtube video to start, but for the most part, it was a reasonable service for checking email, looking at Twitter and Facebook and other general work. I tried to work at home a few times, and it was slow, but I could do it, as long as I wasn't doing file intensive work on the work servers (and that was probably due to the latency and low send speed more than anything).

Over the summer, we started to have issues. I had to reset my router/wireless AP a few times a month because it would hang, so I wasn't entirely sure if it was the router or the USI wireless that was having issues. The router was still having some issue post USIW but it was worse when I had the service. Then we had periods where it would get abysmally slow. Then it would be fast and usable for a few weeks, then it would get abysmally slow again.

We had the antenna for the unit installed in an optimal location on the outside of the 2nd story of our house. I had to run a somewhat convoluted wireless setup with a wireless repeater in the basement. It worked OK but probably contributed to speed issues on my overall network as well as probably introduced some local wireless signal strength issues. USI told me they could do a Ethernet drop but I never took them up on that because it seemed like the issues were mostly from their equipment to mine since I could achieve peak WAN speeds some of the time, and I just lived with the computer to computer LAN issues. But this may be an inconvenience for some people considering this product - they can't always install the router in an optimal place, so if you're not hard wired, you may have to stick your wireless router/AP in a sub-optimal location in your home.

Flash forward 11 months. I was already planning on going back to Comcast simply because the USIW wasn't cutting it anymore, but a few weekends ago it was grinding to a halt. So I logged in, found a good promotional deal from Comcast and signed up online. Was back up and running with them after a quick call to activate my existing modem.

USI was easy to cancel, and relatively hassle free - except that they sent me a notice saying they were going to bill me for a renewal, which I ignored.

I was very satisfied with them as a company, their service was good the few times I needed it, and the price was really good for service that was still better than the fastest DSL option. But it can't hold a candle to what Comcast offers.

USI is currently piloting fiber installations in a few Minneapolis neighborhoods and I won't hesitate for a second to switch to it if they begin to offer it in my neighborhood - right now they are charging 60% of the price for double the speed of Comcast. Even if they upgrade the wireless product at some point, I might be willing to try it again - I'd really like to reduce my dependency.

As for TV, well, ironically, now that we have cable back with Comcast I'm feeling more strongly about being able to cut the cable ties. We're not watching much original network or cable programming at all anymore, just a handful of shows during the week. Having kids has caught up with us, just no time to get into new shows. So as things have fallen off in our stable of aired shows, they have been replaced by things on Amazon instead. And with a 20Mb connection from Comcast, that streams anything in HD just fine. Sports is still the lynchpin here, as I subscribe to the Red Zone NFL Channel and watch a fair amount of NBA, NFL and MLB on cable. Still, I envision a day where the cost will exceed my willingness to pay, given Comcast's continued price increases.

iPhone 5 impressions after a month

With our iPhone 4's on their last legs as telephone communicating devices due to various issues with speakers and mics, I got up to pre-order the iPhone 5's at 2am when they went on-sale. Unfortunately, due to a snafu with the plan configuration software on Apple's website, I had to abandon that effort, and AT&T was no better. Both sites offered me different plans that I did not want. I'm assuming that was caused by our grandfathered existing plans. I finally pre-ordered two phones around 4:30 pm on the first day of pre-orders in an AT&T store where I didn't have to change anything, and was told to expect a 14-21 day wait.

Our phones finally arrived on October 1st, nicely within the 14-21 day window. I tried to order Applecare+ for them over the phone but was told that I had to take them into a store to get them checked out. So I decided to try out Squaretrade, which had no requirement like that and was comparably priced. We'll see how that works out. The process to acquire the Squaretrade warranty is really easy - you just have to upload your receipt.

First impression of the iPhone out of the box was how light it was, and also that the build quality was better than I was expecting given some people's complaints about it being prone to scuffing, etc. I already have a couple of dings on the outer band from dirt getting into the case. It does seem to scratch easier and since the black model has a coating, it's immediately noticeably  But I've never been one to treat my devices as they are in a museum. We kept our old phones to use as music players around the house, and I expect we will do the same with the iPhone 5's, so these devices will likely not have another owner.

The phones went right into cases that I had purchased the day before. I've never been a naked phone person as it gets dropped and just generally mishandled too often for me to take my chances. (hence why we also purchase the extended warranties/damage protection even though they are generally considered a waste of money). My wife has dropped her phone multiple times already in the first month, so I'm glad it is in a case.

I backed up both our old phones to iCloud, so I started an iCloud restore to both of them. This took all night to complete on my slow internet connection, due mostly to the number of apps and photos that were still on our camera rolls. Katie's phone actually got stuck in restore mode, draining the battery by constantly trying to connect but not actually downloading her whole camera roll. I finally fixed that the next night by restarting her phone.

My first impression upon actually getting to use the phone was that it was significantly faster than my old phone. Everything is snappy. The camera loads very quickly and takes excellent pictures. I'm jumping 2 generations, so I'd expect that, and it didn't disappoint.

The larger screen size is appreciated more than I thought it would be. The extra home screen icons are a nice benefit, as well as the ability to fit more content on the screen in apps like Mail, Tweetbot and Listary. The new technique for integrating the touch sensor with the screen is nice, it does make it feel like the screen pops a little bit more.

iOS 6 is a nice update with a lot of new subtle features, but not a a ton of major updates. Maps changed, tons has been written on this. I have mixed feelings about it, mostly from a search perspective, their local database is not as good as Google's, there's absolutely no doubt about it. Simple searches for things like Gas in my area omitted gas stations, a search for Hardware pulled up a store that's been closed for over a year, and other things like this just on searches in my area. I've found some substitute apps like Quick Route, which uses Google's database on Apple's map tiles in iOS 6, but none of these solutions is perfect. To be honest, Google Maps wasn't always perfect either but it's probably still the best for local search. Yeah, you can use an html version in Safari but it's a sub-par experience at best.

One area that I'm not thrilled with is how the Music app now handles iTunes match. In iOS 5, you could download music to your phone on an individual track or full album basis, and then pick and choose which tracks remain on your phone, deleting items you didn't want to store locally. I used this quite a bit to load and remove items locally. On iOS 6, Apple manages the downloaded tracks for you based on free space. It doesn't give you a way to delete the tracks manually when iTunes Music Match is turned on. You can delete tracks off the phone, but you have to flip music match off, delete the tracks, and then turn it back on. It's a bizarre head scratching change to what I thought was otherwise a well designed service. Since I am using my iTunes library less these days due to Rdio, I am considering not renewing my Music Match and going back to managing tracks the old way. I hope Apple addresses this in a future update, and I'm not the only one.

Much has been made about the integration with Facebook and the feature where you can integrate the address book. I was leery about using this feature at first, mostly based on anecdotal evidence from other platforms, where Facebook contact data permanently merges with the data set used locally on your phone. Apple does a very good job of keeping the data segregated from your built in contacts unless you explicitly hit a button that merges the data onto your phone's data set. For people that it can match up, it shows a unified profile when you click on their name, and it's pretty evident where the information is coming from. This unified profile works pretty well out of the gate, though I had to adjust some of my friend's names to get them to match up. Since I use Facebook only with people I actually know, I've actually found this to be a somewhat useful feature for filling in contact information gaps on a few occasions already. I honestly wish more of my friends would put their phone numbers and address information into Facebook, but I understand the reluctance to do so. I feel like Apple handled this integration very well given privacy concerns of past implementations of this on other platforms, and I plan to keep using the feature.

One other feature that I'm enjoying more than I thought I would is Passbook. Here's an example of Apple going out and evaluating NFC, probably deciding that it wasn't ready for prime time yet, and coming up with something of a stopgap solution which may turn into a more permanent one should NFC never fully take off to its potential. I would kill to get rid of my wallet as it exists today and just carry a phone around. I think we're still a few years away from being able to do so, but Passbook could and probably will go a long way towards reducing the size of my wallet. I'm already using it for Starbucks and Walgreens on a regular basis (having never had a physical Walgreens rewards card, since they just started rolling the program out) and I'm hoping most of the other loyalty programs that grace my wallet find a way to get on this platform soon.

One challenge I'm still having is the phone seems to have a much higher latent use of data. I'm using this term to describe data use that's occurring in the background or by system processes that's not explicitly triggered by the user. Apple's always been really good about giving the users control over this data, but something on the iPhone 5 and iOS 6 seems to be violating these settings. I'm using double the data I was before, and I haven't changed any use patterns that I can determine would be driving this increase. My wife is also using more data on her phone, though she's such a light user that it's a huge deal. It's just really curious, and Apple does not give the user the tools to figure out what's using the data, and blocks apps that try to do so. This is one area where they need to improve.

Overall, the iPhone 5 is a nice upgrade from my iPhone 4 that will serve me well. Many of the things I liked about my old phone are true here. It's comfortable and familiar, and I like that, for now. I'm still not ruling out looking at Android, we'll see what things look like in another two years.