Technically there’s not really a pt.1 to this post. For the sake of discussion we’ll refer to the review I posted on December 20th 2008 as part 1. I am having yet another issue with the FastMac batteries. In my review I praised FastMac for being very punctual and generally on the ball with everything.
After writing the review, some folks left comments expressing some concern about FastMac’s service. I defended FastMac at first. Sometimes one or two bad transactions happen. Now that I have done more research, my views have changed. The stories from the comments are starting to hit pretty close to home.
If you recall back in December 2008 when I wrote the review I just had a MacBook Pro battery replaced by FastMac because the one I had purchased in October of 2008 mysteriously died after only having it for two weeks. I thought at first the issue was due to me neglecting the battery while it sat on my desk with a 36% charge. Now I think that was not the case at all. I firmly believe it is due to the batteries being cheaply made. The reason I have changed my views are because I am currently in the process of replacing yet another FastMac Truepower battery. Read the rest of this entry »
In an effort to contribute today I have brought you something a little bit on the lighter side. Here we have what could be the next evolution of a MacBook. First we had the MacBook Air now the next logical move the MacBook Airship (yeah yeah I know but I prefaced that cheesy comment with this will be a post on the lighter side).
This one of a kind Mac Mod utilizes all of the default electronics from a LEGO Mindstorms NXT set. Crammed into the iconic Apple Power Mac G4 Cube’s famous “8-inch” (acrylic) cube are a LEGO NXT programmable brick, 3 interactive servo motors and all 4 sensors: touch, sound, light, and ultrasonic.
Apple is getting ready to start the iPhone 3.0 OS Event in about 20 minutes. I thought I would share my predictions and what I think we might see at the event.
• Copy and Paste : I think we’ll see copy and paste this time around. Everyone who owns an iPhone has been down that beaten path of having no way to copy snippets of text and pasting them in another application. I think Apple will finally make it happen.
• Live search : I think we might see some type of Spotlight integration. This would allow us to search all around the iPhone OS for contacts and the like. This would give Apple some definite fire power over the Palm Pre search functions.
• Push Notification : Mobile Me is running quite a bit better now. I think Apple will at least mention push notification. They haven’t mentioned it in quite some time. I think now is the time to announce the push notification fixes
What I’d like to see.
• Multi Tasking : I don’t see it happening right now. I would like to see the ability to run multiple applications. Just think, you could double tap the home button and it would bring up a menu that allows you to scroll through the open applications and select them, close them, etc. This would be nice for when you’re e-mailing and you need to jump back to the browser, or maybe if you’re sending IM’s and you need to refer to documentation without closing your chat session.
• Artist Artwork in iTunes / iPod : There is one thing that bugs me about the iPhone. The iPod management. I dislike how the content is arranged. I would like the ability to set album artwork to artists, much like in iTunes 8. I would like the ability to set album artwork per artist and have that said artwork displayed in the artist view. If you go to the albums view in the iPhone now, you’ll see what I mean. I think this would help the overall appearance whilst browsing for media. I would also like to see other view options available in iTunes. I want to be able to use the browse pane. Why can we not have that on the iPhone?
• MMS : There is allot of hubub going on about MMS. I don’t think Apple is going to roll the announcement out quite yet. I think it’d be nice, but I’m not sure if they will right now. I think they should though.
• Off line Mapping : I would love the ability to view my maps and directions off line. I think this one leans more toward the iPod Touch. I would like to be able to store different maps, not just directions, but I’d like the ability to view maps in offline mode. Right now you can only save maps that are in temporary memory. I would like the ability to download said maps and directions for offline viewing. The data isn’t too big to store offline, so I don’t see what the problem would be. I know this won’t happen, ever. I can dream though, right?
• Turn By Turn Navigation : The iPhone has GPS, Maps, and internet. Why can’t we have turn by turn? There are 3rd party developers creating turn by turn. I think we should be able to get this at a low cost. Who knows. I love the form factor of the iPhone, GPS works great. I’ve had my butt by the Maps application, turn by turn would really cut the cake for me.
• Better app management : As we install more and more applications the screen gets cluttered, we need a way to better organize our applications.
• iTunes app store queue : I don’t know how many times I will be searching for an application or two and I find several that I would like to download. I would love the ability to put downloads into a queue and download them all at once. JailBroken iPhones can do it, so why can’t we have a download queue natively?
I think that’s all for right now. I am off to read the liveblogs.
I recently had a faulty MacBook Pro battery replaced by FastMac and thought I would share my experience with you all. Was it good or was it bad? First let me explain the situation. On October 1st, 2008 I ordered a brand new replacement battery for my 15” MacBook Pro, one of the FastMac TruePower batteries. The batteries claim to have 68% more capacity than the “other” brand of Apple batteries. You can find out if it’s true by looking at a couple reviews here and here. For the short time that I used the battery it seemed to perform well. I cannot comment on the longevity of the battery though, as mine became inoperable after a few weeks of use. Why did my battery suddenly die? I made the mistake of taking the battery out of my MacBook Pro when the charge on the battery was at 36%. I left the battery sitting on my desk for about 2 weeks without charging it, causing the charge to slowly deplete. After that, the battery would no longer charge. Whoops.
On October 14th I contacted FastMac about my situation, explaining what had happened and that the battery was completely dead. I received a reply within the hour! They asked for the serial number, cycle count, charge capacity, some other general information from the System Profiler, and my order number. I received a follow up email within 20 minutes (or less) of sending my reply. The customer service rep told me that I had a couple options as they were out of stock of this particular model of battery. He told me I could either send the battery in and they would exchange it free of charge when the new shipment arrived, or if I was in a hurry they could ship me an Apple branded battery if I put down a $100 deposit that would be refunded when they received the old battery. I opted to send the old battery in and wait. Luckily the new shipment arrived before my package reached FastMac! It was immediate turnaround, I got my new battery in 3 days after sending my dead one in.
FastMac’s customer service is great: they are very fast, super nice, and easy to talk to. They listen to your problems and try to help you resolve them to the best of their abilities. I was really happy with the exchange and would recommend FastMac to anyone thinking about purchasing from them. Their products are great, I get 4 and a half – 5 hours of battery life on this new battery. On top of all that, they are also very reasonably priced.
You might have seen some iBooks, Macbooks, Powerbooks, etc. with the Apple logo on the lid colored, maybe it was colored the old school rainbow color, maybe it was a solid color like graysail’s iBook.(seen here) Sometimes, you’ll see the rainbow. It will look dull and not very professional. Other times, you might see one that looks really really top notch. This review is about those top notch colored Apple logo’s you might see. If the ones you have seen look top notch, they are probably made by iColours. I am going to review the rainbow iColours inserts. Read the rest of this entry »
