The View From Space

My apologies, I’ve been semi off-line from twitter and blogging the past few days while flexing my rebellion muscles.

Now that AT&T has officially screwed over iPad customers with their “unlimited data” bait and switch tactics, many are looking for ways around AT&T’s misleading advertisements.  Earlier I wrote about evaluating a product called MyWi.  I recently purchased MyWi and have been using it to tether my iPad to my jailbroken iPhone on T-Mobile.  Problem?  Due to hardware limitations only Edge speeds could be achieved.  What to do?  Well I have a 3G capable G1 waiting in the wings.

So I went ahead and rooted my Droid G1 (akin to jailbreaking an iPhone).  This provides access to the Droid OS root and allows things like wifi tethering. Then found an app called Android Wireless Tether.  Right off the bat it worked seamlessly.  I now have a 3G WiFi connection for my iPad without having to kowtow to the AT&T behemoth.

Anyone need a jailbroken 2G iPhone? 

Found a great app for those looking for pictures, wall paper, etc. Photobucket for the iPad is a must for everyone. A free app that allows you to upload and share pictures from your iPad (500 MB of storage and 10GB of traffic per month for the free account). However, even if all you ever want to do with it is download pics this is definitely the app for you. There’s a great selection of pics available and the search function let’s you narrow your choices down considerably.
Will do more testing to flesh out the can’s and cannot’s of this app. Will also look at other picture services and see how they perform on the iPad.

Not being one to follow convention I recently began evaluating an iPhone app called MyWi. I’m looking to see how well it works off of an edge connection on my jail broken iPhone. Having used pdanet on my old G1 phone and a 3G network I wasn’t very hopeful. Boy was I wrong, I’m pleasantly surprised by it’s performance with Twitter, email and even the app store. In fact, this blog was written and saved to my web host using MyWi, the upload time was reasonable, even with an attached picture.

Simple web browsing was tolerable, but video streaming is definitely out of the question. YouTube pages came up quickly but the videos were too choppy to be enjoyable.

I still have 8 days of free eval time left, during which I will be putting it through the paces with as many different iPad apps as possible. Will have a wrap up report once the eval period is done.

Checking out the WordPress app on my iPad. Noticed some differences from the iPhone app, I found that it’s a bit more cumbersome to use than the iPhone app.
First off on the iPad you have to be in edit mode to access the preview, photo and settings buttons. On the iPhone all those buttons are accessible right from the Write screen. You would expect that the options would be more accessible given the larger real estate of the iPad screen.
Second, I wasn’t able to add categories to my post, on the iPhone it was easy to add. The iPad app only allows you to select what is already available. In fact, while creating this post I had to jump onto my iPhone to add the iPad category.
On the plus side it’s an order of magnitude easier to type on and to be able to see what you’re typing. And once you get to the preview screen you experience the full benefit of the iPad, the picture is gorgeous.
So what platform will I be using most? I’m not sure yet, I guess it will depend on the circumstances. The iPhone would be best for those posts that I want to get out quickly and easily. The iPad is best when I have a little more time and space. I guess I’m going to have to do a lot more testing on each platform.