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T-Mobile, iPhone, WebConnect plan

While driving home around 8:30 last night, I couldn’t send an email from my iPhone via Edge. Couldn’t browse the web either — I tried it as a test.

Today, still no Edge for email and web. But I can update feeds with Newsstand.

Today, however, when I tested web browsing, I got a web page saying

T-Mobile
To connect to the Internet with the device you are using, you’ll need a webConnect data plan.
Please call Customer Care at 1-800-937-8997 to make
sure you have the correct webConnect data plan

I’m very disappointed. Currently, I’m a very light Edge user. I have a 100MB per month $9.99 data plan from T-Mobile and since 3 August 2009, I’ve used 33.1MB (2.5MB up, 30.6MB down).

I hope this is actually a temporary outage, but I’m not holding my breath. If this continues, I may just switch back to AT&T. Blech.

This is a material change in terms of service. If I leave, I want out of my two year T-Mobile contract without any penalty fee.

Here is a discussion of this I found via google.

Good news: This post from that discussion worked around it for me!

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Still in love with my MacBook Pro

Frequently, while working on it, I’m reminded that I’m still in love with my almost-two-years-old MacBook Pro. It’s just still so fast. Checking old posts… holy cow, I bought it on 20 July 2007. That’s two years!

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Farewell, iPhone 3G

With a new iPhone very likely coming in June, it doesn’t make sense to me to keep this one. So I returned it to Wal-Mart within my AT&T 30-day buyer’s remorse period.

Also, the thing was sluggish compared with my iPod touch. For example. Pocket God took a full five seconds longer to load on my 16GB iPhone 3G than on my 8GB second generation iPod touch.

I’m looking forward to a new iPhone model in June 2009.

Regarding hardware, I’m hoping it has

  • Support for the 3G GSM frequency used by T-Mobile USA.
  • Unlockable with software.
  • The faster bus of the second-gen iPod touch (or better)
  • Faster CPU (to ensure it can handle Flash animation really well)
  • More RAM (not Flash — RAM). The iPhone has about 5MB free with no major foreground app running (except the iStat app that tells me the memory usage.) For comparison, my iPod touch has 26MB free at the moment. And 4MB inactive. I’d say the iPhone as pushing it a little close on its memory usage at idle. Plus the iPod touch has a faster bus.
  • More Flash. 32GB would be great.
  • Thinner case
  • Speaker on the mic side so my right pinkie finker doesn’t cover it so naturally.
  • Better syncing with iCal. Even with 8.1.1, which appears to have somewhat solved my iCal sync problems, they’re still barely solved. After one sync, I’m liable to not be able to sync to iCal again without a reboot. Contacts aren’t very reliable either — sometimes they just sit there forever, pretending to sync.
  • OLED (Just dreaming here. The sunlight readability and power usage would be amazing.)
  • Even better battery life — what the heck. The battery life is already fine, but more would be finer.
  • 802.11n chipset to make it possible to be farther away from a WiFi antenna. And lower-power-usage 802.11g connections. I read somewhere this was a possibility with the chipset someone believed the new phone would use.
  • Non-shitty camera. Current camera sucks.
  • Video
  • Voice dialing (This is the first time I’ve ever wanted voice dialing. But I’ve wanted it from the time I made my first call on my iPhone 3G.
  • Maybe later I’ll list my software desires for the next-gen iPhone.