Now that my wife has an iPhone 4, I decided to take her old iPod Touch and repurpose it. For the longest time, I wanted to be able to control the thermostat from upstairs, however I never found it economical solution to do so. That is until now.

At the beginning of the year I changed out my thermostat for a WiFi enabled thermostat. This allows me to control the temperature in the house from anywhere in the house or in fact anywhere in the world. Since I already had the big pieces in place, all I had to do was reconfigure the iPod touch to be a dedicated device for controlling the thermostat. In addition to controlling the thermostat I figured that I could put the Squeezebox software on it so that I can also control the music from upstairs without having to go downstairs or to bring my iPhone upstairs.

With the iPod Touch all configured now when I wake up I can just roll over and turn the heat on without getting out of bed. While it may sound funny to have to turn on heat in San Diego it does get a little chilly in our house so I like to turn the heat on in the morning just to knock off a little bit of the chill.

I listen to the MacBreak Weekly podcast and they keep mentioning Ford Sync. As I’m not a fan of American cars (old biases die hard), I never thought I’d get a chance to try out Ford Sync. On our recent vacation, we rented a car which happened to be a brand new Ford Focus (it had 8 miles on it when we got it). Since I’ve never had good luck getting radio stations when renting cars, I made sure I brought cables to plug in my phone. I had a USB cable as well as a 3.5 mm patch cord. I was about to plug in the patch cord when I realized there was a USB plug in the center console. I plugged in my iPhone and the system immediately recognized it.

Pretty cool, I thought. My wife started playing with it and was able to browse all the music on my iPhone and we enjoyed music throughout the trip. In addition, all of the prompts for Navigon were played through the car stereo. I tried to use the voice recognition, but didn’t spend much time with it. It seemed to work OK, but without knowing the vocabulary, navigating it was difficult.

I didn’t try out making a phone call through it, nor did I try the navigation as I already had Navigon on my iPhone. I was pretty impressed with the technology and would love to see something like it in my next car; however, the chances of me buying a Ford are pretty slim. I do like a larger screen for navigating audio, like my wife has in her Honda CR-V and the navigation on the LCD is easy to use.

When I signed up for AT&T last June to get the iPhone 4, the only options I had for data were 200 MB or 2 GB; unlimited data was discontinued before I signed up. I opted for 2 GB to give me some room, in case I needed it. Up until now, I’ve used at most 250 MB per month. Since I work at home and mostly use Wi-Fi, I use most data on Wi-Fi. Furthermore, when I’m out, I don’t stream video or do anything that is high bandwidth. This month, I went on vacation (first real vacation in 5.5 years) and had no Wi-Fi coverage for the entire 5 day trip. My wife and I used the phone to find stuff to do, as well as for some Twitter checking, RSS feed reading, and email. It looks like I’ll use maybe 800 MB of my 2 GB allocation. So even with my high (for me) usage, I didn’t even use half of my allocation.

For many people, 2 GB of data is more than enough. If someone commuted on a bus or train and streamed music or video, they might use more data. So for social networking, web browsing and email 2 GB works and unlimited is just a marketing gimmick (at least it is for Sprint now). Of course, everyone’s usage varies, but for me, unlimited doesn’t mean anything to me. I suspect that when I add my wife to my account, 2 GB will be enough for her, as well.

When the iPhone 4S was announced, it seemed like a minor upgrade, I immediately wanted to get one. I like shiny toys and needed justification to get one. Luckily my wife has been bugging me about getting an iPhone and she said that she’d be more than happy with an iPhone 4. So, I’ll get the shiny new gadget and pass down my iPhone 4 to my wife.

We ordered the iPhone 4S last week and in 3-4 weeks, it will arrive. Then the fun begins. I have to swap the SIM so that I get the iPhone 4S working on my number, port my wife’s number over to the new line, and then combine the lines into a FamilyTalk plan. This is almost a recipe for disaster; knowing that this wasn’t going to be straight forward, we ordered the phone at an AT&T corporate store (turns out our flight home from vacation was delayed, so we stopped in at the large mall on Maui and went to the only AT&T store on the island). I just hope this doesn’t get screwed up; crossing my fingers.