Siri and a 4 year old

I've been playing a lot with Siri on my iPhone 4S and am finding it pretty neat. I add reminders when running and when in the car. I'm also asking it the weather, temperature, etc. My 4 1/2 year old son saw me asking it "What's the weather?" and he tried to do the same. Unfortunately he doesn't enunciate well, so Siri gets very, very confused. He's managed to get Siri to respond to something this evening; he asked it "What's the weather in San Jose?" and it responded correctly.

So, while Siri works pretty well for me, I wonder how well it works for people that don't speak clearly, have speech impediments or have thick accents. I know that Apple is still working on it, but right now, don't expect Siri to work for a 4 year old!

iOS 5's most useful feature

Now that my wife and I both have iPhones running iOS 5, the single most useful feature for us is Reminders. I've used to do lists on and off for years, but never found anything that was always accessible and easy to use. With iOS 5 and iCloud, I have access to my reminders on my desktop, iPhone and iPad. Furthermore, with Siri on my iPhone 4S, I can add reminders when I'm running or when I'm driving.

To top off my personal use of reminders, with iCloud, I can share reminder lists with my wife. I've setup a grocery list that we can both see. The other day I added an item to the list while I was in Portland and when I arrived home later that day, my wife had been to the store and purchased everything on the list, including what I had added!

There are lots of other useful iOS 5 features, but so far, this feature could be something that helps restore my sanity. Yes, I know that other apps can do this, but this is simple to use and just works.

Repurposing an iPod touch

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.

iPhone Upgrade Saga With AT&T

My iPhone 4S arrived today and I knew I had my work cut out to swap it with my iPhone 4, add a line for my wife and port her number from Sprint. The process was supposed to be:

1. Activate iPhone 4S and make sure it can make a call.
2. Swap SIMs and restore my iPhone 4 onto the iPhone 4S.
3. Restore my wife's iPod onto the iPhone 4.
4. Call AT&T and combine the lines onto a FamilyTalk plan.
5. Call AT&T and have them port my wife's number onto the new line.

The first 3 steps were tedious, but I didn't run into any problems. Step 4 is where the problems arose. I called AT&T and told the rep what I wanted to do; the rep was thoroughly confused about what I wanted to do. Once she understood it, she didn't think it could be done and I finally offered to goto an AT&T store to get it done. The rep said that might be the best idea; of course, I wasn't about to leave the house because I got a rep that was clueless. Finally she got a supervisor to help her do what I wanted.

So after almost an hour, the rep managed to get most of it worked out, but had to pull my A-List feature off the account. The in-store rep who sold me the phone said that it is likely that I'd be able to keep the feature (no longer offered) if I was on a qualifying rate plan. It was good enough for now, so I asked the rep to transfer me to number porting and she almost couldn't figure out how to do that.

The last step I got a very knowledgable rep on the phone who was able to take care of the port without fumbling. I then asked her if there was a difference between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S data plans; they were the same price and same amount of data. She didn't know, but understood that I swapped the phones and offered to transfer the IMEIs in the system so that the iPhone 4S was associated with my number. As she did this, the system rejected it, so she swapped the data plans. I'm not sure it made a difference, but if there is a different plan to get the top data speed the 4S can achieve, I wanted it. This call lasted a bit, but it took time to wait for the port to complete.

After something like 1.5 hours, I had a working iPhone 4S and my wife had an iPhone 4.

It is amazing how poorly trained some of the customer service reps are in the wireless industry. While it sounds simple to do customer care for a carrier, the number of combinations of plans, features, etc. make it very hard for a poorly trained rep to get anything done. Combine that with old features that the current system won't accept. Just about any time I've had to talk to customer care rep from Sprint or AT&T (the only 2 carriers I've had service with), it was a nightmare. My issues with Sprint were so bad that the only way I could get them resolved was to go through back channels and get a higher level service rep. Hopefully I won't have to call AT&T back any time soon.

To top this off, I spoke with an enterprise customer care representative since I have a corporate discount on my account. I can't imagine what the non-enterprise reps would have done.

(I did send email to the sales rep who sold me the phone to see if she could help me get the A-List feature back; she seemed far more knowledgable than the rep on the phone. For those that don't know, A-List lets you call certain numbers without racking up minutes; I use this for conference calls all the time.)