Joe and Jamie's Blog

Saturday was an exciting day. Not only did we have the MLS game to go to, but Verizon came to install FiOS for our TV and internet. I am very happy we finally are getting digital cable plus consistent internet speeds with great upload speeds. You can view my post where I was very disappointed with Time Warner here.

The installation process took around four hours for completion. That includes the guy running the cable from the pole to the house, mounting and activating the box on the house, and then checking the signal strength to each TV before plugging in the cable boxes. We are lucky that the FiOS terminal is the pole right in front of our house, makes for an easy setup when you are the main pole for the area.

Our installer Darrell was very neat and knowledgeable. He did an excellent and thorough job. I have some pictures of him connecting the wire to the pole and the box on the outside of the house. I helped him where I could since I am interested in all that sort of stuff. Learned a lot about how they deliver the fiber that day.

I haven’t been home all weekend besides just being here for the install to know how great the TV service has been. I know its nice to finally put our HD TV’s to use. Today I really tested the internet. I have been uploading and downloading files all day to see if the speeds slow down at any point, and they don’t. We have the same download speeds as Time Warner, but ten times the upload speed. We got the internet bundle with the 20/5MB speeds. What is great is they can always increase the speed dramatically if I want and guarantee the speed consistently. Here is the new speed test from www.speedtest.net while on FiOS.

Time to head down to the Time Warner office now and return the equipment.

When I picked up my new BlackBerry last weekend I decided to go for the Visual Voice Mail that Verizon offers. Why? Well I hate checking voicemail and this makes it simple as pressing a button.

I didn’t know that this was available on other model phones, probably would have gotten it when it came out in August 2008. I did know the iPhone worked like this though.

Here’s a picture of what it looks like and how easy it is to use. Voicemails come in, you just open the Visual Voice Mail app on the phone and press the play button next to the one you want to hear. It’s that simple! I absolutely love it, can’t you tell?

Jamie chose not to get this, she doesn’t know what she’s missing…

Visual Voice Mail

This weekend our phones me their New Every Two date, which is a program through Verizon where they give you a discount on phones every two years. It’s an incentive to get you to upgrade your phone.

Jamie has had the LG enV for the past two years. She wanted to upgrade to either a BlackBerry or a similar PDA/Windows Mobile phone so she had a reliable way to get her email and surf the internet. Since Verizon still has its buy-one-get-one on BlackBerry’s, I figured I would upgrade mine as well. I didn’t really have any issues with my Treo besides the casing near the antenna starting to break, but a brand new touch screen BlackBerry beats the Treo 700wx any day.

After an unsuccessful attempt to get the phone Saturday, we went this afternoon and picked them up. Unfortunately Saturday the Verizon store’s system went down while we were there and they couldn’t check us out. With our discount and the bogo on the phones, we were able to get $400 worth of new technology for $100. Now that is what I call a deal. We even decided to family share the plans together to save a bit of money too. Hey, anyway helps at this point I guess.

So far I am very impressed with this phone. It has a gazillion features built into it. So many that I haven’t put the phone down since noon when I got it. I have always wanted an iPhone, but around here the AT&T service really sucks, so I haven’t switched. Now that BlackBerry introduced their App Store, I think the iPhone finally has true competition. The App Store was the only thing the iPhone had over the Storm. I will wait a few days of fiddling with this phone before I bother to start with the thousands of apps that are available now.

I signed up for the new Visual Voice Mail plan. This negates me hating voicemail. My past post was about how much I hated dialing in and wish they could just email me the voicemails. Well Visual Voice Mail gives me a list of all my voicemails and allows me to choose the one I want to hear. I then just hit the play button and it starts to play. No dialing in and listening to all those messages in a row. By tomorrow I should have some voicemails so I can take a picture of it and post it here.

Pair of Verizon BlackBerry Storm 9530 smartphones

This weekend I installed the latest update for my Palm Treo 700wx. I recently had to hard reset the phone back to factory defaults because I lost my picture messaging account. I remembered there was a 1.22 update months ago that I did, so I logged on the Palm site to download it again. Wee to my surprise there was a new 1.24 update that came out in December.

Now I love my Treo, but I also hate it. There were many things that irritated me about it. Once I saw that this update upgraded me from Windows Mobile 5 to 6 I was like a kid in a candy store. I said to myself “I bet they fixed a whole bunch of stuff I hated”. I actually was right for once, they fixed many things indeed. I like how there is even an option to do Windows Updates right on your phone!

The update to Windows Mobile 6 has made my email not lock up the whole phone while it was syncing, internet browser now displays pages better. Programs seem to run smoother, it has the new look of Vista without the performance loss (can’t they do that on the desktops too?), and they made solitaire look prettier!!! They also expanded what types of Office files it could open, and updated it to be compatible with Office 2007.

There was one thing that I did not like at all, which actually was pretty vital to me. They removed Terminal Serivces (Remote Desktop). I used that all the time to get on servers during emergencies while I was off watching a soccer game or at the mall or something. I dug deep into this wondering why Microsoft would get rid of that technology. I found out Microsoft made it one of those optional components for the cell phone providers, and that almost all providers chose not to add it to the phones. Big mistake I would say, there are many, many people not happy with this. Luckily I found something that places terminal services back on your phone, and is updated to work with Vista/Server 2008 computers too. You can obtain the download here.