I finally have both a phone and an internet connection in my apartment! Well, I actually got my internet hooked up this Tuesday and my phone last week, but I didn't have time to write a blog post until now. If anyone wants to give me a call, my number is 090-2955-1481.
I'm quite pleased with the iPhone so far. Being able to check my email or go online anytime I want has been very handy, especially since the touchscreen is a lot easier on my hands than a mouse. I haven't used much in the way of apps yet, though that's mostly because I don't really know yet what I want or how to find it. The connection speed isn't the greatest, but it works well enough. The biggest problem I have with it right now is how it handles applications and multitasking. The first couple days the battery was draining incredibly fast – one day it dropped from 100% to 48%. I eventually found out that exiting a program doesn't close it, and every open program uses power. Once I figured out how to manually close programs, the battery drain issue went away. Now it drops about 10 to 20% a day depending on how much I use it.
Another enormously frustrating problem was that iTunes wouldn't recognize my phone, preventing me from putting my photos on it or downloading large apps. It gave me an error message that said that I didn't have the 64-bit version of iTunes installed, which I most certainly did. It turned out that when I installed iTunes, it didn't install a program called Apple Mobile Device Support that's critical for syncing my phone with my computer. Apparently Windows 7 has a lot of issues installing this program for some unknown reason. Reinstalling iTunes didn't do anything, and neither did a mess of other possible solutions. I spent half of last Sunday trying to fix this problem before giving up in disgust. I finally fixed it today using a method that involved copying drivers and registry files from a Vista version of the program, and I'm very relieved to have that taken care of. I've had problems updating iTunes ever since I bought this laptop, and I think this was the root cause all along. I'll find out for sure the next time I try to update to a new version.
Getting my internet set up was surprisingly simple. They originally told me it would take about five weeks, then called back the next day and said they could come next week. All I needed to do was choose an ISP (I went with Biglobe) and whether I wanted a LAN or wireless connection (LAN, no more wireless for me, thanks.) What looked like a huge mess of possible choices for service turned out to be no choice at all; it was simply a matter of what kind of connection my apartment complex had installed, with varying prices depending on how many people lived in the complex. One more Japanese choice in name only!
On Tuesday, the technician showed up, plugged in a router, did a few things on his laptop, and left. The ISP mailed me a CD and some instructions (in Japanese, of course,) and one of the Japanese teachers and I spent a half hour trying to figure out what they wanted me to do. I was actually on the phone with their English tech support when I realized how to fix the problem and got everything running. It is a VDSL connection, so the speed does vary quite a bit (somewhere between 100 kbps to 8 mbps,) presumably depending on how many other people are using it at the time. It's generally fastest in the morning, and slows to a crawl in the evening. It's usually not fast enough to download videos at night, so I've started preloading a bunch of videos in the morning to make sure I have something to watch after work. So far, the speed has been great this weekend. Either way, it's vastly better than the Wi-Fi connection I was borrowing before, which had an average speed of 0 - 50 kbps.
It's a huge weight off my shoulders to not have to worry about these two things anymore, to say the least. I'm also happy to be able to do video calls again!
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