My 4 year old son, Christopher, has taken our Santa from the living room and hid him under his bed. He’s hilarious.

So, the other night, I had the opportunity to test a few phones across AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon.

We had two iPhone 4S and one iPhone 4 phone.

One iPhone 4S was on AT&T, the other iPhone 4S on Sprint, and the iPhone 4 on Verizon.

I was quite astonished by the results of our Speedtest.net test on these phones, all running iOS 5.0.1.

Shocking. The 4S on AT&T was nearly 6x faster than the same phone on Sprint. That made me happy. Sprint has the most liberal data plans from what I gathered, but I’m glad to be that much faster. The sad thing to note her was how poorly the iPhone 4 performed on Verizon.

The Verizon phone had the weakest visible connection with 3 bars, the AT&T phone had 4 bars, and the Sprint phone had 5 bars. This is just for educational purposes. Hope you enjoyed it.

UPDATE: Thanks to Greg for running his own test. iPhone 4S on Verizon, Dec-1-2011.:

So I’ve been listening to my Sennheiser HD570 headphones at work a bit more as of late and I always felt they could use a little bit more oomph in their sound. I was looking around Amazon.com the other day, trying to help someone at work find some headphones for a gift purchase. In doing my research, I found the Fiio E6 that is distributed by Micca, who provides a Y-cable in the packaging.

Specification

* output power: 150mW into 16 Ohm, 16mW into 300 Ohm

* SNR: >95dBA

* Distortion: <0.0009% (10mW)

* Frequency response:10Hz~100KHz

* USB power supply port:DC 5V/500mA

* Power supply mode :Built-in rechargeable lithium battery.

* Size:41mmx40.2mmx9mm

* Weight:16g

After listening to them for a few hours with low volume (25% or less through the PC) through my cheapo Dell desk speakers, I wasn’t SUPER impressed. I think you need to turn up the volume to 50% or higher to really get a good idea of how the E6 performs. I then switched to the Sennheisers and pumped up the volume to 50% (I’m using Spotify as my music player and listening to some Armin Van Buuren State of Trance 500 album). Cycling through the 4 EQ settings, I’m able to:

1. Hear the difference between them all and
2. Truly benefit from 3 of the 4 settings: Neutral (still amps the signal), +3dB, +6dB, and -3dB.

I’ve never heard my Sennheisers sound this full of life before.

All in all, I think this was a great $24.99 spent at Amazon.com and I’d highly recommend this to anyone who has felt they could tweak their headphone listening a bit.

For a more in-depth review, you can read this one at headfonics.com or this one at anythingbutipod.com.

Cute.

Benjamin had his first try at skating that wasn’t on the ice. He loved the inline skates. It was fun to watch him. Christopher also had his first time skating off the ice. He had skated once before with the whole family at Onyx in Rochester.

4 years of your love and your blessings!! I love you.

I installed iOS 5 on my iPhone 4 about a week earlier than the Oct. 12th release date. Loved it. Used the new album creation (like tagging really) to make a bunch of “albums” that made it easy. I digress. Anyway, I picked up my 4S on Friday. I took one last backup of my iPhone 4 at 835am EST on Friday.

I restored the 4S from the backup taken at 835am.

Later in the day, I noticed my Camera Roll was empty (well, it had 4 photos I took with the new phone to test the camera’s optics). NOTE: I DO NOT have iTunes set to sync my photos on the phone with anything on my computer. I just grab photos from my iPhone from time to time with either Windows’ native importer (into Live Photo Gallery) or Picasa or even Lightroom.

I tried to restore my phone again from the iPhone 4 backup, but it didn’t exist. I thought I’d try to make a backup of my 4S, just to see if it would end up showing all backups. iTunes only showed my iPhone 4S’ backup.

I started looking through my phone and noticed that its last iCloud backup was about 1.8GB in size. When I showed its details, I noticed that it had 1.5GB of photos. Crazy!!?!?!?!? I did a little more digging and found out where iTunes stores its backup files (for Windows Vista/7) here: C:\Users\_______\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync. There were 8400 files here, none with an extension.

I copied all of those files to a new folder and appended .jpg to their filenames. What this did was show me which of these were photos. Take note: There will be JPG files here from your phone’s app and browser cache, but you can have Windows (or a 3rd party app like Picasa) display the photos sorted by their dimension. This way, you can see the photos you took with the phone’s camera which are something like 2592x1936 (taken on an iPhone 4) in resolution. Icons from apps and the web will be smaller, like 320x240, and similarly small in resolution.

The files will look like this. The highlighted file, when copied to a new folder and adding the .jpg at the end, does in fact show up as a photo!

So, at this point, my photos have been saved, but they are not back on my camera, not in their own folder/album, and not in my camera roll, where I really want them to be.

In my digging, I also found iPhone Backup Extractor. This is a clever piece of software that goes into your iOS device’s backup on your computer and lets you extract out specific items, like photos, for example. I AM NOT ENDORSING THIS. I only tried the unregistered version, which would only pull out 2 items per extract. Since I was able to manually get to my photos, I ended up not buying this app. It does look VERY useful and helpful though. Something to consider having in my IT toolbox (yep, I’m that guy…the one who helps their family and friends).

So, I was looking at some of the new features of iOS 5 the other day, and came across the reader mode of Safari on my phone (the iPhone 4S). It takes all the crap out of the site you’re reading and gives you just the content. So far, it’s worked 100% of the time for me (2 for 2). I decided to give it a try on the PC version of Safari, reading an review of iOS 5 from Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng.

This is how reader mode looks:

That is much easier to deal with than this:

I took Benjamin to the ALCS tonight. It was awesome. We both got to experience a game at this level of the playoffs for the first time. We went with Matt and Louis and had a really good time. We saw homer after homer and left the game yearning for the Tigers to go to Texas and beat the Rangers in their own park!!

So, I installed iOS 5 yesterday. Very easy to do. Remember, you need iTunes 10.5 Beta 7 or higher to do this. Restored everything from my backup as I hoped.

I love the new notification system, where it drops a small title bar down from the top of the screen. I also like how it shows notifications you’ve missed on your lock screen, a cue taken from what jailbreakers have had with intelliscreen and LockInfo for a few years now.

You can finally create your own albums, which is essentially like tagging your photos, much like how you label messages if you use GMail. This can prove to be useful, especially if you have 100s to 1000s of photos in your Camera Roll.

I haven’t had a chance to use iMessage, as I don’t have anyone’s cell # with iOS 5 already installed. Also, not sure how the iCloud is working out yet. I haven’t enabled it to sync photos, but it is syncing contacts, calendar, reminders, and bookmarks. You get 5GB of storage to use with up to 10 devices. 5GB can get eaten up quickly, so they sell 10GB, 20GB, and 50GB yearly plans, for storage.

I really liked how it gave me the ability to install apps I had purchased already but weren’t installed on the phone. That, my dear, is excellent.

I like how you can select a word and choose Define, and it’ll bring up a dictionary entry for the word.

I haven’t tried Wi-Fi sync, but am looking forward to that. It supposedly will sync with iTunes on my computer when the phone is plugged in to power and connected to Wi-Fi. Update: Doing it now. Hang on to your hats, kids! I pushed Sync Now. It was syncing, so I thought. Nothing happened. I can press Sync Now again,and, it says that my last sync was yesterday at 6:35PM.

The first time I used an Apple computer was playing some tank game at my dad’s cousin’s house in Indiana. Was an Apple IIe I believe.

And my first work on a Mac was for the Michigan Tech Lode, their weekly paper. Was a PowerMac and used QuarkXpress. Loved it.

I’m speechless. Steve Jobs, a modern pioneer, dead at 56 years old. His innovations and fervor for progress in technology will be missed and reflected upon and probably never copied. RIP Steve Jobs!

How crazy. When Christopher was getting himself dressed this morning, he asked me what we did “before this day”. It’s crazy because I just posted about his “after this day” phrase!!

I just wanted to catalog this phrase. Christopher refers to “tomorrow” as “after this day”. I wanted to make sure I remembered this in the future, and that I could remind him of it when he’s older.

I’m a computer guy. I love computers and what we can do with them. I love the internet and what we can do with it. What I love MORE is what computers AND the internet allows us to do…and share…and dream…and share…and plot…and share. You get the idea.

This Google Chrome commercial is a great example of this idea.