Although this is a tech blog and I normally write about tech stuff, I’m also an affiliate and recently came across something I felt worthwhile to take part in. Affiliate.com, known for their stylish branded shirts they give away at the affiliate conferences, is holding a contest. They gave away some pretty cool shirts this year (just like last year), and they asked bloggers to write a creative post about the shirt for a chance at some money. They’re giving $1,000 to the winning blogger, but more importantly, they are going to donate another $1,000 to the Red Cross for Haiti in the winning blogger’s name. Win or lose, I’m pretty happy to see the donation that will take place, but I wanted to give it a shot, too. Affiliate.com mailed me out a t-shirt and I decided to run with the poker theme, playing against, well, myself.
As you can see above, I was doing pretty well with four Aces. Those other Joe Techs never knew what hit ‘em. In all seriousness, I’m definitely wearing this shirt to my next poker game.
About The Affiliate.com Shirt
The shirt they sent out this year is really comfortable (100% cotton), but what stands out is the design. I have a lot of conference and affiliate company shirts and I like most of them a lot, but this one is my new favorite. The edges are frayed slightly for that popular worn-in look. The front design looks like a King of Diamonds and the back is branded, but in a very tasteful way. I will be wearing this shirt out a lot. For a better view, take a look at my little fashion shoot below (and feel free to poke fun at me in the comments).
I can’t say enough how awesome it is that they’re donating the money for Haiti and even if I don’t win, I’ve gotten a really nice t-shirt out of the experience. However, I’d also love to win. If you think I should win the contest let me know in the comments by telling me what you think I should do with the $1,000 prize.
When I was told a Pantech Impact was on its way to me for a review, I admit I didn’t have my hopes too high. Compared to their own Matrix, the Impact looked like a lesser phone and if there’s one thing this phone has reminded me of, it’s that looks can be deceiving.
To be fair, the Impact isn’t ugly, but when closed and off, it doesn’t really flaunt all it has to offer, either.
What the Impact Has to Offer
As I mentioned above, this phone didn’t stand right out of the pack to me. When I got the phone, I changed my opinion. It’s still not the sexiest phone I’ve reviewed, but it definitely has plenty of geek appeal, which became apparent once I turned it on. While off, the phone is dark and hides its front-facing external key pad. Once activated, however, the keys are all lit up, making the phone look like something a character in the movie Tron might have used. The whole face if the Impact is solid and smooth, so you wouldn’t know they keys are even there when they’re not lit up.
Conversely, when opened up, the internal keyboard is easily visible and physically well-defined. A good physical keyboard on a phone should always be easy to type on and that means feeling your way around. The Impact does a pretty good job of this with its raised keys and raised portions of the F and J keys to help you find your way around in the dark.
Besides the Tron-like look, the front of the phone makes the Impact easy to navigate without ever opening it up. The navigation is slightly hindered by only showing two lines of menu items at a time, but still makes answering and making phone calls, sending texts, etc a one-handed possibility.
The Lithium-Ion battery offers 3-5 hours of talk time with up to a couple weeks of stand-by. Opened up, the Impact provides a colorful 2.6″ 400×240 display and a system that is pretty easy to navigate once you get the feel for it. The outside of the phone contains a microSD slot for up to 32GB of storage, volume and Hold buttons, and the ear/mic/charging jack. This phone also offers just about everything you might expect from your typical smart phone, including mobile access to email, navigation, etc.
What’s Lacking
After the initial shock of what it offers, I took a step back to look for what the Impact was missing. While 2.0 megapixel camera is nice, I see a lot of phones shipping with 3.0 or more megapixels, so I thought Pantech could have squeezed at least that into this phone. Additionally, I love to use my choice of headphones with a cell phone and the Impact doesn’t provide this option. Beyond these two drawbacks, I didn’t see much missing with the Impact.
Conclusions
The Impact isn’t the prettiest phone I’ve seen at first glance, but a single touch brings it to life with a redeeming blue glow and opened up, it looks and acts even more like a smart phone. Although it wouldn’t be my personal first choice for a smart phone, Pantech packed a lot of functionality into a small package for a fair price (after 2 year agreement and rebate).
This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of SellMyMobile.com. All opinions are 100% mine.
This weekend, I was asked to review a file search engine called General Search. It’s a site where you can search through a few of the biggest file sharing web sites on the Internet.
How Does It Work
It’s pretty much just what it looks like. You head to the site and initiate a search for whatever files you’re looking for. If you need a Windows XP driver for a Sony DSCP110 camera, just type in the camera model and “driver” and hit search. The site brings back results and shows some helpful information such as a short description, file name, size, and hosting site. When you click on the link, you’re taken to the site to download the file. Bandwidth costs money, so most hosts have a (sometimes slower) free version or you can pay for membership to the host site for faster downloading.
General Search lets you pick which file host to search through if you want to narrow it down and if you register for one of their free accounts it will keep track of your past downloads so you don’t have to search again if you lose a file.
Why Would I Use This?
To answer this question, you should first ask why you would need to look through the file hosting sites this site searches. The biggest reason is to find obscure or otherwise hard to find files. A great example is if you wanted to track down an older driver that worked better for you but the manufacturer’s web site only has the latest driver. In such a case one of those file hosting sites might have the older driver and this file sharing search site might help you track down that file. So it’s good to have a site like General Search bookmarked for circumstances like these.
Additionally, it’s sometimes fun to take a look at the top or recent searches and see what people are looking for. You never know if you’ll discover some new song or funny video.
Content Quality
To be quite honest, I’m not as familiar with Uploading.com, but RapidShare seems to attract a lot of porn and pirated files. It seems like they do a pretty good job of removing anything copyrighted or illegal, but don’t be surprised if you see some adult themes in the recent and top searches. I suppose this could be a good thing if you’re looking for that stuff. If not, just type in what you’re looking for and the other spectrum of content shouldn’t get in the way of your search too much.
One of the things that I saw that I was unhappy with was a search result directing me to a site other than one of the actual file sharing sites. This alternate site pretends to try and connect to get your file and then tells you that this particular file needs you to create an account. It’s not illegal and I don’t know if it even tries to get money from you, but it’s a little sneaky and doesn’t seem very nice. I always ignore those and head back to the search results. I don’t know if I’m being directed to that site by General Search or by the file host.
Conclusions
Although I didn’t like the fake download registration option I came across, General Search, itself was fast and yielded some good file results. As a test, I was able to find and download a Samsung camera driver pretty quickly, which beats looking through forums for a while. I’ve bookmarked this site for my future file needs.
A couple weeks ago, Robert Scoble tweeted out a link to an interview with a couple entrepreneurs who did something I haven’t seen others perfect. They came up with a way to let anyone create an iPhone application without developer knowledge or a lot of cash. Of course, I was thrilled about the idea and a little apprehensive about the results, but I just had to try it out.
Their company, Genwi, recently launched iSites.us, a site that enables people to easily create an application for the iPhone and Android platforms with little effort, and little cash outlay. The whole process involves $25 (or $99 – see below), some image preparation, and about 10 to 15 minutes of your day. This is followed by a week or two of waiting, depending on demand.
Preparation and Planning
iSites offers a couple different pricing options. The more expensive option gives you full control over advertising, allowing you to have your own ads embedded in your app or none at all. The cheaper option (the one I chose) is $25 and includes their own ads in your application. The ads really aren’t in the way, so for me, this was not a problem. If you want your own ads, you’ll need to make sure you have an account with the ad network you choose, but either way, give it a little thought and determine what will work best for you and your budget.
Another thing you need to worry about is your brand management. Before starting, think about your application’s title and description as well as keywords. Additionally, there are a few images you have to have ahead of time. You need an icon, an iTunes display image, a banner and a splash screen image (see the iSites Learn More page to get a peek of the image size and file type requirements. It’s best to have these images all ready to go to streamline the creation process.
Finally, you should grab the category feeds for your blog or site so you can have categories in place when the app launches. The more frequent your content, the more categories you may want to have set up.
Creation and Approval
The creation process and completed application is better seen than described, so I’ve included a video showing the process. For the most part, it’s about 10 minutes of filling out web forms and uploading some images. After that, it’s just a game of waiting for an email announcing the completion of your application.
There may be the rare case in which your application is not approved. In this case, you’ll need to revise text, images, title, etc until it’s approved. When the whole process has been completed, you can just search for your app and download it.
Completed Application
Once completed, the application doesn’t have a lot of features, but it does have some of the important ones. When you start up the application, the first thing you see is the splash screen. I saw at least one other company creating iPhone apps while inserting their own brand here, so I really liked that iSites helps you insert your own branded spash screen here. The app then loads up to the Home screen which shows a listing of your recent posts with thumbnails where available. Each post can be selected to view and read. While reading a post, you can jump up or down a post, favorite it or share it via email, Facebook, or Twitter. The sharing options are a must for an application like this.
Over all, the application is really smooth and brings my blog to a whole new audience pretty seamlessly. Better still is the ability to manage it from the iSites web site control panel. From the control panel, I can change my images, description, etc. Additionally, I can add or change categories and other feeds. This really does feel like a pretty decent blend of control and simplicity.
Application Analytics
I love numbers. More than just any numbers, I love numbers that tell me people are reading what I write. Even before purchasing my app creation, I was a little excited about the prospect of seeing how many people downloaded my iJoeTech iPhone application. Once the app has hit the app store, you have analytics at your fingertips via the iSites web site control panel.
Amazingly, I had a nice bunch of downloads of my app before I even knew it was in the App Store. Pretty exciting. While it’s fun to watch, the numbers are important as a barometer for how your keywords and other criteria work to get someone to look at your app and then to download it.
What’s Missing?
I’m not sure if the analytics pages cover just the iPhone downloads or both iPhone and Android. I’d love to see analytics for both on the same graph. It would also be nice if the application had an option to open a post in Safari. Most of all, though, I’d love if there was some way for the application to hook into my WordPress and let the user submit a comment right from the app.
Conclusions
I’ve been wanting to create a JoeTech.com app for the iPhone for a while now and although I had seen other offerings, this one resonated with my mostly due to the ease of setup and the low cost. It truly is pretty amazing that I can give JoeTech.com readers a customized iPhone application so easily for only $25. I think every blog should have such an app and iSites.us is the place to get it done.
