I hate it when I see s price for something I’ve decided I’m going to buy and then when I get to the store, it’s not the same price. This was the case last night as my wife and I arrived at our local Best Buy store to purchase an iPod touch for her. But we found a way to save the money and get her iPod touch without any arguments, threats, hassles, or even coupons. Right after paying, I told her I really should share this with my readers in hopes that some of you can save a few bucks.
Buying Online Is Cheaper
My wife had poked around looking at prices and found that Best Buy had a decent price ($354.99) on the 64GB iPod Touch (3rd Generation) she wanted. She called me up and we agreed to head over there before dinner. After work, I picked her up and we went to the Best Buy to find that they had her iPod, but in the store, it was the same price as at the Apple store and other retailers. At $399.99, it was $45 more than we expected. While that’s not going to break the bank, I’m not eager to throw away $45. So I pulled out my iPhone, loaded up the Best Buy web site, and found the same product in the online store for the price she saw earlier in the day. Then I noticed the “Online only price” in red letters near the price. Although I found a way around that at that moment, it wasn’t until today that I noticed that the product listing on the FULL version of the site did not have this “online only price” notice like the mobile version of the site, which seems a little tricky to me, but is likely just a mistake.
(Click either image below to see the full size)
Full Site
Mobile Site
How We Saved Money
Not one to just give up, I asked the employee working the MP3 player section if we could just buy online and then use the in-store pick up option. As I was showing him the price online on my iPhone, he pointed out the “online only” notice and said that he was pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to but we could check with customer service. Of course, we checked with customer service and they said we could. At my request, she was nice enough to check inventory and let us know there were plenty in the store to buy, so we bought one using my iPhone. There’s a 45 minute wait for the order to be completed and brought to the pickup area, so we went to dinner and came back to complete a purchase, having saved the money we had hoped to save.
Knowing what we now know, we would have placed the order from a computer at home just because it’s faster and easier to fill out all the information, but otherwise, it was a pretty painless experience and we never even had to try and convince anyone we should get the online price or have any uncomfortable discussions about why the price is different. And really, I understand the reasoning but was pleased to find a way to have my cake and eat it, too.
What’s The Lesson Here?
Although this is specific to our scenario at Best Buy with this product, the lesson to be learned extends to any consumer activity and could be applied to car purchases easily. Don’t be afraid to look for ways to get the price you want. There’s no reason to not look at your purchase from every angle, compare prices, and ask questions. You never know when it’ll save you a few bucks.
I love to travel… I don’t get to head out of town often, but when I do, I need my technology. Being away from my computer for more than a few hours gets me a little twitchy, so road trips have traditionally been hard to deal with. With the iPhone and the almost unmanageable list of applications to choose from, things have gotten much better. I just got back from a road trip from Phoenix, AZ to Long Beach, CA, where Michelle and I stayed on the Queen Mary for an extended party, and my iPhone helped a lot when it came to relaxing and getting things done. Here’s a list of ten must-have iPhone applications for your road trip.
Google Maps
One of the original built-in applications in the iPhone’s OS is the Google Maps app. With it, you can quickly search for your destination and map your route to get there. With your trip all mapped out, you can relax and just check in once in a while for any freeway changes or other details. Of course I’m still waiting for Google to give us turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone for free (yes, I AM that spoiled by Google), but there’s a few (not free) apps out there to try as well. I use Google because it’s incredibly simple and I can jump right to street view to see what the building I’m looking for looks like.
Pandora
My favorite source for streaming music on the web is also my favorite source on my iPhone. What I didn’t know was how useful it could really be on a road trip. I intended to make a note of where in the desert it stopped working, but it just kept working the whole time. Other than a couple times cutting out for about 30 seconds, Pandora streamed brilliantly over AT&T’s 3G network the entire drive. Now if AT&T could just get my phone to reliably make phone calls where I need it to…
Email
Another standard app on most smart phones is an email application and the iPhone has a pretty complete email program and it handles multiple accounts. The thing that I used to hate is coming back home to find thousands of emails to go through. This weekend, I was able to keep up with my two important email accounts and respond to people in a timely manner while removing all the spam from my server to only sync valuable emails when I get home.
TweetDeck
While I tried to enjoy my vacation more than Twitter, I still have thoughts and photos I want to share while out of town. Vacations also offer lots of fun things to tweet about. I’ve tried a few of the top Twitter iPhone apps, but this one is my favorite. Just waiting in line for tickets to the aquarium, I was able to check for new tweets, mentions, and DMs and reply to a couple in just a couple minutes. Then I globally marked the rest as “read”. Easy.
Weather
It’s always important to know the weather where you’re going, and if you’re on a long road trip, this can be tricky. When we drove to Detroit and back last summer, we passed through several states and the weather app was very useful to plan out our wardrobe as well as touristy events.
Safari
Despite the completely unexplainable fact that I still can’t view flash in a web site in Safari on my iPhone, it’s still a great browser. It’s pretty fast and renders very nicely. Best of all, it’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to a real web browsing experience on a phone (except sites with flash). Wireless access in many hotels will run you about ten bucks a day and in the Queen Mary, it didn’t matter because I got almost no wifi signal in my room. Browsing the web over 3G in my room was a huge convenience on many occasions.
Gazette
I read a lot of blogs. I try to stay on top of industry news and events and still read blogs of colleagues and influential bloggers. I could lock down an hour in my room to do this on the laptop, but then I wouldn’t be vacationing, would I? Instead, I prefer to skim my preferred feeds in the frequent spare moments when I’m waiting for Michelle to get ready, the elevator is taking forever, or, dare I say it… the bathroom. Catching up in these otherwise wasted spare minutes leaves that hour free for vacationing.
Camera
I have a digital camera and it takes better pictures than my iPhone, but it also runs on AA batteries, is inconvenient to tote around, and lacks the luxury of instant sharing. With the iPhone’s camera, I can snap off a shot any time and I can take thousands before I run out of space. There’s tons of ways to share my photos, from the Facebook or MySpace apps to Twitter apps to Flickr apps like the one mentioned below. Additionally, with the 3G S, I was able to shoot video, which I found myself doing a lot more on this trip.
FlickIt
One of the apps I use the most, vacationing or not, is FlickIt. It just uploads your photos right to your Flickr account. You can add detailed information and tags to each photo, but I usually just do that later from a PC. The only thing missing is the ability to upload videos to my Flickr account. Then it would be perfect.
WiFiTrak
WiFi is almost always a better option than 3G in terms of speed, but when you travel, you often have to wait until you’re at the hotel or near a hot spot and even then, it will usually cost enough to make you grimace a bit. One way around this is to leech off someone else’s WiFi. Just fire up this app and find a suitable (and open) connection and use it. As seen here, you won’t always find an open router, but when one is nearby it helps to have a fast way of knowing and connecting to it.
Bonus : RDP
What if that piece of information, email, phone number, etc is only available to you from your home or office computer? This happened to me over the weekend. I can’t think of a better test case. Servers were about to be moved and I needed quick access to some IP addresses that were in a list only on my computer at the office. I was on the beach with no other electronics than my phone, but I opened the RDP app and connected to my computer at the office, got the information I needed, and went back to enjoying the beach. The alternative would have been to catch a cab, get back to the hotel, fire up the laptop and pay for the WiFi access. I have only needed this app twice and it could use a little bit of tweaking, but both times it was a life saver.
Like probably 10 million others, I updated my iPhone today to the new 3.0 software. The download and process was pretty fast, but getting my phone back to life still hasn’t happened yet.
The symptoms
- Your iPhone displays “slide for emergency” message and only allows emergency phone calls.
- Your phone no longer drops down for options in iTunes
- You see the following error when you connect the phone:
The cause
It would appear that the iTunes store is just overloaded. I’m only speculating here, but I imagine the connection to the iTunes store is to validate and update any apps you’ve purchased and downloaded. If iTunes needs to re-download any apps for any reason, you can imagine the rush on the iTunes servers with everyone upgrading all at once. This looks like something Apple may have overlooked.
The solution
If this is, in fact, an issue of Apples iTunes store servers simply being overloaded, the solution will be to just wait. Unfortunately, those of us with now “bricked” iPhones are left without service while we wait for Apple to fix the problem or for the swarm of requests to Apple’s servers to die down. Either way, it feels like incredibly bad planning on Apple’s part. To get it to come back to life, just repeat the following process until it works:
- dismiss the error message
- eject (See the second update below first)
- unplug
- plug back in
The most frustrating part is that I can’t use the phone at all now. I’d be ok with not getting to some of my apps for a while, but this is just crippling.
UPDATE: After following the above process a few more times, it came back to life quickly. If your iPhone still doesn’t work, just keep trying the above and it should be back in no time.
UPDATE 2: While linking back to this post, Mashable pointed out that there’s another way to force iTunes to try again and again. Just click the iTunes Store and then click the phone again. My process worked for me, but Mashable points out that it comes with the risk of data loss. I partly assumed that everyone does a backup first. In any case, keep that in mind.
