{"id":319542,"date":"2010-02-14T11:33:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-14T16:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:feeds.phonedog.com:\/\/98e4082ab9f8504f37f6b1d64a0e399a"},"modified":"2010-02-14T11:33:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-14T16:33:00","slug":"article-adrianas-travel-diary-macworld-a-lost-iphone-mobile-me-and-accessories-galore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/319542","title":{"rendered":"ARTICLE: Adriana’s Travel Diary: Macworld, a lost iPhone, Mobile Me and accessories galore!"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, I flew to San Francisco from New England to attend the MacWorld event. My best friend, Susan, met me at the airport, so I knew this would be a fun trip no matter what. (C’mon, gadgets and girlfriends? It’s a she-geek’s dream…) “Sooz” picked up Chinese take-out on the way home, where she planned to crack open a bottle of wine for our food and gabfest, but somewhere between the restaurant and her front door, her iPhone 3GS went missing. We looked everywhere — inside her building, outside, back at the Chinese restaurant and on the street. I even checked my purse, as if it could’ve mystically materialized in my bag somehow. No luck. It was just gone. <\/p>\n

I’m not a Mobile Me subscriber, but Susan is. So she logged into the web interface, as the little journo fired off in my head, noting what the $99\/year service could and couldn’t do for her in this emergency. The end result was illuminating. The “Find My iPhone” feature narrowed down the neighborhood where the device was, but didn’t pinpoint it. Next, she activated a custom message (offering a reward and showing contact info). She also sent out an audio alert that would emanate from the phone, even if it was in silent\/vibrate mode. <\/p>\n

Here’s the catch with all that, though: The service might work perfectly, but it relies on the kindness of whatever stranger finds the phone. For us, this simply didn’t pan out. She ultimately had to face the fact that her iPhone wasn’t coming back. The final feature of MM was remote wipe, and she activated that and suspended service on her AT&T account. As we finally settled in for the night, take-out containers in front of us, we did actually manage to enjoy the rest of our evening. I even put my own phone away, as a show of solidarity for her loss, which felt a little weird, but good. And so we spent quality time bonding without the distraction of emails, IMs or Tweets. <\/p>\n

To be sure, losing her iPhone was an interesting way to start out the Macworld trip. And it wouldn’t be the last time it felt like something was missing this week.
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Macworld<\/strong>
As for the show — well, how many iPhone\/iPod Touch cases, earbuds and skins can a person look at? There were plenty of those, along with wares from a few app developers, and those comprised most of the phone-related stuff. Now, since I was there doing double duty for PhoneDog and lining up coverage and giveaways for Today’s iPhone, I did find it interesting and productive. As a consumer, it was also neat to see the other exhibitors, from backup solutions to wireless networking and other Mac computer-related products. So it wasn’t a bad experience at all. It was just… a little strange. <\/p>\n

Apple’s absence from the show was palpable. Okay, yes, this was my first Macworld, but according to people I spoke to, this year’s show was smaller and the vendors were less diverse. And since the biggest news from Cupertino — the iPad, of course — has yet to materialize in the market, a lot of exhibitors were left to show mere mock-ups of future iPad accessories. In other words, there were some companies whose main purpose in being there was to spotlight featured products that didn’t actually exist. (In some instances, all they could show were images on paper, not even dummy prototypes.) That felt kind of surreal to me. <\/p>\n

Of the products that actually did exist, the ones that stood out to me were:<\/p>\n