Tyler Doherty’s Website

Wow! 8th grade already! It seem like just yesterday that I was starting 6th grade, knowing no one, and now, having an interconnected web of friends between the friends that went to my elementary school, and go to a different middle school then me, and all of my friends in my middle school. I’m friends with a lot of people, from a few of the most popular girls in school, to kids on the other end of the spectrum, and everything in between. I have learned a lot about everything. From learning physical science today, to learning how to ask a girl out. I came from a school that was extremely strict. I don’t think anyone officially asked anyone out in 5th grade, now you can watch down one hallway, and you can see at least 5 relationship beginning and ending. I have learned a lot. I came into the school in 6th grade wearing glasses, no hint of designer clothes, long socks as opposed to ankle socks. If you looked up “geek” or “nerd”, it would show a picture of me. When I heard a cuss word I flinched and almost told a teacher. I have changed quite abit in about 2 1/2 years. If you have known me for all three years, you will know. I now have a girlfriend and feel wanted, instead of a nobody and am not the biggest nerd in the world… well at least I don’t show it. I think that this year is going to be the most fun year of school yet! I mean, the way it has started has been great, and I am not going to let any boring Language Arts classes stop me from having fun. I love both my electives this year, first being Spanish, and the teacher is AMAZING, and second being Drama, with my most favoritest teacher ever (she taught my 6th grade geography class and she was amazing). So as you can see, I’m going to have an amazing year, with amazing friends, and (mostly) amazing teachers.

Tyler Home 8th grade, school

Well, I got the iPhone 3Gs on Thursday morning after a week and a half of waiting. FedEx said that it would come Tuesday before 10:30 AM EDT but the customs in China held it up for a very long time. Let’s just say it shipped Thursday with priority direct shipping and didn’t get to the USA until late Tuesday evening. But enough with the griping, onto the actual phone. I would of done an unboxing video and speedtest comparison between the 3Gs and the 2G but I figured that there are enough of those already on the Internet that I don’t need to post those. If you really want to see them just goto YouTube and search for “iPhone 3GS Unboxing” and “iPhone 3GS vs. iPhone 2G or 3G”.

When I got the phone I was really excited and I opened the shipping box without scissors or a knife out of pure excitment. Inside was the iPhone 3Gs box, which looks a lot alike to the original iPhone and 3G’s boxes. I ripped the plastic wrap right off the box in no time at all. On the top was the 3Gs, never touched by uncovered human hands, then the Getting Started booklet and warentee information which also contained the “SIM removal tool” which is not a paper clip but a specialized tool for taking out the SIM card. Under that were the headphones, charging cable, and wall adapter. I was so glad to get a new pair of headphones and charging cable because my old charging cable was on it’s last wire and my old headphones were dieing.

I plugged the new phone right into my computer and called my Step-dad up so I could activate it. He gained control of my computer via LogMeIn. I then copyed over all of my music, apps and videos that I wanted on the phone. If I didn’t say so before, I got a black 16Gb iPhone. I still have 14Gb of free space. Already I had noticed it running a lot faster than my old iPhone. When the phone was syncing, the backup was made I’m guessing about 75% faster, and when it was done, I started up a game of Marble Blast Mobile, a very graphics intensive game that used to take at least 30 seconds to load the game on my old phone and takes about five to load on my new one. When I chose a level to start, the game loaded in about 2 seconds on my new phone. Once the game loaded I noticed how responsive and high frames per second it had. On my old phone it used to have about 15 fps and on my new phone it is about 30 fps. That is a 2x upgrade. That is all thanks to the 600mhz processor and 256Mb of RAM it has. To put it in perspective, it has the same power as a 8 year old IBM ThinkPad A21p laptop. Wow.

When I played a very CPU intensive game called TapDefence (a tower defence game), when I had all of the spots filled with arrow towers, the game was still very responsive. The GPS is another great feature of the 3Gs and 3G that the original iPhone didn’t have. Paired with the compass, it made a perfect pair. The compass isn’t actually an compass, but a magnometer, a digital compass. In maps, it can show you what direction you are facing and in the compass app it can give you your direction in degrees in true north and magnetic north.

The camera is an upgraded feature that was in both the original iPhone and the 3G but the 3Gs’s is a 3.0 Mpx autofocus camera that records 640×480 video at 30 fps. It also geotags your photos and video so you can remember where you took them. Here are a few example photos:

A lot of people dislike AT&T for what they say is crappy service, but I think otherwise. I get 5 bars 3G at my house which is outside of the city limits, it is a suburb with a lot of trees, and the city isn’t really that decent of a size. Also I’ve never had a dropped call anywhere and they have the most advanced GSM network in the US. They aren’t based on the outdated CDMA network that Verizon and Sprint run on.

Over all I’d give the iPhone 3Gs, the most advanced smartphone, an eleven apples out of ten; 11/10.

Oh and I wrote this entire reveiw on the iPhone 3Gs.

Tyler Home, Tech 3gs, iPhone

I’m sorry that I haven’t posted much recently, but there really hasn’t been much to post about. Once I get my new iPhone, I’ll do a review and a speed test difference between that and the first-gen iPhone but other than that my life has been pretty boring this summer. I’ve gone to a few camps, and sen my dad once but other than that I’ve been at home doing a bit of personal server work (for any techies who are reading this I threw Windows XP Pro onto an Thinkpad A21p and put XAMPP and iTunes [for a DAAP server] and put every possible open source free CMS onto it). I also went through about a thousand different themes for my website and found a few that I liked. That took about 6 hours.

Another thing I did was design about a dozen roller-coasters in NoLimits only about 3 of which whose videos will be posted to youtube. Other than that I haven’t done much. I’m writing this post right now because I really have nothing better to do as I’m waiting for my new phone which is on the opposite side of the world right now in Shenzhen, China

Tyler Home, Tech