Yesterdays announcement from Telecom offering a very nice sounding reason to owners of iPhone 3G/3GS’s (or is that 3jesuses)  sure does sound good but is it as great of an offering as they say? At $1149 for an unsubsidized iPhone, I can’t imagine there being more than a few hundred people this whole thing is applicable to. I am part of those handful of people.

I have been a customer of Vodafone as long as I’ve had a cell phone. Suffice to say for most of that I’ve felt shafted but know as well as anyone that switching got you fundamentally the same plan at the same price with a different number.

I currently spend $90+ on my Talk 120 plan – far from good value but not really worth me jumping on a specific iPhone plan. Below I’ve tried to make a comparison of the similar plans on Vodafone and Telecom. This isn’t too scientific and feel free to point out any errors.

New Telecom Plans Compared to Vodafone

So there you have it – tie yourself to Telecom and get 25% off your plan over the course of the 2 year contract. Of course will the pricing on plans change much over the next 24 months? I would hope so but we all know how it works in NZ.

One thing we should all demanding – carry over minutes. They market these plans as having ‘free/included minutes’ but in reality when you pay $60 for 120mins (as I do now) you’re really paying $0.50c a minute for calls with a gaurantee of paying for at least 120 of them – which makes one wonder – if one pays for these minutes at that rate you should be allowed you to carry over the minutes for the next month – but not in NZ, if you don’t use your minutes they disappear into the either and you still pay for them.

Will I switch? It depends. The question will Vodafone try and keep me?

(FYI – I retook the screen shots so ignore the VodaNZ tag and dates on the iphone screen shots).

I think swine flu has gotten a bad rap.
I for one would like to thank it for scaring the hell out of the Japanese and leaving Air New Zealand with a bunch of empty planes with a schedule to keep. So when the $700rtn flights to Tokyo ex Auckland turned up on grabaseat I couldn’t help but take advantage of them (recession be damned). With less than a week from booking to flying out I had little to no prep time to learn some more language or figure the lay of the land. I did find on my travels that my iPhone 3G was a great thing to take on the road so here are my thoughts on the apps I found either useful or useless. Enjoy.

Shibuya Japan bia the iPhone

To start I wasn’t sure if Japan would even accept GSM based phones, it has always been known as a land of futuristic but very much proprietary phones. The good news is as long as its a 3G (2100mhz) mobile you should be good to go. There are 2 provider options for roaming, either DoCoMo or Softbank, my phone defaulted to Softbank on arrival but a bit of researched showed DoCoMo’s prices to be (marginally) better. For a full idea on costs on roaming Vodafone has every countries rates listed here.

Surprisingly Tokyo seemed to have little wifi, free or otherwise. I would randomly check my phone for any networks and find no AP’s near me. Starbucks yes, but even in the middle of Shinjuku besides one of the busiest train stations in the world – nothing.
This is quite surprising for the country with the fastest internet connections around you would assume that it would be saturated with wifi but it just wasn’t the case. I assume as everyone has cabled internet or data on their phones so wifi just hasn’t become as ubiquitous as it is in other countries.
Most hotels (including ours) offer free internet in all rooms and with an addition of the underrated but incredibly useful Airport Express we had a full 802.11n network ‘in room’.

Currency for the iPhoneBy far the most useful program when traveling was Apples own in built app, Mail. Sounds strange but by emailing yourself import info, pdfs & jpg maps one could have on hand a good amount of the internet offline. Each morning before leaving the hotel I would email anything that maybe useful to have on the day – whether it be the ‘How to plan your day at Disney Sea‘ from themeparkinsider.com or where the best tech shops in Akihabara are. Find a web page, save as pdf, email to self. It was truly a useful thing to have.

Outside of Mail, the single most useful application I found was the free Currency (itunes link) currency converter app. Japanese Yen is one of the more confusing currencies to work out in your head (I think it was something like remove 2 zero’s and times by 0.6) and having this on hand, even as a rough guide really helped either not spending a fortune on a bottle of water. Each morning I would open the app, which in turn would update to current exchange rates.

I also installed OffMaps, a Google Maps replacement that allows caching of maps from the open mapping database and store them locally on the phone. It sounds good, with an active internet connection all you need to do it go to the city you want to save and then select an area to download. Lonely Planet Japanese Phrase BookThat all worked as planned but once untethered from the internerd everytime I would open the program and use the GPS button it would ping me back to Auckland and make it a mission to get back to Tokyo and even harder to find out where the hell I actually was. Add to that the fact the maps were almost information-less, no landmarks or street names. I imagine as the mapping is open this should improve and the applications current user interface bugs get fixed this app could be a real god send.

Other programs I installed and had varying amounts of success with were  Tokyo Subway 2009 and the Lonely Planets Japanese Phrasebook. I think the subway app explains itself and was always useful to find which line runs where and where a suburb was in relation to where we were.

The $13.99 Lonely Planet app contains 600 common Japanese phrases. Each phrase displays the English pronunciation, Kanji characters and when clicked pronounce the sentence out the speaker or headphones.
I did find the few times I did try and use the app the sentences I needed was slightly different to what I really required or missing completely. Lonely Planet also do a Tokyo specific guide which looks useful but it did get to a point where I didn’t want to spend more on apps for than the holiday itself.
In the end I found my Girlfriends copy of The Original “Point and Speak” Phrasebook prooved to be extremely useful as it contained images, pronunciation and Kanji lettering of pretty much every thing you could ever need to ask someone or solve any problem you may run into. This book will hopefully be ‘ported’ to the iPhone but for now the analogue option wins out. If you are going to Japan – you need this book.

On trips to other locales I imagine a GPS navigation app would prove to be quite useful. Recently I’ve been playing with the first app to be available to the NZ market – I plan on posting on this soon.

I used to be a big Outlook user, finding it the only PIM client that kept my life even slightly sorted. I was so tied to Outlook that when I first brought my Intel based Mac, I quickly installed the beta release of Boot Camp, XP and got Outlook going. For the first couple of months of owning a Mac, I ran Windows almost exclusively.
Outlooks IMAP support has always been my single biggest peev. That, and its continued use of a single PST file for all data storage. There a lot of good reasons to not use a single file db, mainly if it corrupts you could loose ALL your previous history from emails to contacts. I have seen more than one person just about cry when they loose all their digital lives thanks to a Windows reinstall and not seeing their well hidden PST file deep in the documents & settings folders.

Of course Outlook being a Microsoft program, export options are nonexistent, unless you wanted to move to, say, Outlook. If so then no worries.
There are commercial applications that can take care of this whole process but I like to do things the free, slightly harder way – so for you all here is a compilation of various steps to take a large PST file to a complete export to iCal, Address Book and Mail.app (or other standard supporting applications on other platforms).
These steps are for Windows XP and Outlook 2007, but should be the same or very similar on Vista.

Getting your email to Mail.app.
This is originally from Schwie’s Pad’s blog post, refined by myself.

  • First you’ll need a copy of Outlook Express installed on your XP machine. In our case we’re going to use it as a conversion tool and not the just the shittiest email client ever. I would recommend a virgin setup of Outlook Express.
  • Open Outlook Express, it should detect your other Outlook profile and ask if you want to import the profile. If it doesn’t detect Outlook, you can import your mail manually. Under the File menu, choose Import, Messages. Choose Microsoft Outlook.
  • Choose the default profile and then choose selected folders and choose any folders that have email in them. You can use CTRL to select multiple folders. You do not need to choose contacts or calendars, that is done via other workarounds below.
    Import Outlook Profile to Express
  • It should spend sometime slurping through your emails and bringing them into Outlook Express.
  • Once they are all imported, we now need to access the Outlook Express .dbx email files, these are stored in your Documents & Setting folder on your system drive (probably C:\). Best plan is to enable hidden files (via Tools menu, properties) and then go through the folders from C:\ – in my case it was – C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{D54D6AEB-503D-49E3-BD59-11545746A4D2}\Microsoft\Outlook Express
    The two italicized names can be different but you should be able to get there.
  • Now you’ll need a little command line app by Ulrich Krebs called DbxConv.exe. It’s freeware and available here. Extract the zip into you Outlook Express folder you just found. This program will convert your email folders from MS’s dbx format to the standard mbox format.
  • Open command line via the Start Menu and Run command – from here type CMD.
  • Now for the tricky bit, as command line was designed from the days of 8.3 file names theres no real easy way to get your way to a folder buried deep in windows file system – I have discovered though if you type “cd ” and then drag the folder icon in the address bar of explorer to the line in command line, it will insert the full folder address in to the  command. Press enter and you should be in the same folder as the files you need to convert.Insert address in to dos command promptResulting command
  • Now in command prompt type this command – dbxconv -mbx *.dbx
  • Depending on the size of your original pst file it could take a while (up to 20mins). You will see few failed items that don’t convert (such as Contacts, calendars, Folders and Offline), you will not need these.
    Congratulations – your email is now in a format all reasonable email clients should use – mbox. From here you aren’t just limited to Mail.app, other clients support mbox including (ironically) Microsofts own version of Outlook for the Mac, Entourage and the opensource Thunderbird.

Getting your mail into Mail.app

  • From here you’ll want to get your newly created mbx files from windows to your OS-X install. I would recommend taking only the mbox files of previous email folders you want – Inbox.mbx and Sent.mbx being the obvious choices.
  • Now with them on your Mac, open Mail.app. If this is your first time opening Mail.app, setup your email accounts as you need. Once you’re all done there open Import Mailboxes from the File menu.
  • Choose mbox files and navigate to the folder with your converted mbox emails in them. You can select miltiple mbox files which will be imported as separate folders into Mail.app.
  • A progress bar later and you should find an IMPORTED folder, and you can now move them as you need to.

Exporting your contacts from Outlook to Address Book
Originally from macosxhints.
As you may have figured out by now, Microsoft makes it as difficult as possible to escape their Office/Exchange ecosystem, either by not including export options or making it as much a convoluted process as they can. For this we will make the files we need by faking an email with all your contacts as attachments – smart.
You can export individual contacts to a vcf file by selecting the contact and choosing Save As under the file menu. This is great for a couple of contacts but not those of us with 1000 odd contacts –

  • Switch to contacts view in Outlook, Select All contacts (or just the contacts you want to take with you) and the under the Actions menu, Send Full Contacts and then In Internet Format (*.vcf).
    Send Outlook Contacts as vcf files.
  • Outlook should then make a new email with attachments of all you contacts as usable VCF files. You could email that to yourself but if you have quite a few contacts, it’s best to copy the files out the unsent email and into a folder to move manually. Click on one of the vcf file icons in the attachment panes and select all. Drag its icon to an folder in an explorer window.
  • From here you need to get the folder of vcf files to you mac, open Address Book and drag all the vcf’s on to the Address Book window.

Getting your calendar
This is actually the easiest part of the process.

  • Switch to calendar view in Outlook and select the calendar you want to export.
  • Under the File menu, choose Save As. ical format should be the default.
  • Choose more options and set the date range as Whole Calendar, detail on Full, leave the advanced options unticked.Save as ical format in Outlook dialogue
  • Save.
  • Again, get the resulting files on to your mac, and then open iCal.
  • Choose File, Import and choose Import and iCal file
  • You’ll be asked if you want to merge with a previous calendar or make a new one.
  • Rinse & repeat if you have more calendars.

Things that don’t export/import.
Tasks! although these can be imported as an email folder via the Outlook Express method although tasks will be turned into emails as far as Mail.app is concerned.