A long time ago I switched to Firefox mostly because of its extremly useful plug-in model (which also includes add-ons such as ieTab). I do use Internet Explorer (IE) from time to time since certain sites still are optimized (or only work) for/on IE.

Then came Google Chrome along and at a first brief encounter (installed on my Windows Server 2008 machine), I wasn’t impressed with the promised speed along with the fact that there were virtually no plugins out there to use.

A couple of months passed and I kept reading in blogs and other places about the amazing performance of this browser (e.g. test done by ExtremeTech), so I decided to give it a week on my Vista machine just in case in case…and surely I started seeing results. Web pages do load faster and I really find the omnibar very useful saving me both time and click as it tends to find what I am looking for 85% of time as the first result.

So even though I have to give up a few of my plugins (and thereby features) due to chrome being so new on the market and lacking proper plugins, I still find it worth it even if the speed gain is 2.3% (according to the tests). You may think above certain limit small gain in speed does not matter and it’s more of a marketing ploy. I disagree because performance hit even in small dosage is very noticeable and frustrating, so I take performance over feature richness if I have to.

I don’t have an iPhone but rather a Nokia E71 which for my needs is better than the iPhone (maybe I will write a comparison later).

Nevertheless, what I really dislike is that many carriers (e.g. AT&T) lock the phones they sell to their own network. I am paying for the phone and you are already making me commit for 2 years to use your services, so the only way I interpret your move to lock the phone beyond our agreement is that you are insecure of the quality of your services, hence you use this method to shackle me down to continue using your network. Of course there is more to this as carriers usually pay through the nose to get exclusive deals with (hot) phone manufacturers and this is one way for them to try and get back that money. Bottom line though, it is not very customer oriented.

Anyways, for all you iPhone fans who are not on AT&T but still want want to be able to use an iPhone, here is a method to ‘unlock’ your iPhone and still keep your warranty (which other methods such as jailbreaking can’t do)

Moogle.com offers an unlock adapter to achieve this for $29.99. I am sure there are other sites that offer this service and the way these work is that they don’t modify any part of the phone itself, neither by hardware nor by software. The only thing they do is they intercept the data traffic between the SIM card and the phone, and when the phone asks for sim card’s operator code it gets a “fake” code back (basically, the phone thinks it’s using ATT sim card although it is not). That check is done once upon phone boot, sim insertion and/or signal re-acquisition. The other parts of the phone do not care (so they display proper operator logo, connect to the right network etc.) and do not ask for the code again.
Then again, I am sure it is a matter of time before Apple & the carriers who have exclusive deals with Apple tighten up the model further through the software updates so this stops working.