Something doesn't seem right...

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​Tomorrow's the big day, when the next iPhone (which I still say makes no sense to call iPhone 5, no matter how well it jives with the graphic above)​ is announced. 1PM tomorrow EST. I watch these liveblogs at The Verge and at Ars Technica. They're both excellent and rock solid through the massive traffic. 

I recently watched this hands-on by The Verge who got ahold of a purported mockup of the sixth gen iPhone. This hardware mockup is the sum total of all the rumors and supposed hardware leaks of the new device, finally all pieced together. If you haven't been following these leaks that have been showing up for the past few moths, give the video a watch since they go through all the suspected hardware changes. The generally agreed upon deltas between the iPhone 4S and the sixth generation device are:

• 16:9 aspect ratio screen that is tall enough to support an additional row of icons on the home screen
• ​Miniaturized dock connector
• Headphone jack moved to bottom of the device from the top​
• Two-tone metal back​
• LTE​
• Thinner

And notably absent: NFC. Gruber, Dalrymple, and Anandtech can't all be wrong. ​It's too bad, since I think getting NFC in iPhone would be game changing, especially with the new iOS 6 feature, Passbook. Womp.

I'm not sure what it was about this particular video that spurred the thought, but something about these leaks just doesn't seem to add up. It seems that every single piece of this thing has already leaked out, which has never happened before. What if this is a bogus leak by Apple? I'm not sure, but something doesn't seem right.

If this is indeed legitimate, some other feature has to be missing. I don't think this is enough of a redesign. ​There has to be some big hardware feature that didn't leak, and I feel like the leaks we've been seeing could not be this device at all. We'll have to wait and see. For a full roundup of the rumors, check out this great post. For the real deal, tune in at 1PM tomorrow.

​I'm still holding out hope they don't call this thing iPhone 5. Do right by me Apple. 

Stop Calling It iPhone 5

Even posts that end with:​

The world has apparently decided to dub it the iPhone 5 ahead of time, but honestly we'd be surprised and a little disappointed if Apple goes that way – after all, it'll be the sixth iPhone, not the fifth.

...call the thing iPhone 5 in the title. And it's not just The Verge, it's most of the tech press. They should know better, since it doesn't take much of a big expert to see why it will certainly not be called iPhone 5.​ Let's quickly look at all 5 existing iPhone names in order of when they were released.

First Generation: iPhone​

The first one, the one that kicked off a revolution in smartphones. No need for a suffix here.​

Second Generation: iPhone 3G​

Certainly not the third one - The 3G noted that it used 3G radios for faster data rates.​

Third Generation: iPhone 3GS​

The actual third one. An S was appended to 3G since it looked identical to its predecessor but was updated with faster internals. S was for Speed.​

Fourth Generation: iPhone 4​

Still a 3G phone but everything else was completely redesigned. Instead of calling it iPhone 3GSBFAHWCREE (3GS But Faster And Hey We Completely Redesigned​ Everything Else!), they opted to name it after the actual generation it was, the fourth.

Fifth Generation: iPhone 4S

This was the one that was widely speculated to be called iPhone 5, and got so much hype that the mainstream media freaked out when it was just a speedier iPhone 4 with a fancy camera. It's still the fifth generation iPhone though, just taking after the 3G to 3GS naming convention.​

Sixth Generation: iPhone 5 - Huh? Of course not.

Wait, what? No, you big dummy. They can really only go three ways here: 'iPhone 6' since it's the 6th generation one, 'the new iPhone' just like they did with the third generation iPad, or iPhone LTE since it will be the first iPhone to come equipped with LTE radios. I think 'iPhone 6' is extremely unlikely and that the last two names are equally probable. The naming of the third generation iPad may signal a shift to a suffix-less naming convention for iPhone, much like they've done with the many generations of iPod Touch and Apple TV.

​One could make an argument for iPhone LTE over the new iPhone because they'll still likely sell the iPhone 4S for $100, and that could confuse people. I would agree, if it weren't for that pesky iPad 2 sitting along side the new iPad on Apple's shelves. Personally, I think it would be confusing to the average consumer, but who knows. 

My money is on iPhone LTE, since i think wireless consumers have been trained to get all excited about LTE data by the carriers and it is a feature that many Android handsets have ​been rocking for quite a while now. I think it would be in Apple's best interest to show off the LTE capabilities front and center for in-store competition with Android and Windows Phone. 

So, please, PLEASE knock it off and don't call it iPhone 5 any more. You're better than that.​

Transition Complete, but Google Drive is Buggy as Hell

Google Drive finished uploading the 60ish GB of data to its servers and after verifying that all my stuff was there, cancelled and uninstalled Mozy from my computer. I felt it was important to show the super creepy images you're confronted with during each of these steps:

Yikes.

Anyway, back to Google Drive. Since it finished uploading, the application crashes every time I boot into Windows, after a few minutes of 'Scanning web...'.

I tried re-opening it, rebooting, etc and nothing worked. OK fine, I'll bite. Let's disconnect.

Agh, well they certainly don't mean I have to re-download all my files right? There's no way. THERE'S NO WAY.

After disconnecting, you need to sign in again and are forced to choose a new, empty Google Drive folder. I tried to outsmart it two different ways to have it use the old folder, hopefully bypassing the go-redownload-everything-like-a-chump issue:

• First I let it put a new Google Drive folder in its default location, then changed it to the old one. Nope, 'This is not your original Google Drive folder, please select the original folder.'
• Next, I closed out of the Google Drive and Dropbox applications, then renamed the original folder to a temporary name (had to kill two googlecrashhandler.exe's to allow manipulation of this folder, FYI). Then I re-opened the Google Drive application, made a fresh folder with the correct name in its desired location, then simply dumped all the old stuff in the new one. This seemed to work.

But no, it didn't. After gazing into the cloud for a while, it created a new folder structure within the folder mirroring the existing one, just with a (1) after each folder name. Now it's re-downloading everything into these folders, all 60GB of it. Presumably I'll be able to go into the web app and remove all the (1)'s later and it will update the folder structure. 

Terrifyingly, it has green "I'M SYNCED BRO" check marks on the folders with the lovely (1)'s that haven't synced, and blue "I'M SYNCING BRO" check marks on the original folders, which are already synced. It looks like it's going to make two copies of everything, which makes absolutely no sense. On the web, the folders appear without the (1) - there is only one copy of everything.

For now I've pulled my original data out and into a backup folder to make sure it doesn't screw anything up.  This just goes to show how immature this service is compared to Dropbox, which would never have this problem. They really need to work on their algorithms so they're not needlessly moving around GBs of data. Luckily I have over 150GB of bandwidth left on my Comcast cap for the month or I'd be in trouble.

I should have left Mozy on for another month of overlap, this thing is making me nervous...

Simplifying to Google Drive and Dropbox

In my last post I discussed transitioning from Mozy to Google Drive, and I am happy to report that the transition is complete (well, sort of, the bits are still on their way up to the cloud). Of course, it wasn't enough to just switch services, I had to do some other things as well. To summarize:

• Dumped Mozy's 125GB plan in favor of the 100GB Google Drive plan. Big savings of $5/month, or roughly 5% of my monthly Starbucks budget.
• To fit within the 100GB storage plan, I no longer back up iTunes media (78.5GB!) this way. Instead, I rely on the already established iCloud account with the $25/year iTunes Match service. All my content is already backed up to iCloud, why the heck was I doing it again? With iTunes Match, ALL music is backed up (think MP3's purchased from Bandcamp or Amazon), not just music purchased from the iTunes store. 
• Eliminated syncing to Microsoft's SkyDrive by moving all that stuff to Google Drive.
• Moved Dropbox folder within my Google Drive for access to those files on both services.

So how'd it go? 

The Good

Google Drive uses a very simple interface and is very Dropbox-like. You have a folder called 'Google Drive' and everything you put in it magically floats up to the cloud. It's that simple, just like Dropbox. I'm using this on my Windows 7 PC, and after installing the application and choosing where to put the Google Drive folder you're good to go. The setup was a breeze, as was selecting the storage plan. Purchases are carried out through Google Wallet. 

The Google Drive folder is annotated in Windows Explorer with a little sync icon when it's waiting to sync, and a check mark when it's synced. Pretty unobtrusive. This is similar to what Dropbox does, as you can see in the following screen capture of all my various sync folders. This was taken before I moved my Dropbox folder into Google Drive and got rid of SkyDrive.

[Google Drive sync folder as shown in Windows Explorer.]

The Bad

I have to say, Mozy does a better job of allowing you to control what gets synced, at the expense of some complexity. For example, I used to back up my iTunes library. In the Mozy screenshot below, I was able to un-check boxes next to folders I didn't want to back up (podcasts, super large files, and other things that I won't be put on suicide watch for losing). 

[Mozy's folder selection interface - Un-check what you don't want to back up.]

Google Drive does allow you to select which of the top level folders within your Google Drive folder are backed up, but you don't get to be choosy within them. 

[Google Drive preferences window]

Forced into a full backup of my iTunes folder made it dawn on me that iCloud is already doing this for me. I can see how this could be an issue in other cases, so I hope Google adds the ability to selectively back up throughout the folder hierarchy later.

Lastly, I've had it crash on me a couple times since I installed it a few days ago. The application is clearly just out of beta, and they've got some work ahead of them.

The Ugly

Soon after installing Google Drive, I noticed that I was experiencing an extremely slow internet connection on my phone. Then I noticed that web pages were taking forever to load on my desktop. For whatever reason, my internet connection had suddenly become very slow. Painfully slow. It appears that Google Drive or my new modem is doing something awful to my internet connection. When Google Drive is off or paused, I get appropriate upstream and downstream speeds (more or less). When it's on and syncing, everything grinds to a halt, even though it's only uploading at a 300-400 kBps rate.

[Google Drive not uploading]

[Google Drive uploading, yikes!]

I suppose this is only really a problem during the initial backup phase, when many GB need to get squirted into the cloud. However, there's no excuse for this, and it could be a symptom of a bigger problem. If it's not Google Drive slowing my internet connection down to a crawl, it could be the Motorola 6121 DOCSIS 3.0 modem I just installed. I can run several more MBps on my local wireless (Airplay to 4 sets of speakers) while Google Drive is running, so the slow down is cant be caused by my router, leaving just the modem. One of the two is getting all gummed up; I need to figure out an experiment to find out which one...

Overall everything has gone OK, if we omit the whole super-awful-internet-speeds-thing. It's always something.

From Mozy to Carbonite to Mozy to Google Drive

Backing up files is important, and I'm particularly anal about it. The idea of losing years of accumulated pictures, documents, downloads, and other types of nostalgic garbage is simply too much to handle. In fact, I have all the important stuff backed up quite elaborately, in no less than 4 ways...

1. Real Time Backup -  I keep all my data on a RAID 1 array of two 1TB disks. If one disk goes down, as one did a few months ago, you just pop another disk in without losing a single bit.
2. Almost Real Time Backup - I use a cloud storage service that syncs a subset of my data to the cloud daily. That's what I'm talking about in this post.
3. On-Demand Backup - Using robocopy, as I discuss in this old post, I back up to an external HDD hanging off my network somewhere. 
4. Super Infrequent Off-Site Backup - Periodically I burn a stack of blu-rays and leave them at my parents house. If the house burns down, all the data's there, just a few months old.

What I want to talk about here is the 'Almost Real Time Backup'. Back in the day, Mozy was reasonably priced at $4.95/month and the data storage was unlimited. In February of 2011, Mozy dropped this plan, moving to a 50GB plan for $5.95/month and a 125GB plan for $9.95/month. Additional storage can be purchased on top of the 125GB plan, and for a few months I was paying $23.9/month to store a few hundred GB (95% pictures I've taken). Yikes, it was time for an alternate service, and fast.

I switched over to Carbonite, where I could store all my stuff for around $60/year. However, Carbonite is super irritating. For starters, it wants to overlay colored dots on the icons of all of your files, since it integrates itself right into Windows. The dot changes color according to the status of the file (backed up, not backed up, waiting to back up), and although I'm sure you can turn it off, I just never looked into it. Instead I got upset. Much more irritating was the way it choses what to back up. By default, it ignores all video types. Well that won't do; nearly every photo album I have includes several videos. And it didn't stop there. Various other file types were ignored, and you had to manually add them to the list of file types it would back up, and there was no centralized place to go look at what you've authorized. It was a mess. Even though I prepaid for a year, I stopped using the service after a couple months and repressed all the memories. 

After Carbonite, I crawled back to Mozy; this time with a more judicious selection of files to back up. I managed to limit my backup to under 125GB, and all has been well with the $9.99 plan. I can't say that I have any problem with the service. The software is unobtrusive and does what I ask it to without any finagling or confusing steps. It's good.

But $10/month is $120/year - is this reasonable? Certainly I'll pay to have a professional off-site backup, and it's definitely worth $120/year for that peace of mind. But maybe there's a lower cost or better solution out there. I looked at Dropbox, which I use primarily for PDF syncing and Apple TV screensaver pictures, and the newly released Google Drive.

Dropbox is fantastic, however their paid options are costly. 100GB is $19.99/month - forget about it.

Google Drive is only $4.99/month for 100GB, including a bump up to 25GB for Gmail. Switching over to Google Drive, after trimming down the 117GB stored in Mozy to under 100GB, would condense the accounts I have and save a whopping $5.00/month. 50% cost savings, and one less account to worry about. And I trust Google, whether I should or not.

This evening I purchased this subscription and will be moving over from Mozy. You can get 5GB for free, but for just a small amount of storage, Dropbox is worth checking out too.