Salty Helps You Ditch Your Sprint Contract

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iPhone

Salty Helps You Ditch Your Sprint Contract

Posted 01/28/2009 at 1:55:58pm | by Salty the iPhone

I used to be militant about not wanting to switch my cell service to AT&T, but I've been fiddling around with my buddy's iPhone enough that now I REALLY want one. Any advice for getting out of my Sprint contract?

First of all, congratulations, you've finally caught on. Secondly, you don't fiddle around with an iPhone, you perform MIRACLES OF HANDHELD COMPUTING. (Although I do support militantness nearly everywhere I can find it. *Raises fist.*)

Thirdly, you're neck-deep in luck, my friend, but only if you act fast. Sprint recently increased its administrative charge to 99 cents per line. Of course, this is a change to your contract and entitles you to cancel said contract without being subjected to the ETF, or Early Termination Fee. (You might have to argue with them on the phone a little, but stick to your guns. Salty would. In fact, you should just borrow my guns.) But you need to dispute the contract change within 30 DAYS, meaning before this Saturday, so do it, um, right now. Then enjoy your iPhone.

(Salty salutes Barganeering.com for the tip!)

I have too many apps! How can I weed out the ones I don't use?

Look, apps are great. They're convenient to buy and install, and it's nice to help software developers out. But it's easy to go overboard and then you have nine home screens of icons and you have to hunt around for Shazam when you're in the taqueria and by the time you found it, that awesome salsa number isn't on the jukebox anymore and now you'll never find out what it was.

I can't think of an easy software-based hack to track how often you use your iPhone's various apps. You could get all manual with it, and just jot down notes (in the Notes app or on actual paper I suppose) when you've used an app, then after a month or so jettison all the apps you haven't used since you started keeping track.

Or, try putting all the apps you know are keepers on one screen, then leave one screen almost blank in between there, then make a third screen of apps you're not sure if you use often enough to keep on your phone. As you find yourself using those, take a second to drag them to the almost-blank screen until it's filled up. The apps that are still languishing in your "I just don't know" screen can probably be junked.

But keep in mind, if you ditch an app from your phone (by holding an icon until they all start to wiggle, then tapping the X by icons of apps you want to chuck), it's still in your iTunes Library, so if you change your mind, you can always put it back on there. Like we might do one day with Demon Solitaire (not bloody likely).

COMMENTS: 2

TAGS: Hilarious, Salty, advice, Sprint

COMMENTS

Seriously, too many apps.
Submitted by hawkwood on Mon, 2009-02-02 09:24

I too have loaded all my springboard pages with apps, and wish there were a better way to deal with the apps craziness. I blogged about this several months ago, but here's the meat:

What I want is a way to search for then launch an app, similar to using Spotlight or Google Desktop. The only way I’ll get this, though, is by action on Apple’s part. In the license agreement for the iPhone SDK, Apple specifically states, “An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise.” So even if someone wrote an app that could search through my applications it would have no way to launch them.
As I see it, the actions that Apple could take to rectify this situation are to either remove this restriction from the SDK agreement and let someone make this app, or make the application themselves. Should either of these happen, here is a list of features that I would like to see:

Searching - sort of obvious…

Custom tagging - the apps already have a “genre” assigned to them, but those are not detailed enough for me. For example, I want to type in “audio” and have AOL Radio, Last.fm, and Simplify Media as the results.

Favorites/Recently used apps - I mainly use only about five or six apps, and I’d like a group that kept track of those for quick access.

Customizable sort order for results - As this app is still hypothetical, I’m not sure if it would be better to get the results as alphabetical, recently used, or most used, so an option to choose between these would be best.

This application would increase the usefulness of the iPhone/iPod Touch for anyone who uses more that one page of applications.

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