I’ve recently had some annoying experiences with Google’s apps on my iPad and iPhone. I was having a conversation on Google+ the other day with a friend of mine, and I wanted to share some photos in the conversation thread.  I had photos on my iPhone that I wanted to somehow get online and link to them in a reply on Google+.  I wanted to put them in a Google Picasa album, but Google doesn’t have a Picasa app for the iPad.  I’ve seen Picasa apps put out by third parties, but that always makes me nervous, giving some outside source access to my photos.  Why should I have to, anyway?  Google makes plenty of iOS apps, why not provide one for Picasa?  Picasa is something users can spend money on, too, which should be an incentive to make it convenient to use, regardless of your device.  I spend $20 a year to get extra storage space, but the best way to upload photos is still on my desktop computer.  This sucks because I don’t take the photos on my computer, hell I don’t even take photos on a camera anymore.  I take photos on my phone, and half the time I never sync the things to any other device.  I need to be able to share my photos on a dedicated photo-sharing site, uploading them directly from my phone.

I got an iPhone 4S today after my AT&T contact expired yesterday. I’m excited to be on Verizon now and will hopefully experience fewer dropped calls. I was with AT&T for seven years, since they were Cingular back in the day, and I finally got tired of the crappy cell service. It was always the most frustrating around UK’s campus, when I would have to try multiple times to even get a call to dial out. It tended to say “call failed” immediately, not even ringing. I’m expecting to like Verizon’s service better, and I’m certainly liking the iPhone 4S over my ancient iPhone 3G. I was surprised to be able to trade in my old 3G for $65; there’s still a demand for them?

Well, after a few hours and several different Google searches, my iPhone 3G is now jailbroken and has Whited00r on it. I think my phone may be the fastest it’s ever been, and I’ve tried iOS 3.1.3, 4.0, and briefly tonight 4.2.1 on it. I updated my iPad to iOS 5 tonight and, on a whim, decided my aging iPhone could use some more flash and glitter, too. Someone on Reddit mentioned Whited00r as being a way to make your older iPhone speedier while still getting some of the features from later iOS versions, so I decided to try it.

In case anyone else has the need to do this, I’ll explain how I converted a .docx file to a PDF on my iPad 2. The fact that I feel the need to write a tutorial on how to do this should be a big hint to the folks at Apple that their file management system, or lack thereof, needs work. :/

I feel like I gave the impression that I’m not enjoying my iPad, or that I regret its purchase. I don’t, and have been having a lot of fun with it. My big grief in the last post deals with stupid corporations, not limitations of the iPad. Anyway, from my few days of using this thing (I’m typing this blog post on it now), here are some of my favorite apps:

UK just lost to Connecticut in the Final Four so I’m cranky anyway, but one thing I’m really starting to find annoying is media limitations on my iPad. Grooveshark has a snazzy new HTML 5 interface, but they still require Flash for the music player. No Grooveshark app exists for either the iPhone or iPad in the App Store, so no Grooveshark for me on my iPad.