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The Midlife Second Wife ™

~ The Real and True Adventures of Remarriage at Life's Midpoint

The Midlife Second Wife ™

Tag Archives: Verizon Communications

And the Grand Prize Winner of the Verizon Wireless Drawing is …

20 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Giveaways, Product Reviews, Technology, What's the Buzz?

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

boomers, Ellipsis 7, Jawbone, Mini Jambox, tablets, technology, Verizon Boomer Voices, Verizon Communications, Verizon Wireless

Ellipsis7WinnerWish I had a sound file of a drum roll for this. I’m pleased to announce that the grand prize winner of this week’s Verizon Wireless drawing—the lucky individual who will receive the Verizon Wireless Ellipsis™ 7, is:

Julie Phelps of Massachusetts

Julie, your tablet is on its way to you, along with a SIM card and a few other goodies from Verizon Wireless and me. Not sure it will reach you before Christmas, since there’s a lot of traffic out there what with Santa’s reindeer and his massive fleet of UPS trucks. Nevertheless, you and Patricia Craven (winner of the Mophie Juice Pack Power Station) and Shawna Elkins (winner of the Mini Jambox by JawBone), definitely have something wonderful in store.

My heartfelt thanks to all of you who entered the drawing through the blog, the Midlife Second Wife’s Facebook page, and on Twitter. And a special thanks to Verizon Wireless for being such a phenomenal brand partner for the last six months. My time with them is drawing to a close, but I’ll be back here in a week or so with some closing thoughts on the experience.

Happy weekend, everyone!

Disclosure: I am participating in the Verizon Boomer Voices program and will be provided with a wireless device and six months of service in exchange for my honest opinions about the product.

Disclosure: I am participating in the Verizon Boomer Voices program and will be provided with a wireless device and six months of service in exchange for my honest opinions about the product.

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Do DROIDS Dream of Electric Sheep?

25 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Product Reviews, Technology

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Blade Runner, Droid, iPhone, Motorola, Philip K. Dick, product reviews, smartphones, technology, Verizon Communications, Verizon Wireless

Marci Rich, DROID, Verizon, Motorola, The Midlife Second Wife

The DROID RAZR MAXX HD. Photo taken with the my iPhone’s camera.

Disclosure: I am participating in the Verizon Boomer Voices program and have been provided with a wireless device and six months of service in exchange for my honest opinions about the product.

Here’s what came to mind the first time I powered on Motorola’s DROID RAZR MAXX HD, a smart phone that I’m testing as a member of Verizon’s Boomer Voices program: the science-fiction thriller Blade Runner, directed 30 years ago by Ridley Scott. It wasn’t so much the resonance with the product name and the title of the film’s source material, Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as it was the vision that appeared on the screen and the sound emanating from the device.

The first to appear on the touch-screen was Motorola’s red, Batman-like logo, followed by the voice of the DROID—robotic and synthesized—saying (by way of introduction, I guess): “Droid.” Then, immediately after, a lightening-laced, fractured vision that could have been a split-second scene from Blade Runner. After all that, finally, a flickering-red-power-star-encased-in-a-diamond image came into view, signaling that your smart phone is ready to receive you now.

I’ve used an iPhone for years. Turning it on has never been this much fun. Score one for the DROID.

But is fun enough? I’ve been paying close attention to the similarities, differences, pros, and cons ever since returning from Chicago at the end of June, where Verizon Wireless hosted my program colleagues and me to a day-and-a-half of training on this device and related products. Here are a few of my loves and—since hate is too strong a word—dis-loves when it comes to the DROID RAZR MAXX HD:

Voice-Recognition Software
This is, by far, my favorite feature of the DROID RAZR MAXX HD. After unlocking the phone, all I have to do is swoop my finger from the bottom of the screen to the top and Google appears, ready to search at my command. I click the microphone and ask it do to my bidding. For example, I asked Gigi (for that’s what I’ve named this miraculous feature, deciding it made a fine derivative of Google): “Call the Rocky River Public Library.”

“Calling now,” she replied. And just like that, I was connected.

Oh yes, I know all about Siri. I have an iPhone 5, after all. But it’s been my experience that Siri pops up when I least expect her, and when I do need her she’s difficult to find. Google’s voice-recognition software on the DROID RAZR MAXX HD is easier to use. Her tone is slightly more pleasant and human-sounding than Siri’s, too. You can almost hear the smile in her voice.

Again, shades of Blade Runner.

I’ve also had more success with the DROID’s voice-activation in getting to websites than I have with my iPhone.

Google Now
While we’re on the subject of Google, let me just say that I love the “smart cards” that appear beneath the search field when I do that upward swoop thingie. Yes, you do have to allow Google certain permissions for these actions to work, but I’m over that. I like being able to see what’s on my calendar for the day, what the weather is like, and some of my most recent Google searches. If the screen gets too crowded I can simply swipe them away.

For those unfamiliar with smart phones and their operating systems, I should take this opportunity to point out that Google owns Android, which is a Linux-based operating system. Unlike Apple’s operating system, Android is open-source, which means that other developers can create software for it, yielding myriad choices in apps. Apple is an organic entity unto itself—it’s apples to apples all the way. I’m not saying that its closed-system philosophy is a negative—quite the opposite, actually. I’ve been a loyal Mac user ever since purchasing my first desktop back in the late 1980s. But it has been fun to experiment with a different operating system. (Fun. There’s that word again.) We’ll come back to that.

High-Definition Screen, Color, and Instant Photo Uploads
The high-definition screen of the DROID RAZR MAXX HD is a thing of beauty. If you’re reading this review on a DROID RAZR MAXX HD, ask Gigi—er, I mean Google—to pull up a website showing the color spectrum. What do you think?

I actually wonder, however, if the colors I’m seeing are true-to-life. Here’s why. Schopenhauer and color theory notwithstanding, when I use the DROID camera, the image I’m about to shoot doesn’t appear as real—as true-to-life—compared to the camera of my iPhone; the colors seem off. That’s when I look through the viewer, but I’ve noticed it on some of the resulting photos as well. Here’s a picture I took of my iPhone with the DROID. Contrast this with the photo I took of the DROID with the iPhone above. I set each shot the same way, with the same background. I auto-adjusted the color, as I always do, in Photoshop before saving the final image. The backdrop of the iPhone shown below is closer to real-life, and this shot was taken with the DROID. That said, the colors of the iPhone itself are way off. This could be because I’m taking a picture of something with a lit background—even though I cut the brightness of the iPhone’s screen back.

The DROID’s screen in the picture above, taken with my iPhone, is closer to what my eye sees. I hope I haven’t confused you too much. (Can we get a philosopher to weigh in on this?!)

iPhone, The Midlife Second Wife

A picture of my iPhone 5, taken with the camera of the DROID RAZR MAXX HD

I have to wonder if I’m willing to sacrifice visual veracity for ease and speed in uploading. When we were in Chicago, one of the tech trainers set up my DROID so it would automatically upload the photos taken with it to my Google+ account. Talk about magic! This feature saves me the trouble of having to email my iPhone photo to myself, or of having to attach the iPhone to my laptop in order to download images to iPhoto, which I then have to save again to a designated file on my laptop. Once the DROID picture appears on my Google+ page, all I have to do is download it. That’s all. I absolutely love the time this saves me.

I haven’t even begun to tell you other important things, such as the size and shape of the DROID versus the iPhone, the network speed, the battery life, and overall ease of use. I’ll be back again to share more of my thoughts on the DROID RAZR MAXX HD. For now, I’d like to ask your opinion on this:

I’ve often thought there are are two kinds of people in the world, and that they can be summed up in three categories:

  1. Those who prefer Coke over Pepsi
  2. Those who like coffee more than tea
  3. Those who are passionately pro-Mac versus those who are PC

What do you think? And if you are a devoted Apple fan, would you ever change sides? Even for one product? Let me know in the comments below!

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Hey Boomers—Verizon Will Hear You Now

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Product Reviews, What's the Buzz?

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

boomers, consumerism, midlife, product reviews, technology, Verizon, Verizon Communications

VerizonBoomerVoices

Disclosure: I am participating in the Verizon Boomer Voices program and will be provided with a wireless device and six months of service in exchange for my honest opinions about the product.

Now hear this: Verizon is partnering with a select group of midlife bloggers across middle America as part of a new program called “Verizon Boomer Voices,” and they chose yours truly to lend her voice to the chorus. This an important step in the right direction—for boomers and for Verizon.

According to “The Boomer Consumer: Preparing for the Age Wave,” our cohort controls 77% of all U.S. financial assets and 50% of discretionary spending. And a 2012 article in the Huffington Post reported on a study by the media ratings firm Nielsen and BoomAgers, a creative company that assists companies in marketing to boomers. The study’s findings reveal that boomers, which will make up half the U.S. population by 2017, are “the most valuable generation.”

Pardon me while I indulge in a brief editorial digression:

Duh.

And yet, despite our obvious value, boomers have been largely invisible to advertisers and television programming executives. A segment on HuffPost Live last year, “Over 50, Under Counted,” focused on this oversight. One of my very smart boomer blogger friends, Darryle Pollack (in a previous life Darryle was a television reporter), contributed wisely to the conversation. And it delighted me to see that a comment I sent in during the segment’s live stream received attention by the moderators, even if the impossibly young woman did mispronounce my name as Marc. I. Rich.

With Verizon’s program, it appears as though at least one mega-brand recognizes that it’s good business to pay attention to our colossal clout.

Here’s how they’re doing it: Verizon will put some of its best technology into the hands of boomer bloggers who are keenly interested in learning more about tech and becoming something of an expert in the realm. Those among us who have felt sidelined by advertisers and the mainstream media should take heart by Verizon’s initiative. Verizon gets it. They care what we have to say. (And no NSA jokes, please.)

In an e-mail, Verizon Social Media Strategist Iskra Dobreva explained the evolution of the two-year-old Verizon Voices program, which, she notes, was established “to pull together like-minded bloggers to check out some of the latest and greatest Verizon devices, products, and accessories, and then network and share their experiences with one another, and with their readers and social following.”

Since its inception, the Verizon program has, according to Dobreva, “pulled together bloggers that focus on a variety of topics and interests, including sports, fashion, health and fitness, food, family life, etc. Boomer Voices is the latest group Verizon has launched.”

While the Verizon Voices program exists in a variety of markets in the United States, Dobreva notes that the program in which I’m participating is “a Midwest-based program and … the first time a group of Boomer bloggers was formed.”

Verizon is flying me to Chicago this weekend for some training on the device I’ll be testing. In return, I’ll post about the device once each month through December, and I’ll augment those posts with tweets and Facebook updates. One could nickname this program “posting and hosting,” since I’ll also host two house parties where I’ll invite friends, family, and neighbors to eat good food and check out the Verizon goods. I’ll also have to attend monthly webinars, so you can see that this endeavor will keep me busy.

It goes almost without saying that I’m thrilled they chose me for this program, and not just because of the perks. (One of my favorite lines from All About Eve is when Bette Davis says, “I’m … not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut.”) What Verizon is paying for is my honest opinion, and that’s what they will get. If you’ve read the product review I wrote for Viewpoints on a kitchen appliance, you know that I play it as it lays.

I think it’s great that Verizon cares what boomers have to say about the products we buy in the marketplace, and that we use as an integral extension of our daily lives. I should note that I’ve been a loyal Apple consumer ever since my first desktop back in the 1980s, so if I’m to be playing around with non-Apple devices, doing so will mark a first in my own consumer history (except for the Kindle I received from my husband as a Christmas gift). I don’t count the Kindle Paperwhite that I reviewed for Viewpoints, since I donated that to the Richmond Public Library.

Suffice to say that if I encounter any cumbersome learning curves, I’ll try to make reading about them enjoyable for you.

So let’s all raise a glass (and a salted peanut) to Verizon for thinking that the opinions of boomers have value. And for being willing to listen.

Updated on June 22, 2013.

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