iphone

The iPhone 4 waiting game

by aaron on June 24, 2010

Like one or two other people out there, I waited in like this morning to get the iPhone 4 from Apple. You may be wondering why I just didn’t get it delivered to my house and have it yesterday? That is a good question and I would have done that except for the fact that I was traveling this week and I was still in the Boston area today. That means I wouldn’t have gotten my grubby little fingers on an iPhone 4 until this evening. That is a situation that was totally unacceptable to me.

I’m not going to give a review on the iPhone 4 because there are plenty out there and I’d have to agree with almost all of them that this is a really good smart phone. The display is really crisp and the A4 processor that powers the phone is snappy and my battery life is great. I have not encountered either the calls dropping when I’m holding it in my left hand or the yellow staining.

What I did want to do is talk about the waiting that I had to do for the iPhone. No, I’m not going to complain about it but I really have to give major credit to the staff at the Northshore Mall Apple Store. Since I had reserved my phone I got to the store at 6:30am. When I got there the line was already really long and it was only one line. This surprised me a little bit since I had expected two lines. That was taken care of a bit later on. What really impressed me was that the store was very strict in making sure that everyone stayed as calm as possible while waiting in line and made sure that there wasn’t a mad rush and people potentially getting trampled. Major props go out to Brandon and his staff for making sure that everyone stayed calm. Also major props to all of the people waiting who listened and were respectful to one another.

Once I got in the mall, the reserved line moved pretty quickly. This was because they were allowing in about 30 people who reserved the phone to 1 person who was on stand-by. When I got to the head of the line I did have to wait a bit longer since they let one of the stand-by people in since he was being a total whiner. Once I did get into the store the person that helped me had a smile on his face and was in a good mood. This was impressive since he must have done several if not tens of activations already but didn’t seem deterred by that. I also help by being a wise guy and asking if this is where I could pick up my Droid X.

The whole activation process took about 10 minutes and I was on my way back to the hotel to sync my new iPhone with iTunes so I can listen to stuff.

I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with how the entire thing went.

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Jailbreaking my iPhone

by aaron on May 4, 2010

I finally did it. I took the plunge and decided to jailbreak my iPhone. I guess that I should take a step back and explain why I did this so close to a iPhone OS 4.0 release which would have some of the features that I’m looking for.

I think that the main thing I’ve been looking for is usefulness of the lock screen. As it stands now, you don’t really see anything on the lock screen aside from being told if the battery is charging (if you are plugged in) or nothing at all. As far as I know this is something that won’t be updated in OS 4.0. When you jailbreak your iPhone that changes with an application called lockinfo.

Lockinfo gives you the ability to see notifications, emails, SMS messages and a lot more all from the lock screen. This is really useful for me because I can see anything that is going on at a quick glance. There is even a plug in that will allow you to see the latest twitter updates in your time line. Lockinfo costs $4.99, I’m still on my trial but I will buying it when that is over. It’s worth it.

The other app that you won’t be seeing in OS 4.0 (We’re really waiting for AT&T to get off its behind for this) is the ability to tether your iPhone and use its 3G connection with your laptop. There are several ways to go about getting this done with a jail broken iPhone but the easiest is using an application called MyWi. I don’t need to have the connectivity all the time but when I do need it it’s nice to have when you’re in a pinch. MyWi is a paid app (with a 10 day trial) and costs $9.99. I have not installed it yet but it looks good.

Now let’s talk about what we will have in OS 4.0, namely multitasking and fast app switching. I think that aside from a unified inbox in the Mail application this has been the most popular feature request for the OS. To get the multitasking and fast application switching you need to install two applications. Backgrounder and Proswitcher, both applications are free. Backgrounder gives you the ability for multitasking but it’s Proswitcher that really makes this work. It gives you the ability to look at the open apps in a view that is similar to web OS. All you have to do is just swipe to the left or right to get to the open app of your choice.

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As you see there is also a badge on the lower left corner to indicate which apps are running in the background.

One thing to remember with running apps in the background, the more that you run the faster your battery will be drained.

I’m only one day into using my jail broken phone but so far so good.

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Amazon Kindle Review

February 28, 2010

After a long time debating about what to do, I finally decided to get a Amazon Kindle as my ebook reader of choice. There were two main reasons why I decided to get a Kindle instead of the other main devices that are out there, like the Nook from Barnes and Noble and Sony’s ebook [...]

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Thoughts from the subway

January 28, 2010

I’m standing on the subway on my way to a meeting listening to a podcast and alone with my thoughts. Here is some if the randomness that is my mind: Twitter needs to improve their API so that develoers are able to use to sync between a desktop application and its mobile counterpart Seeing women [...]

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My love/hate relationship with ebooks

December 21, 2009

There has always been a certain allure of ebooks for me. I started with ebooks way back when I had my first Palm PDA, a Palm V (it wasn’t my first PDA but that’s a different story). I love the idea of having a device that has your entire library in the palm of your [...]

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Why I won’t be getting an iPhone GS

June 22, 2009

You may have missed it but there is a new iPhone that was released this passed Friday. It’s becoming an annual rite of summer where Apple releases the latest and greatest hardware and software for their smartphone platform. Unlike the last two years I have decided to take a year off of the upgrade cycle. [...]

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Random thoughts

June 16, 2009

I have not posted anything of substance up here recently because I’ve been pretty busy. It’s not that I have not wanted to but it always seems to be low on my priority list. Sad, but true. Here are some random things that have been on my mind as of late. This weather has really [...]

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iPhone 3.0 Thoughts

March 17, 2009

If you follow any tech news you’ll know that today at 1:00pm EDT Apple will announce their blueprint for the iPhone 3.0 operating system. There are a lot of  predictions and places you can catch a live blog, I’ll be refreshing the Macworld one constantly, and places you can read “expert” predictions. I thought that [...]

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