grinthock.com – A World Of Opinionation

iPhone 3G Battery Power Up!

Posted on August 19th, 2008 by grinthock.
Categories: Toy Box, iPhone.

So once we got our iPhone 3G here, it’s been a few weeks, we all know the battery stinks.

First – we have noticed that conditioning has made a difference — after about 10 battery cycles the battery started to last about 10% longer than when we first reviewed the device.

I’d like to show you this product…  (No we didn’t get one for free)

that’s the “Brando iPhone Power Station”  now if you have not shopped at Brando, then you are missing out on Hong Kongs best.  We ordered this little gem for $25, it’s got a 1000MAH capacity.

Charge it with your standard iPod/iPhone power cord, and I have been just tossing it in my bag.  If I get 3/4 of the way through my day, and realize i’m not going to end up at home until late, and i’m not in the car to charge, it’s nice to just have tossed in my laptop bag.

It will take your iPhone from 20% to 100% in about 45 minutes and works perfect.  For $25, you can’t beat it.   How much longer a review can I write about something so simple…

Head over to Brando’s to get one — Here

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IPhone 2.0.1 – More security than repair?

Posted on August 6th, 2008 by grinthock.
Categories: Apple, iPhone.

Ok Apple, you have made your point, you are a little sorry you sent out a shit product on day 1.  So you try to fix it, we get it, but for god sakes TAKE YOUR TIME!

So far we have been hearing about a mryiad of problems, Bluetooth is apparently (not tested by us) working with various cars now, UConnect for one, however apparently the BT and WiFi is being disabled after upgrade for some – we are also hearing about bricking during the upgrade but with no details this could be some schmuck who modified the hell out of his phone.

The 2.0.1 does make things snappier, it also kills the jailbreak.   I’m sure the Apple Dev Team will infact fix that problem, give them some time.  Apparently there have been some “unknown” baseband changes as well, Dev Team is saying this could prevent unlocking – but they don’t know yet.

It seems that 2.0.1 was more of a fix for the jailbreak, and some small slowdowns.  2.1 is really what we are waiting for, but considering it’s already been seeded to developers, the final modifications for 2.1 are probably already complete no?  More details as they become available to us….

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NetShare Situation, a few days later…

Posted on August 5th, 2008 by grinthock.
Categories: Apple, Toy Box, iPhone.

Why didn’t we report on it?  Everyone else did.  We just stood back.

So, 50,000 foot view here,  NetShare,  Iphone App, Proxy Server, allowed “hidden” tethering over WiFi.   Shows up on ITMS App Store, disappears, reappears, no information from Apple, for DAYS, NullRiver the dev of the project hears squat from Apple.  Meanwhile many have already purchased the $9.99 app, and installed it.

All the information seems to be flowing right off of NullRiver’s website, but everyone else is super quiet on the issue, so we shall see how it develops.

It appears some of the pirates have also released this on torrent sites, not sure how, but we have one of our other partner sites in europe looking into that.

Looks like NullRiver has finally got communication with Apple working now, and has issued this statement

We’ve finally gotten in contact with Apple. Looks like the lack of communication was due to automated e-mail systems being employed on both ends, which resulted in e-mails being lost in transit. We’re working with Apple to get NetShare back up on the AppStore.

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iPhone 2.0.1 is released, let the babies be eaten…..

Posted on August 4th, 2008 by grinthock.
Categories: Apple, iPhone.

Did you honestly think we would just sit at home and not report on it?  Well, we might as well, I mean all the ususal suspects have this thing wrapped up as usual, and we don’t just report the ususal junk.   So let’s just wrap the coverage.

1)  It’s out

2)  It’s not tested enough to have any sort of opinion that’s intelligent (but you know that we will)

3) Apple is still eating babies.

So 250MB’s of goodness is heading our way, let’s see what this breaks.  As long as it fixes the slow backup problem we will be more than happy, other things would be nice.

Poking around a few news sites and the various forums people are reporting

– Faster Keyboard use

– Faster Contacts

– Fixed backup experience (we will see!)

There are some reports of people with issues doing the upgrade, possible USB problems, also restore issues.  Based on our testing, and the fact we restored our iPhone here in the lab 6 times in 3 days, we found stability seemed to be better when we did not RESTORE the phone, but re-sync’d the phone.  Restore doesn’t really save you much, only things like U/P in Facebook, Jott, Mail settings.  Everything else is sync’d anyway.

So as this writes, the file is downloading, done in apparently 10 mintues, so once that completes I shall start the upgrade procedure, and then goto bed while it restores and re-synch’s all my content.

Update!

PWNAGE tool doesn’t work on 2.0.1 as is… Ugh, newsflash! Did you really think that Apple would release an update WITHOUT killing off Pwnage? I’m sure it will get Pwnd again soon enough, but interestingly enough, i’m wondering what this baseband update is that 2.0.1 bring, perhaps some sort of battery management fix? Repairs to our signal loss issues?

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iPhone App Store cripped for Canadians — Workaround found….

Posted on July 31st, 2008 by grinthock.
Categories: Apple, iPhone.

So you have purchased a wonderful new idevice…  Plan to put many iApps, and have some iPlay time.  But you find out that you cannot download some basic apps like “GOOGLE Mobile”  which apparently kicks serious butt — along with a few other US only applications.

Well a solution has been found – thanks to the people over at http://www.howardforums.com  this is now possible.

So we take no credit – only credit for showing you that it exists…

So here’s how it works….

1)  Click HERE and get a redemtion code for a “free song”

2)  Copy that code.

3)  Open your iTunes, open the iTunes Store,  click on your account name in the top right corner just below the search window, and select SIGN OUT

4)  Now scroll all the way to the bottom, very bottom, in the centre there’s a thing that lets you select which store you are in — pick United States

5)  Scroll back up once it’s changed — click REDEEM

6)  Follow the steps to redeem, when it asks for your iTunes account — DO NOT ENTER IT — select CREATE, and now create an account, once you get to billing address just put in any valid BS address you want, under billing type — put none.  This won’t allow you to buy stuff, but we are only here for the free stuff.

7)  Once it’s done — you are now logged in as your “US” account and can download those apps at will.

8)  Sync — sign back out — sign back in as your canadian store, and you are happy!

Warning — if this bricks your phone, erases your computer, causes physical harm to you, or anyone you know — don’t look at us — we warned you.

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iPhone Bluetooth Compatibility issues, 2.0.1 possibly on the horizon, App Request!

Posted on July 25th, 2008 by grinthock.
Categories: Apple, iPhone.

We are getting scattered reports about bluetooth compatibility issues.  Various headset, many complaints from Chrysler / Dodge owners (I’m assuming this would probably affect Mercedes Benz as well) that their existing U-Connect Bluetooth systems (built in Factory Bluetoot) is not working with the new iPhone 3G.

One of our correspondants drives a Chrysler 300C, and upon testing the phone simply refused to pair with the car, we have tested with 3 other headsets as well as the bluetooth in a Lexus without a problem, so it appears to be some sort of compatibility issue.    Some users have reported that turning off the Wi-Fi fixes the problem, however it didn’t seem to help our U-Connect.

Did the big fruit change the Bluetooth chipset and not bother to perform additional testing?  Can this be fixed in a new revision?  How long will people need to wait for the iPhone 2.0.1 software to launch?

We can confirm from viewing our website logs that iPhone 2.0.1 is out there in the wild, so it’s in testing, the question is, with all these bugs being reported now, and 2.0.1 already seeding, will these issues be fixed in 2.0.1?  Did apple know about these issues already, launch a buggy product just to get it out the door and then knowingly fix those issues in 2.0.1?

Many questions to be answered in the coming days.

Phil, buddy, we all like you, but can we PLEASE get some fixes here?  Things are getting quite difficult.

Also — APPLICATON REQUEST!   3 of our correspondants are now walking around with this…. Thing… and we all have the same request, there was an application available in installer that allowed you to VERY quickly turn on/off the various radio’s in the device to save power — somebody write one of these for the App Store (or at this point, even a jailbroke 2.0 app).  It would really help us.

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Pwnage allows jailbreak – Apps nowhere to be found!

Posted on July 24th, 2008 by grinthock.
Categories: Apple, iPhone.

So we jailbroke our 3G iPhone that we are testing here….

Unfortunately it’s even less interesting than the photo above, but the bottom line is,  there’s zero apps.  Seems like there is a large developer platform, lots of dev tools, unix tools and a new package manager replacing the previous “installer”  but other than the NES emulator and one other game, there isn’t much.

Right now most of the previous apps won’t run on 2.0, due to changes by Apple, so much re-writing must be done.  How many dev’s will now simply go through the App store now that they have a possible revenue stream?    I want my ORB CLIENT BACK!

So for now, we suggest staying away from the jailbreak, there isn’t much to gain, once customize comes out we will be VERY happy, louder email sounds are a reason alone to jailbreak this thing.

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Apple removes FIREWIRE charging support from iPod 3G – Breaks accessories.

Posted on July 23rd, 2008 by grinthock.
Categories: Apple, Department of rant services., iPhone.

Here we go again…

In a previous entry I had written about how the new iPhone 3G does not charge with existing accessories.  This includes the very expensive BOSE systems, the Apple HiFi system, and many incar systems made by various manufacturer’s one of which being the DiCE electronics unit I have.

So why is this?

Yep that’s right, back to the firewire days.   Apparently many of these charging devices still use the older and depriciated “FIREWIRE” pin’s on the 30 pin iPod connector to charge the phones.   The iPhone and iPod Touch both supported this charging method, and I havn’t seen any REASON in the 3G for them to remove the support, but the bottom line is — they have yanked it.

So Apple now is only supporting power through the USB interface on the device.  Even the iPod Touch which cannot be sync’d via FireWire can still be charged via it.  Personally here I put the blame on 2 people, first, the manufacturers of the devices they should have been supporting the new standard — and infact both USB and Firewire standards to provide both backward and forward compatibility.  This day was inevitable, so why they waited till now, we have no idea.

The bottom line people have hundres of dollars in charging accessories that simply don’t work now, whats the solution?  There isn’t one currently.

What needs to happen is, pins 19 and 20 have 12V, that’s the old firewire method of charging.   That needs to be reduced using some sort of regulator, 7805 or something similar, and then inserted into pins +23 and Ground on 16.

This could be accomplished by a simple Male/Female Apple dock connector with the electronics inside to complete the task, but nobody makes such an animal.  While I’m not electronics GURU, i’m tempted to build something except that stupid Apple proprietary cable is a pain in the ass, i’m not really willing to cut one right now being that they are quite expensive, and i’d need a dock connector as well which means sacrificing a $20 cable and $30 dock.  Ouch.

Bottom line?  This is stupid, Apple never should have done this, even if he had, he should have explained why.   Bullshit, that’s what I say.

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iPhone — A few days in…

Posted on July 22nd, 2008 by grinthock.
Categories: Apple, Fido / Rogers, iPhone.

Well a few days in, and we have realized a few things….

Battery…   We said it in the previous post — i’ll say it again…  Horrid.

Network….  4 Days in, and Fido/Rogers has already experienced a 6 hour outage on Tuesday of this week, no data service for half of the business day and spotty service for the rest.

Mail Notification….  The notification of new email is a short, quiet tone and a quick BUZZ sound, it’s VERY quiet, and pretty much impossible to hear unless it’s silent — THIS CAN NOT BE CHANGED.   This is completely unacceptable, this renders the device almost useless as a mobile communications device.  The sound can not be changed, made louder, or modified in any way.

Apps Crashy Crashy…  We reviewed the iPod Touch awhile back, and were running lots of sweet apps on it, via installer.app, most of those apps, and the Apple provided apps such as Google Maps and otherwise were quite stable.  We have found many apps on the new 2.0 to be quite crashy crashy, some of them refusing to load unless we reboot the phone.

UPDATE on push email…  We have started testing push email from mail2web.com’s free Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync service, and so far we are glad to report that the  push email IS working pretty good.  Yahoo Mail’s service is either not working properly or is slow.  It’s quite delayed.   The Exchange ActiveSync service also seems to push quite slowly, and not as reliably as we had hoped, our Blackberry comparisons are still showing the Blackberry as significantly faster.  More updates to come soon.  We can’t really get a clear concise answer on this issue, because the more we try to test it, the flakier it seems to be, it works for awhile, then stops.

There really are no available cases for this phone we like, there are many holders, not many with belt clips….  MacAlly has some coming, we will review some soon.

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iPhone 3G Review – Push doesn’t – Battery life SUCKS — BlackBerry Still King…

Posted on July 20th, 2008 by grinthock.
Categories: Apple, Toy Box, iPhone.

Everyone else is writing about this stupid thing, so I figure we need to get on the bandwagon.

So we picked up an iPhone 3G to take a look at, being in Canada we have no choice but to get screwed by the only GSM option in Canada, ROGERS, now that being said we chose “FIDO” as our carrier, they are owned by Rogers but their data/voice plans have some small differences that make them MARGINALLY better.

First, it’s the same phone, the formfactor is a little different, it’s a smartphone, so it’s got some size, I find it pretty big compared to my Blackberry CURVE.

I would get into the BS associated with the iPhone and all the “cool” stuff it does, go hit engadget or apple for that junk, I want to talk about what doesn’t work.

PUSH EMAIL… 

It outright doesn’t work.   Push seems to work “Some” of the time but far from “all” of the time, infact for us here, it almost never works, both with Exchange ActiveSync, and with YahooMail (same reports on MobileMe, not working)

If your phone is awake, screen on, in the mail program you can see it refresh, and it grabs mail (ala “Fetch”) but that’s it.    Fetch seems to work reliably, but the push just doesn’t work for us in our tests.   I’d say, 10% of the time the push works, and when it does, it works in “spurts”,  this makes me think it’s a problem with the phone registering itself with the push server.  For the push to work, the phone has to let the push server know where it is, so it knows where to PUSH TO, i’m thinking the push destination info is being screwed up.  The phone should have a process running in it, similar to dynamic DNS services like “NO-IP.COM” that monitors where it is, and then updates the other end, I have a feeling the iPhone isn’t doing that…  More testing, hopefully, i’m wrong.    Bottom line — the push email isn’t ready for primetime, and it won’t replace my Blackberry for corporate email anytime soon.  I’m not convinced this is a server side issue, i’m sure this is a phone problem.

AppStore

I’m happy about the AppStore, but not happy that it’s as tightly controlled.  I understand where Apple is coming from, by doing this, they ensure that apps that do bad stuff don’t make it on, but that really closes the loop for nerdy apps.    I am kinda ticked that stupid apps cost 1.99, this is the choice of the developer, but honestly, where stuff used to be free, now people are just trying to REALLY profit from it — that says “closed platform” which it is.  Even the BlackBerry isn’t technically a closed platform, Apple, you need to check your priorities here, then again, what are there priorities?

Video…

The video looks awesome, yes I did say I wouldn’t review regular stuff, (FYI, it’s my blog, i’ll review what I want), only reason I mention it is, the iPhone REALLY shows the benefits of having a SPEAKER, I love my iPod Touch, but honestly, it needs a speaker, I don’t always want to have to put on headphones, especially when playing games.   The fact I can play games, video and even music without headphones is a real treat….  Shameless plug for the new CANADIAN production Flashpoint, which I am REALLY stoked about (partially because of my HamSexy Whacker Tendencies) but mostly becaues i’m impressed something of this qualitiy can come out of Canada.     When i’m done with this blogpost, i’m going to look for a FlashPoint ringtone..

Battery Life. — OR LACK THERE OF.

The battery life on this thing is a complete joke.   Turn on WiFi, bluetooth, 3G data, and try to last a day, with moderate use my phone was dead in 6 hours, that’s CRAZY!  Ok the BlackBerry Curve isn’t real great, and sure it doesn’t have all the neto features, but at least I could RELY on it.  Apple says “to reduce battery drain, turn off 3G, Wifi, Bluetooth, turn down the screen”  Oh so basically turn off all the cool stuff that I purchased this thing for?  What’s your problem!?  What’s the point!?   Especially considering you won’t let me carry and extra battery with me, instead I have to carry a charger around.  So for now, i’m making sure that if i’m in the car — it’s in the charger.   It’s a pain in the ass that every time I get somewhere I have to, turn off bluetooth, turn on wifi, turn off 3g, and then when I leave again I have to turn off Wifi, maybe turn on bluetooth, and then my battery might last?   Did I mention it’s like 47 steps to do all that?

FYI — I knew what I was getting into with this battery BS…  But I still think it’s stupid to release a product that simply doesn’t have the kind of battery life that the kind of people who would purchase this device NEED!

Existing car kits – don’t work.

Every other iPod product worked, my brand new “DICE Electronics” iPod car kit, which integrates so nicely into my car, and charges my ipod touch, won’t charge my iphone, the phone gives an error saying that the accessory isn’t supported for charging.  Ok I get it, you can’t charge at full rate — fine, then charge slower, but don’t just refuse to charge, this is stupid.  I’m not spending $150 on a new adapter (which doesn’t exist yet).    I’ve tested it with a Monster kit, as well as a no-name chinese kit, so far I havn’t found a car kit that works — so for now i’m using the home charger kit connected to a cig lighter 120V adapter…

Also, the iPhone doesn’t work gracefully with my DiCE car kit when it comes to playing, the phone PAUSES the music each time a call is received — and then doesn’t UNPAUSE once the bluetooth call is completed — I think this is a issue with the DiCE unit, I need to speak to them about it, bottom line, i’m a little ticked because I just picked up this DiCE unit, I may end up replacing it, but i’ll speak with DiCE and update my readeres.

Complaints…

– No MMS — Come on, everyone else is doing it.

– No Video Camera — Honestly Apple, huge portion of your business is flogging video, and this won’t take any?

– No Copy/Paste — A smartphone without copy/paste makes zero sense.  Wake up guys.

– No Reliable Push Email — Apple you better start looking at how BlackBerry is doing this, because theirs works.   I’m not totally convinced this is a server side issue, i’m pretty sure this is a phone problem.

– Battery Life — Horrid, what’s the point of the toys if they cannot be powered!  Turning the toys on and off all the time is a chore, and completely unacceptable as a solution.

– Car Kit’s don’t charge, most ipod chargers won’t charge it

– Ringers – There’s no reason I can’t use ANY media on my device as a ringer, it’s being stopped by Apple, and nothing more, and that is annoying.

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