Tag: iPhone

Categories
Geeky/Programming

iPhone 4S Blue Pixel Line Problem.. Fixed!

Friday as I was leaving work, I noticed a small 1 pixel line vertically directly in the middle of my iPhone 4S that I just activated about 1.5 weeks earlier. WTF? Thought something was on my glasses, rebooted, restored, etc, etc, still was there. Wasn’t a software issue, definitely hardware. Brought it directly to the Apple Store and the took a look and said, yep, we will replace it no questions asked. Something definitely wrong. Not sure what causes it, I saw something about some board inverter deal on some forum, but nothing concrete.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t happen again 🙂

Categories
Life Product Reviews

Vacationing with the iPhone and iPad

Was just on vacation since Sept 3rd through today.. Drove up to Nisswa to drop the little one off, then down to the Twin Cities for 4 nights, then back up to get the little one in Pierz, then back down to Eau Claire for 2 nights, then back home for 2 nights.. fun time. I didn’t really connect to work (only to extend my holiday by 2 days!) but I was still *connected* to everything I wanted to be.

First, I shut off email/exchange sync to my iPhone/iPad, easy enough in the settings. Turned off the calendars too so I didn’t get any new meeting alerts. Good to go.

How else did I use my devices?

Well beyond the basics (on the iPhone – Phone, SMS, Email (personal), Taking pictures and videos, weather, calculator, maps, maps, maps, maps..)

1. Gowalla/Foursquare – I recently just killed both my accounts and started fresh. I tried to see the usefulness and benefit of these. I like Gowalla better – just prettier. Foursquare tells me what is trending better. I use them both to find things around where I am, and check in to keep track of where I went 🙂

2. Twitter/Facebook – just killed my Facebook account again as well, I think I have 15 close friends on there now, so it is pretty quiet, but nice. Twitter I use to just keep up on the real time stuff going on, track favorites, as usual.

3. Soundhound/Shazam – used these to lookup songs I heard at bars or wherever, it is a given pretty much anywhere.

4. Flixster – used this to find movie theater near by and showtimes. Couldn’t buy tickets at the theater I went to, but I could have with fandango, just not worth the hassle I guess.

5. Yelp/OpenTable/Urban Spoon – more targeted in finding foodie places. OpenTable to reserve.

6. SportTacular – to keep up on the Twins and Vikes 🙂

7. WF (mobile site) – to view my accts and transfer and what not

8. Nice Ride and Train Brain – these are where it gets good. Downtown Minneapolis has these cool bike stations you can rent out a bike (for free for under 30 minutes!) or for a small fee (http://www.niceridemn.org/_ (FYI Trek has a similar offering, called B-cycle). Ride it all over and drop off at another station. We rented two and drove them from Uptown to Downtown. Was pretty awesome. The app shows you the stations and has a timer, it could do much more though 🙂 Train Brain shows you the light rail schedule in town, we took the train from Govt Plaza to Mall of America, and back. Was pretty cool.


9. Scanner – QR codes are all over in Uptown on shops, etc. I used this to scan their codes and open links.

10. Reeder – on the iPhone and iPad – used this to keep up on my Google Reader 🙂

11. iPad – in general used it for mostly news apps, and surfing the web, used it as a “computer” – did you know on maps.google.com on an iDevice, if you click on the icon of a “place” it does much more than the native Maps app on the device? I thought that was cool.

I also used CityPages app on the iPad to look up some things going on.

Saw a Twins game vs the Royals (they won!) and Wicked as well. Got a little sick Wednesday morning through Friday so that was a bummer but overall it was a good vacation


Categories
Geeky/Programming

The New Hipster: Going Appless

Love the iPhone, really do. But I am pretty hardcode when it comes to apps and loading things and making it “work” hard. Every once in a while some rogue app goes off the wall and starts draining battery like crazy. Usually the only thing to do is restore phone. I have had to do this, and a few other people I know have see it as well. I don’t blame the iPhone, I blame the apps. Just like windows mobile, the apps were the problem 🙂

Anyways, this time, instead of restoring my phone from backup, I just let it stay “clean”. I decided to not install any apps for as long as I can. It has been 24 hours, so that says something 🙂

But what I am doing is going back to the iPhone roots, back to 2007. Web apps. Steve Jobs himself says it is their “other”, open, unrestricted platform they support, so let’s see what it can offer.

Facebook? touch.facebook.com
Twitter? m.twitter.com
Flickr? m.flickr.com
YouTube (the HTML5 version is better than the native app!) m.youtube.com
FourSquare/Gowalla? check.in
Reeder/Google Reader? google’s mobile formatted reader site works.
Other apps? openappmkt.com
IM? meebo has a pretty good web app.

Just like regular hipsters, that drink PBR, and lose the flavor and other added benefits of drinking a less “hip” beer, you have to give some things up.. such as..

Push Notifications – not sure yet if this is a good or bad thing to give up. The current implementation just seems to annoy anyways

Background/Streaming music (Pandora/Last.fm, etc) – I did find dance.fm has a HTML5 version or something that streams directly from a web page, so I could almost say others might follow suit. I also have iPod on the device so not to worried, I don’t listen to a helluva lot of music anyways.

What else? Not sure yet, we will see how long I last. One thing I can say, there are some games that are web apps that are pretty cool, but don’t come close to the native games … yet.

Of course I will probably start installing some apps eventually, and after a while I will be back to my old app going ways 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews Ramblings

One Thing About the iPhone 4..

I still love it. Like I said, I don’t use it as a phone. But I have noticed something different (And I blame AT&T for this – working for cell phone company for 5 years, I blame the carrier :))

In Madison/Sun Prairie, I get 3G ,works great, no issues. When I drive out to work, in the big city of Waterloo, WI – there is no 3G, just Edge/2G. I noticed that the phone is just “Searching..” or low bars – trying VERY hard to connect.

What I did was turn off 3G and it was at FULL bars. So once I get to work, I turn off 3G, and once I leave, I turn it back on.

What it is, the phone is hanging on to the 3G signal from the big town of Sun Prairie, and tries, tries, tries its hardest to hold on to that. Bad handoffs or something. The cell sites aren’t handing it off gracefully to the Edge/2G network, so I have to force it.

Go figure.

Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Thoughts on the iPhone 4

I picked up my iPhone 4 on Friday afternoon (July 16th). Wonderful device. Retina display is awesome. Video camera, front facing camera, flash: awesome.

People wonder about the dropped calls, etc. Whatever. First, I may be different. I haven’t even USED the phone yet. I don’t really use the iPhone as a phone. Personal Handheld Online News Entertainment ? Who knows.. I use it for everything but a phone. Maps, Reading, Feeds, Twitter, Facebook, News, Movies, Games, Work, Email, etc, etc, etc. It isn’t a phone. 🙂

Any ways, Steve Jobs already told us that we are getting bumpers, I might use it.

This device is the best out there, by far. Most gripes might be with AT&T, not Apple. Like others have said, build a better device, and then we will see. I don’t see it yet. I have tried other devices and they just aren’t as smooth.

I can’t wait for Emily to get hers so we can do the FaceTime thing, that will really be awesome.


Categories
Ramblings Reviews

iPhone, AT&T, MMS Messaging Not Working?

So…the iPhone and AT&T. Match made in .. who knows..

Back in 2007 I bought an iPhone 2G (a 4GB). I was on T-Mobile at the time, in PDX. I unlocked it and ran on T-Mobile for a while worked fine, moved to Madison, WI where T-Mob is non existent, so I switched to AT&T, at the same time I got an iPhone 3G. When the 3GS came out, I upgraded to that. Emily got the 2G phone when I got the 3G, and she used that until it died (wouldn’t charge anymore), and once I had the 3GS, she got the 3G.

Along comes MMS.. only works on 3G and higher.

Now, me on my 3GS, it worked right away, no issues. Emily on the 3G though? No dice. Wouldn’t work at all, so what did I do?

1) Made sure the phone had the carrier update – yes
2) Made sure MMS was turned on? – yes
3) Reloaded software, and restored from backup – yes
4) Reloaded software – fresh start – yes
5) Emily went to AT&T to check, they said she was on wrong data plan, changed her, MMS still not working
6) I went to AT&T and told them it has to be something with that specific # on my family plan account, they said no, its the phone or software, I said “bull$h!t” and left.
7) Put my own SIM card in the 3G phone. MMS worked! Awesome. This rules out the phone hardware and software – so the CSR from step #6 was completely wrong.
8) Called AT&T, told them the last 7 steps, but told them I think it is something to do with the phone #/account being on a 2G phone and not upgrading properly to a 3G in their system. She didn’t believe me and said it was the SIM card.. like #6 I called BS but went along with their advice, they sent me a free SIM card replacement.
9) Waited 3 days for SIM, put in phone. Need to activate – called AT&T again, took CSR 30 minutes to activate. She didn’t believe me when I told her she would need the SIM card info to activate it – doh.
10) Told CSR from step #9 the history of step 1-8 and she insisted it wasn’t the account. She had me test steps, etc, etc, etc for about an hour before basically giving up. I kept telling her “It isn’t the phone. It isn’t the software. It isn’t the SIM. It isn’t the network. It IS SOMETHING ON THE ACCOUNT!!!!.
11) CSR from Step 10 wouldn’t believe but before giving up sent me to tech support. Tech support dude FINALLY was like .. yeah, I see it here, that 3G phone is registered in one of our messaging systems as a iPhone 2G, restricting it from sending MMS.. should be able to fix.. he tried, but said sometimes it takes up to 5 days to go through, so now I wait until next week..

Really AT&T? The two CSR’s at the stores (different stores, etc) and then 2 on the phone, and no one would believe the actual problem. I needed to get on the phone with a FizzBuzz CSR (a CSR who you say the code word FizzBuzz to and they automatically know what you are talking about and won’t waste your time telling you to reboot and try settings you already tried about 100 times)

Figured I would blog this as searching Google (which I did about 20 times) on this issue didn’t warrant anything. Hopefully some pour soul that is encountering the same MMS issue on a iPhone that was upgraded through the different versions will stumble on this. One thing that blew my mind was that the AT&T Tech Support guy was like “this is the 4th one like this today I have had to fix” – which to me says “why don’t the first level CSR reps have this info somewhere they can find when troubleshooting MMS issues”..

In any event, we will see come next Wednesday if it works. I told the Tech Support dude to make notes in my account because no way in hell am I waiting and going through over an hour of troubleshooting to get this to work again. I told the CSR from step 10 that I would just cancel the number and add a brand new one to fix it since they couldn’t – and I bet a dollar that it would have worked.

People say “I can’t wait for AT&T to be on Verizon”, but I don’t think it would be much better. The huge multinational or crazy big corporations just can’t deal with customer service issues in a good way, I think they are just *way* to big.

Categories
Ramblings

Sent from my iPhone/iPad

Mini rant. Too much to write in one tweet. To everyone out there who has an iPhone (and now iPad): Do you not realize that even if you go into your mail settings, and remove the signature that will add

“Sent from my iPhone”

that we still know you sent it from your iPhone (mostly). Example: Outlook. Default now in Outlook is Calibri size 11 and black/blue for to and reply. And then we know you have have an iPhone, and we know you aren’t on your laptop 24/7, and then we receive an email that has jacked up all the formatting in Outlook and you are sending it with Times New Roman (or whatever font it comes in as) and it looks just an email that would have “Sent from my iPhone” at the end, yet that isn’t there.

Who are you trying to fool? Do you think we don’t know you are on your phone? Why care about letting us know – there is nothing “wrong” with sending an email from your iPhone. It might even make us think, “hey, so and so is working from their phone – so I won’t attach a 20 MB PDF back, or maybe I will give them a quick shout back, etc.

To all of those out there that removed the signature… why? And if you have, I think you should put it back!

Ok..


Categories
Product Reviews

Reeder, a Google Reader App for iPhone

I have tried many iPhone Google Reader apps, and nothing has come close to working well for me but the web app as a web clip shortcut. That changed this week when I checked out Reeder (http://reederapp.com/2/)

I read a ton of Google Reader (usually 10,000+ posts a month) so I need something good. Reeder has actually replaced my Web Clip Reader link on my second iPhone page as my go to Google Reader app.

If you read a lot of feeds, from Google Reader, I suggest checking out Reeder.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

iTunes DJ – iPhone, Remote App – Party!

Not sure when this came about, but I just realized that there is an “iTunes DJ” in iTunes now. It obviously lets you just play a random selection it picks. But what I didn’t know, is allowing anyone on your wifi network to connect with their iPhone and the Remote App. Once you connect with the Remote app, you can browse the library, and request a song. Multiple people can request a song, and vote it up. Totally awesome!!



I also pump out the output from my MacBook to the MacBook and AppleTV through iTunes so I get total surround sound.

So the Apple Remote app, iPhone, iTunes DJ = ultimate geek iPhone party! Who’s game?


Categories
Geeky/Programming Life

New Bike, iPhone, RunKeeper

Since working at Trek, I have been hounded to get a new bike, even more so than by my friends in Portland when I lived there, and EVERYONE has like 5 bikes there.

So, I finally decided to pick up a new bike, a Trek 7.2 FX, Newport Blue, 22.5 inch. It’s a Hybrid – not a road bike, not a MTB, but somewhere in between.

Some pictures are here, of the bike building process, because when you work at a bike company, you take 25 minutes of out of the day to build a bike.



http://www.flickr.com/photos/scaleovenstove/sets/72157619164047726/

So after getting my bike, I had to get some more gear. The usual, helmet, lights, pump, bag, tools, all that stuff. Most other people will get a “computer” for their bike, a little electronic device to track speed, etc. Guess what? I already had one, it is called an iPhone (what doesn’t the iPhone do.. “there’s an app for that”.. is true.)

I jumped on Amazon and looked for a good armband for the iPhone 3G, with good reviews. This is the one I ended up with

So what other parts are there to this equation? The app of course. RunKeeper Pro. (http://www.runkeeper.com) It lets you set your activity type, you start the music before you start RunKeeper, lock the GPS on, and start your activity. You can “lock” the screen so you dont bump it, and then tap it to get pace/speed info. It will also tell you every 5 minutes and/or every mile what your speed/pace is. Once you are done with your activity, you upload it to their site. It maps it out, elevation, speed, nice google map interface. Aggregates miles over weeks/months, and lets you share with your friends.

Here was a ride I did the other day, http://www.runkeeper.com/ui/activities/1000402


RunKeeper really keeps you motivated. I haven’t used Nike+, but I am guessing it is pretty similar. But Nike+ doesn’t work on the iPhone, just iPod Touch.

I really like my bike, there was a Gary Fisher I had my eye on though, so maybe that will be my next bike. Using my iPhone and RunKeeper, I can keep track of my rides, miles, and share with my friends (which kind of helps you stay motivated too). Fun Stuff – Go By BIke!