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I saw a stat yesterday that said 34% of iOS users think they are already on 4G? It’s hard to blame them too much when the carriers (ATT, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon) all market like they offer that service already. The reason this is a big deal is that once 4G finally hits, way more that 34% of users are gonna flip out when they see their iPhone’s data speeds. Faster than cable. This will cause you to consume much more data than you presently do. A lot more people will start to use the mobile hotspot feature and might give up cable for good. The carriers see this coming and are dropping unlimited data plans and/or throttling data speeds. Verizon is only offering three data plans for smartphones. $30 for 2GB, $50 for 5GB and $80 for 10GB. For any of these plans overage is charged at $10 per 1 GB. So while I guess the majority of you use less than 2GB of data per month, I bet some of you are like me. Last month I used over 50 GB and have used 30 GB halfway through this billing cycle (see bill below). That’s one expensive plan compared to my current $35 unlimited. Once 4G hits Nashville I could see myself using 102 GB a month which would be $1,000.00! Don’t think so. With a wife and two boys I’d be streaming hours of video daily. I know those of you outside the United States pay more. All I can say is that stinks. So how do you reduce your monthly usage? Continue Reading…

Excuse me for a moment while I go away from the tech world to put a rant out there on the very popular subject of the National Football League. It’s back and here in Nashville, the Tennessee Titan’s are gonna stink. I can speak with knowledge if not intelligence on the Titans. I’ve seen almost every game they’ve ever played in Tennessee (including the year in Memphis and at Vandy). You might remember the video my iPhone 3G shot of Bud Adams flipping the bird. I’ve been following the team closely for over a decade. So yes, the Titans are gonna stink and everyone knows it. The Titans spent their number one draft pick on Wasingtion Huskies quarterback, Jake Locker, so there is no way they are bringing Vince Young back. It’s not gonna happen. That said, I think he’s provides the best value in free agency. Continue Reading…

Anyone noticing the brilliant marketing campaign going on right now called Mano A Mano in el Bano? I noticed this morning there were promoted tweets (putting it at the top of my trending tweets list) about Fabio (the long haired Italian model) and the Old Spice Guy. You know from the YouTube Videos and commercials. Anyway, Fabio has challenged him to a dual. What this means, I’m not sure. The Old Spice Guy accepted in a video recent enough to take credit from bringing football back. Can’t wait to see what comes of the dual tomorrow and how much buzz this builds. Not sure how much it cost for the top promoted tweet each day, but I suspect it’s peanuts compared to its overall value. The campaign is already viral on Twitter and YouTube. It has to be popular with females, right? Back me up ladies, you like the pecs. I suspect you’ll be seeing Facebook posts in your stream this evening. I for one am rooting for the Old Spice Guy to win. Either way, the almost real-time nature of this marketing is the future. I suspect the marketing team is gathering data and the dual video or videos will be shot in the morning.

Super Stickman Golf, Jordan Schidlowsky $0.99, is a different type of golf game. Most like EA’s Tiger Woods golf, try to be as realistic as possible. As the name implies, however, Super Stickman is more like a putt putt video game than actual real holes. Most of the 261 holes are a physics based challenge with more than one way to go. They range from par 3 to par 10. You can easily go two or three under on a single hole if you play it right. Many holes also have targets in the air that if you hit will take additional strokes off. I scored a zero on a Par 3 yesterday. What really makes this game fun are the 6 Super Clubs. These can make your ball sticky, freeze water hazards or stop the ball in mid air. All this is necessary because there are some crazy holes to have to navigate through. You unlock additional holes and Super Clubs as you play each nine hole course under par. Some courses include Mars, The Woods, The Clouds and The Cliffs. You can see here in the picture I’m playing the Woods course. After droping down to the correct branch, I can try and finish the hole our use the freeze ball and go for the -3 strokes off just above the water hazard. Again, with the freeze ball this is no issue. Unlike many games you aren’t playing this for the audio or graphics. They are 64 bit or worse. Despite this the game play is natural and addicting. The app offers mutilplayer support either online or local. This app can be played on iPod, iPad or iPhone and should provide you with hours of fun.

Back on November 1, 2010 I reviewed an app called Square which lets you accept credit card payments on your iPhone, iPod or iPad. Even though the company is extremely well funded, the app is free and transaction fees low I concluded it was doomed for failure. You can see my thoughts and video of how the app works here. The well funded part remains. It caught my eye last week when Square announced it had raised another $100 million that put a valuation on the company at over $1 billion! Wow. They were already advertising like mad. Heck I see their ads on this website almost daily. Could I have been wrong about Square? Continue Reading…

My wife and I each got iPhone 4’s back in June 2010. Thus, they are out of their one year warranty. I don’t pay for extended care cause its a rip off IMO. Anyway, there have been two minor issues with hardware that have occurred on at least hundreds of iPhones. My home button doesn’t recognize a press sometimes. However, being jailbroken this is not an issue due to Activator. I have a slide in from bottom mimic a home button press. Can’t wait til Apple kills the home button for good. The second hardware issue happened yesterday. My wife calls me and while I could hear her, she clearly couldn’t hear me. I know, how is that different than any other time? In fact, her iPhone 4 would not emit any sound. Not Pandora, YouTube nor phone calls. This was a problem that had to be fixed. Strangely it would emit one sound. The iPhone would ring but that’s it. It also worked with headphones and bluetooth. Sounds like software so I quickly restored to iOS 4.3.3, but still the same problem. I read a few forums where people had similar or the exact same problem. The answer was try cleaning and drying out the headphone jack or take it to the Apple Store. I used toilet paper (two squares to be exact) rolled up tight and thin. Still didn’t work. Thus, I had my appointment at the Apple to head towards. When I finally got the “genius” he takes the iPhone hits play on YouTube and it works?!? Not only am I annoyed that it happened, but I was pretty sure we would get a new iPhone as the warranty had just expired. I asked if he’d seen this before and what would he have tried. His answer, “Yes, I’ve seen it and other than blowing compressed air into the headphone jack I’d be getting you a new iPhone.” Oh well.

Stop the BS. I can’t take the amount of rumors about the iPad 3 anymore. No, I have no inside knowledge, but neither does anyone else. The iPhone blogs are going overboard speculating about it’s release. Some are even going so far as to say it will be the iPad HD with retina display. I guess rumors get pageviews? While I think a retina display is likely for the iPad 3, it’s not happening in 2011. There are a couple of good reasons I believe this so strongly. First, is Apple is usually consistent in its product release cycle which is once per year. Yes, they broke this pattern with the iPhone 5 not releasing it in the Spring like they had always done. However, that makes it less likely an iPad 3 is coming anytime soon. September is when they release new iPods and the iPhone 5 is gonna be released before the iPad 3. There is no way Apple would release 3 products all in the Fall. It just doesn’t make sense. Plus, the iPad 2 is still selling like crazy. Why put out a new version when demand is still so strong for the iPad 2. Don’t believe me? Just wait til Apple releases earnings tomorrow. iPad sales are gonna be well ahead of estimates of seven to nine million. I’m thinking 10 million despite manufacturing issues. So here I am on record just so I can look back in 2012 and know I was right.

Now that you used jailbreakme 3.0 and have Cydia what do you do? Well, install the best sources on your iPhone, iPad, iPad 2 or iPod. Here I show you how simple this is to do. Like the jailbreak, no computer required. Sources (also known as repositories or repos for short) give you access to hundreds of themes, tweaks and any cracked app (Apple App Store or Cydia) that you might want. Now cracked apps is a touchy subject on a lot of quality iPhone Jailbreak websites. It’s an interesting dialog. Feel free to comment about it. Anyway, here is video showing how simple it is to do. The rest of this article has what I consider the five best Cydia sources.
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Why is it so much harder to download direct to an iPhone or iPod? I’ve tried more than half a dozen apps (Safari Download Manger, Downloads, Downloads Manager, OPlayer, ByteTornado and more) and none will work with FileServe or WUpload. Using an iPad or Mac doesn’t present any issues. While I know this has been frustrating for many of you, trust me, it’s been more so for me. So what to do about it? See one big problem with MegaUpload is you never know when a link dies. FileServe lets you know immediately so you can fix the issue as opposed to wait for it to be reported. Like all similar sites, customer service at MegaUpload and FileServe doesn’t really exist. Due to the request of two “made” users, nmarino1002 and Emdaddy, I’m going back to MegaUpload for 99% of links (as opposed to the 50/50 split for the past two months). I’ve already switched the links for the new seasons of True Blood and Weeds to MegaUpload because they are very popular. Seems that’s what most people want and the customer is always right? Continue Reading…

Mordi asked about recording the iPad 2 display. Yes, it can be done and it’s not very hard on your jailbroken iPad 2. You just need Display Recorder ($4.99) from Cydia. I’ve read Apple won’t allow screen recording for some odd reason so the only way you can do this is to jailbreak. Again, it’s so easy to do right now I would just install Cydia from jailbreakme.com even if you don’t use it yet. BTW, over 2,000,000 downloads! Now why might you want to do this? Well for me recording the display gives my YouTube Video a much crisper look than shooting through my best video recorder (my iPhone 4). For now it only records the video – no sound. Ok so watch the video and if you want the steps to do this

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