iPhone4idiots

Wow, this was an easy article to write. This Apple Cards app is the biggest fail since Ping. I thought this was a brilliant market for Apple to enter. However, they have done so in such timid fashion that Hallmark has nothing to be worried about yet. Almost everything about this app and the ordering process is terrible. Don’t believe me Continue Reading…

Looks like iTunes Match launches this weekend. Those beta testing the music matching service have been told by Apple that iTunes is deleting the libraries today. The likely last step before it goes live. I expect that this weekend. What iTunes Match does is for $25 per year iTunes will scan your music library and match songs with Apple’s own library and then upload the rest of the songs it does not recognize. This makes all your music available on all your iOS devices. It also turns any music you downloaded thorough other means into a legal high quality copy. Anyone planning on using this service?
UPDATE 10/30 – Looks like it’s not happening this weekend. Since Apple said it would go live in October that can only mean one thing. Numerous beta testers have stated the service is slow and only matches about half the songs. It’s still not ready.

After numerous reports, it’s quite clear now that in the United States ATT has the fastest data speeds for your iPhone or iPad. Mush faster if you have the iPhone 4S due to ATT being the only one supporting HSDPA technology. Verizon is next best with Sprint having the slowest speeds. This surprises me as Sprint only has about 1.5 million data hog iPhones on its’ network. I thought it would be faster for sure. On the positive for Sprint customers, it’s being reported Apple and Sprint are working to improve 3G data speed. This first step to a fix is admitting there is a problem. Expect 5.1 software update for Sprint soon. All this will remain the same for about a year. Once true 4G iPhones (and despite what they market, ATT’s iPhone 4S is NOT 4G) hit the market the question of which carrier has the fastest network will start again. Anyone feel your iPhone’s data speed is too slow?

Well that didn’t take long. Less than 7 hours from posting that my advice was to wait for the untethered jailbreak, I decided what the heck. So I went from 4.3.1 to 5.0 on my iPhone 4. Re-jailbroke with redsn0w 0.9.9b7 and installed semi-tether from the BigBoss source. Redsn0w and Big Boss have been around forever and it worked fine. The hardest part was the hour it took my iMac to install iOS 5 and restore from backup. I had over 100 apps – Anyway, worst case is it reboots one day and I can’t use Cydia or Safari for a few hours. No biggie. Please watch the video and give me thumbs up for taking the plunge!
UPDATE 9/24 8:00AM – I should mention iBooks just crashes with this redsn0w jailbreak. No big deal for me as I don’t read iBooks and if I did I’d get an $80 Kindle for that. My guess is there will be a fix within a week or two.

So you may have read about BigBoss releasing a semi-tethered jailbreak. If you don’t know the difference keep reading, but before I get asked again – The iPad 2 and iPhone 4S use the same A5 processing chip (at least that’s what I think it is) for which there is no jailbreak for iOS 5. People are working on that. Most other devices can be jailbroken on iOS 5. Specifically, the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 1, iPod Touch 4G, iPod Touch 3G. However, it is a tethered jailbreak which I don’t recommend. This semi-tethered is better, but not ideal either. My advice, unless you really need it on your iDevice, just play around with iOS 5 and iCloud for awhile. The untethered jailbreak will be here soon enough. So if you want to know the difference between these jailbreaks Continue Reading…

So I feel like I’ve been pretty negative regarding Siri and what it can’t do. So I want to start the weekend with what I expect to be my last post on Siri saying what it can do. Siri works quite well for finding, calling, displaying and texting contacts. Siri will check, display and compose your email quite nicely. She does a fine with taking notes, checking maps or playing music. She’ll schedule a meeting or reminder correctly on the first try. She’ll set your alarm or give you answers to factual questions. Yes, there is a whole lot she can do. In fact there is a nice list here of what Siri is meant to do and the best short phrases to engage her. She also does quite well with dictation. Here is a great list of dictation commands like “new line”, “cap” (to capitalize any letter) and even “smiley face”.

So you may have read or seen that Siri enables anyone to pick up your iPhone and make a call even if you have the passcode lock on. All you have to do is hit the home button to activate Siri and tell her to make a call. She’s your girl. She’ll do it! This was discovered a few days ago and Mashable just picked it up today. You should read more about this soon. The fix is simple. Goto Settings – General – Passcode Lock – and turning Siri (Allow access to Siri when locked with a passcode.) off. Why this isn’t set to off by default I have no idea? My friends don’t keep up with iPhone news. I’m totally gonna pick up my buddies iPhone when he goes to the toilet, loo, potty and say, “Call”. When Siri answer’s depending on my mood I’ll try “girlfriend”, “mom”, “work”. Let me know in the comments what you think.

So my flight back to Nashville is in an hour. Last night in Miami I swear at least half the people I listed to on the street or in a restaurant were speaking a foreign language. Note to self, make sure the boys take Spanish and don’t waste time with French, Latin or Chinese. Most of what I read on Apple and Tech blogs continues to be really positive on Siri. While I agree it’s the future, it’s really not that great at the moment. Yes, it’s helpful for driving in some respects, but it’s not like you can carry on a conversation with Siri. In fact, many times this weekend Siri didn’t get what I was saying exactly right. Whether I was dictating a note or trying to send a text. It’s good, but not great. You really can’t trust a lot of these blogs. Continue Reading…

OK, so now that Siri’s network issues have been cleaned up, I was able to test Siri’s effect on the iPhone 4S battery. I saw a tweet from @JFSikora mentioning he thought it was less and I agreed. So this morning I had to drive from Miami to Naples to visit my Grandma by myself. I took Siri along for the ride. The battery was 100% charged when we left the car rental at a little after 8:00. I asked Siri numerous questions like I had a friend along for the ride. My favorite was when I asked, “Tell me a story.” Siri replied, with “Once upon a time in a virtual galaxy far far away,” The story was about Siri going to work for Apple and while nice was very brief. Anyway, by 11:00 when I arrived at my destination, my iPhone 4S battery was in the red! Yes, from 100% to zero in less than four hours. I was doing nothing else on the iPhone 4S other than Siri and there was nothing running in the background. This might not be a big deal as Siri wasn’t made to be used non stop for hours. That said, the amount of battery drain is very surprising. I mean you can stream video on an iPhone 4 for at least 6 hours. Is anyone else seeing a significant drop in battery life with Siri and what do you think about it?

Siriously??? Apple prides itself on the fact that their devices “Just work”. Being a previous PC guy, I have to say I generally agree with that assessment. That’s what makes the launch of the iPhone 4S and Siri so disappointing. I wanted to test and see the amount of battery drain caused by Siri today. My battery ran out early on Friday, but I was hitting my new toy pretty hard. That said, Siri quit working for me early Saturday morning and was down from 10:00 Central to when I got on an airplane for Miami at 1:30. I read many people online complaining about the same thing. Sebastian Page claimed he was down for 12 hours and got it to work by turning Siri off, then resetting the iPhone’s networking settings and then finally turning Siri back on. I tried this twice with no luck and many others posted that didn’t work. By late Saturday afternoon, Siri was talking to me again. So what’s the problem. Is it ATT, Apple, Yelp? I don’t know but it’s not good. This may explain why Siri is in a beta version and not coming to the iPhone 4 or iPad 2 anytime soon. Can you imagine the extra traffic load these two devices would make. Siri would never work again.