iPhone4idiots

I’ve written in the past about how ATT has instituted a policy of data throttling for it’s top 5% of bandwidth users. I was curious as to how much speed would be cut back and the folks over at AppAdvice uploaded a video demonstrating the extreme nature of the slowdown. Using the popular Speedtest app on two identical iPhone 4S the download speeds on the throttled device are almost ten times slower. What’s even crazier is that the throttled speeds are similar to Edge! Now I haven’t tested this myself as I don’t want to suffer through these slow speeds until my next billing cycle. However, the video is quite clear as to what happens. ATT’s reduction of the data speed by such an extreme amount serves a purpose. It encourages their heavy users to cut back or switch to another carrier altogether. I’m sure ATT doesn’t mind losing the bandwidth hogs. The reduced speeds make it impossible to stream video and make apps like Maps and Safari quite slow. So where does the throttling begin. In the past ATT stated that 98% of it’s users use less than 2GB of data. However, I went over that amount last month and didn’t get throttled. In any event, if you want to avoid this keep an eye on your data usage and use wifi whenever possible. You can easily check your ATT data usage at any time by dialing *3282# (star DATA pound) on your iPhone. You’ll get a text showing how much data you’ve used, when your next billing cycle beings and how many texts you’ve sent. Not sure where this is going as I’m confident Verizon and Sprint are or will be doing something similar. In the meantime just hope you don’t get the text displayed here!

Update 1/27/2012
Oh crap. I’m a idiot guys. As @Leggee @jcis031071 and others pointed out iTransmission won’t sync to your iOS device from iTunes if you don’t have AppSync. Duh. My only pathetic excuse is it has been so long since I’ve had a non jailbroken device I let this simple fact slip my mind. That said, if there ever was a time jailbreak it is now. All devices can be updated to 5.0.1 in iTunes and then use Absinthe to jailbreak. Find the guide here. There really is no reason not to do it. This was done over one million times last weekend so rest assured it is safe and you can’t hurt your device. Sorry for getting any non jailbreakers hopes up.

I’m going to show you step by step how to easily download and view movies and TV shows to your iOS device. With the death of MegaUpload I highly encourage any of you to try this method. It’s really quite simple and in many ways better. Best of all, you don’t have to be jailbroken to do this. If you like this post or find it helpful, please leave me a comment on it. Without further adieu let’s begin! Continue Reading…

So what if MegaUpload never comes back? There are tons of alternatives but of course none are as good, popular or fast as MegaUpload. As I wrote yesterday, many of the other popular alternatives have either blocked United States traffic, disabled sharing of links or deleted user accounts. Thus, they are as good as dead too. Filesonic, Fileserve, FileJungle and UploadStation now forbid users from downloading anything they did not upload themselves. Upload.to is blocking all USA traffic. 4shared, VideoBB and VideoZer have been deleting user accounts and UploadBox and x7.to are just closing altogether. Nevertheless, there are still a some alternatives left. At least for the moment. BTW, look for a detailed post later this week on the best and easiest way to download to your iOS device in the post MegaUpload world. You don’t even have to be jailbroken either. Enough teasing, so what are the best storage lockers left? Continue Reading…

Wow, the United States has some juice. Several European countries have been prosecuting the founders of popular torrent website The Pirate Bay for years. Not only have they not spent a day in jail, but there website is still in operation to this day. Yet, the United States convinced New Zealand to arrest a dual citizen of Finland and Germany for extradition to face copyright infringement charges. Kim Dotcom has been in jail since his arrest on Friday and I’m beginning to think MegaUpload may never return. Even more impressive is the dramatic drop in storage locker file sharing the United States has produced in less than a week. Both FileSonic and FileServe have pulled the plug on their own business fearing the same fate as MegaUpload. Continue Reading…

Like sands through the hourglass, so goes the daily drama of MegaUpload. The only good thing about the FBI’s arrest and seizure of the MegaUpload has been the interesting reading it has provided. Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is quite the character. His birthname was Kim Schmitz, but he changed it years ago. A month ago in a big middle finger to the recording industry he put the MegaUpload Mega Song on YouTube. It’s a catchy song about how awesome MegaUpload is with over 12 million views that features tons of celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Jamie Foxx, Chris Brown, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Diddy, Floyd Mayweather, Jr and many others. Apparently Alicia Keys’ husband, Swizz Beatz, was negotiating to become CEO of MegaUpload for about a year. My guess is Mr. Dotcom thought it would be a good move to befriend some in the industry and it also surely helped him gather some of the singers featured in the Mega Song Video. Why Swizz Beatz would agree to become CEO was either lack of knowledge or greed. Either way it is interesting that he hasn’t been arrested or even questioned by the FBI so far. While this is intriguing the arrest of Kim Dotcom was right out of a Hollywood movie. Continue Reading…

Great news the untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.0 and 5.0.1 for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 has been released. This is the first jailbreak of any kind for iPhone 4S so servers are sure to slammed for the next 48 hours. The jailbreak is easy as I’ve already updated my iPad 2 to 5.0.1, re-jailbroke it and so far am experiencing no bugs (as expected). So watch the video cause this jailbreak called Absinthe works differently than redsn0w or greenpois0n. After watching click continue reading for a few extra tips. Continue Reading…

MegaUpload has been shut down by federal prosecutors in Virginia. The site’s founder Kim Dotcom and three others were arrested by the police in New Zealand on request of US authorities. MegaVideo, the streaming site belonging to the same company and 16 other domains connected to the Mega company were seized as well. An indictment unsealed today by the department of justice claims MegaUpload has caused the entertainment industries more than $500 million in lost revenue. Not sure what this means going forward. Mr. Dotcom just weeks ago claimed to be operating within the law and has a tons of money and lawyers to fight. Given the Pirate Bay website still runs today I think MegaUpload will come back online in the future. In the meantime other storage locker websites like RapidShare, FileServe, WUpload and others will benefit.

Apple today announced iBooks 2 for the iPad, which will include Textbooks. Textbooks will focus on high-quality interactive content for students. Interesting Apple also announced iBooks Author for the Mac that will allow teachers and publishers to create ebooks. Let the publishers create the ebooks and Apple will just take their cut. So before Apple held it’s education conference today I was hoping for one thing. Get rid of textbooks in schools. I hear college textbooks are about $200 each. That’s almost $1000 per semester on books! Apple could give iPads to incoming Freshman for free and make money by the end of the first year by getting rid of this racket. A textbook download would surely be half the price. Not to mention when there is an update the old textbooks don’t become useless. It’s just an update, not a new tree killing press run. Taking notes or highlighting on your iPad pages is now simple to do. Not to mention carrying around one iPad as opposed to three or four textbooks. It just makes too much sense. The author still makes money, the publisher’s still get paid, the student pays less and Apple makes a killing as well. It’s good for Apple, it’s good for students, it’s good for whatever universities are smart enough to be early adopters. The only losers are textbook makers and those companies that deal with buying and selling of old textbooks. Frankly, they deserve to die. The other losers are Apple’s competition. Despite it’s massive purchasing power, how much longer can Amazon buy books wholesale and compete in a digital world? Also, poor Microsoft. There will be no windows version of iBooks and I’m sure their market share in the university and college world will disappear over the next decade. Somewhere up there I think Steve Jobs is smiling.

Starting Sunday January 22, ATT is once again changing their data plans for smartphones and tablets. Current ATT customers can keep their existing plans, but any new ones will be subject to the new contract pricing. Why are they doing this? Simple, just like any company they are doing it to make more money. The bottom line is that they raising prices $5 per month putting them more in line with Verizon. To see the new pricing and comparison to Verizon and Sprint Continue Reading…

Run Roo Run, 5th Cell Media LLC $0.99, is another time wasting game along the lines of Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Doodle Jump and Feed Me Oil. The storyline is a mother kangaroo has to travel from Perth to Sydney to find her stolen Joey. The journey entails twenty levels of twentyone boards (fifteen regular and six extreme). You complete a board by simply hopping from one side to the other without hitting any obstacles. Each level unveils a new tool to be used to help move across the board. Some of these include a springboard, tire swing, moving platforms, umbrellas, cannons, tunnels, barrels and more. The hardest one has to be a ghost that turns you invisible as you then can’t tell exactly where you are and when to jump. The first few boards in each new chapter are very simple. Of course, they get more difficult, but you can make an in app purchase of bus tickets which beat the board for you. In the board pictured here you jump over the shovel and into the barrel which rolls across the water. You jump out onto the tire swing and off into the next barrel to complete the board. Once you have finished all 420 boards the next challenge is earning gold stars for each one. You get a gold star when you finish it quickly. I believe it’s under four seconds but it might be different for each level. In a neat twist ten new boards are released each week for free. This app is similar to those I mentioned in the beginning. Personally, I find Doodle Jump more addicting than this game, but I like this far more than Feed Me Oil. To each their own, but if you like these type of games, you’ll want to try this one out.