iPhone4idiots

Just watch the short video to see what this Cydia tweak does. In short, it allows you to make in app purchases for tons of apps for free. It doesn’t work for all apps, but there is lengthy list of apps listed for which it does. I believe it only works for iOS 5.0 and above which means it will not work on the iPad 2 or iPhone 4S until the jailbreak is released for these devices. This tweak can be found in the Xsellize or Insanelyi repos. If you don’t know how to add sources to Cydia you see how to add these two repos here.

A study released last Friday by U.K.-based technology firm Arieso revealed some interesting things about data consumption. According to Arieso, iPhone 4S users consume twice the amount of data compared to iPhone 4 users. Yes, it’s faster but I don’t see myself surfing the web any more or less because of it. The bottleneck is carrier download speeds which are essentially the same on the iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 (unless you are on ATT in which case the iPhone 4S is a good bit faster). So why is this? Well for one, the iPhone 4S has a camera with more megapixels so all photos and videos being uploaded are bigger files. Of course, there is also Siri. The convenience of asking for web searches for directions, restaurant recommendations and a host of other things has to be a factor as well. More interesting is that the top 1% of data users consume half of the downlink data. Expect this trend to continue as the early adopters of streaming video hog the bandwidth. Anyone cutting the cable cord and getting all their television/video content from the internet surely must use ten to one hundred times the average amount of data. This is the reason you really can’t blame carriers for throttling speeds to these power users. At one point I thought true 4G LTE would solve this problem but it will just be a temporary fix at best. I could easily use over 100GB of data per month if I streamed all my television shows and that’s not even in 1080p. It’s just the nature of technology. Remember the 1.44 MB floppy drives. It really wasn’t that long ago except when it comes to technology 12 months is a long time in many respects. A year from now iPhone 5 users will surely be using twice as much data compared to iPhone 4S users and unlimited data plans will be a thing of the past.

Last week Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain, revised its earnings forecast downward for 2012. It expects to lose about $1.20 per share due in large part to heavy investment in the Nook. While painful for shareholders it makes sense as the brick and mortar stores are dinosaurs. I’m amazed how long it takes for outdated inefficient products to die. Our kids will laugh at us when we tell them how much time we wasted driving to a bookstore. Walking up and down aisles looking for a book as opposed to a quick download. I’ll probably be too embarrassed to tell them how much I paid for a new release in hardback. I don’t want to hear anyone wax nostalgic about being able to hold a book either. You can still take a horse and carriage ride in many downtown areas if that’s your thing. To me all they do is put a big pile of crap on the street for someone to clean up. Besides, technology will soon create some sort of display for you to hold and get a similar feeling without harming any trees. Yes, for those that can’t accept change you can still find the horse and carriage, typewriter, walkman and Polaroid somewhere. Although, Kodak is on the verge of bankruptcy according the Wall Street Journal. Like Blockbuster and Tower Records, the death of bookstores is progress. It’s not all bad for book lovers. There will still be government funded public library’s around. Just hopefully they are filled with iPad’s and E-Readers as opposed to shelves of dead trees collecting dust.

iLounge’s, Jeremy Horwitz, claimed yesterday that the iPad 3 will have an 8 megapixel rear facing camera. This is hardly shocking news as every new iPhone or iPad has a slightly better camera than the previous model. Well, I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. What’s the point? Does anyone use the rear facing camera on an iPad? Yeah, I’m sure there is a very small percentage that do, but it’s a complete waste. I’d gladly buy an iPad 3 with no rear facing camera if it was $50 cheaper. When it comes to taking pictures most people have a smart phone or digital camera that is better. Even with an 8 megapixel camera who is gonna pull out their iPad to take a picture? I just don’t get it. Since Apple started this stupid idea of a rear camera on a tablet every other tablet maker is following suit. I’m sure Apple won’t remove it at this point since that small percentage of users who somehow use it would be outraged. I’m trying to think of a good analogy like maybe a 4th USB port on a computer? Anyway, if anyone actually uses the rear camera on their iPad please tell me when.

Anyone following @Pod2G on Twitter has seen some great tweets to ring in the new year. Eariler today he tweeted, “I made a step today for the A5. With some luck we could expect a release in a week.” A5 refers to the chip used in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S that has been the reason there has been no jailbreak of any kind on iOS 5. Apparantly, not only is one coming soon, but it will be untethered just like his recent exploit that was used for the latest release of redsn0w. He later tweeted that it was safe to update your iPhone 4S or iPad 2 to iOS 5.0.1. Yes, this long awaited untethered jailbreak must be very close. While it could take a bit longer we all hope the “luck” is there and a new jailbreak is released next week. Maybe Sunday will be funday! I know there is a huge number of iPhone 4S users that have been waiting for this day to arrive. My recomendation, go ahead and update to 5.0.1 right now. Once the jailbreak is released servers (including Apple’s) will be slammed with activity. Expect iOS 5.1 to be coming fairly soon as well. I doubt there will be anything signifcant so I don’t recommend updating as you’ll lose your jailbreak. Supposedly the 5.1 jailbreak will come quickly, but again I would stay on 5.0.1. As soon as it’s out I’ll let you know. Who’s excited?

So Apptrackr and associated Cydia app Installous have been under attack from Apple recently. For those that don’t know, they have been the main website and app to download cracked apps. Cracked apps being App Store apps that cost money that you can download for free. It’s the main reason people jailbreak their iOS devices. For anyone that has used either Apptrackr or Installous you surely have noticed that over the past few months a ton of the links no longer work. This never used to be the case and their blog recently explained that Apple has been sending takedown notices for a “ton” of their content. The only way to slow this process down is to add CAPTCHA to their links, something they recently stared doing. In addition they moved their servers to “several different countries” and the extra expense has lead them to place advertisements on that CAPTCHA page. So for those that have noticed these changes that’s what’s happening. My thoughts on this. Continue Reading…