Skype is a huge company with a great reputation for cheap long distance and international calling. My uncle in Greece loves their service. I only started using the Skype app a month ago. See I make almost no long distance calls, but I joined an IM chat group that I wanted to follow closely. It’s running in the background and I noticed my iPhone is unusually hot at times. I’m not sure how often the Skype app is checking for new IM’s, but it must be constantly.

Further proof, not that I needed it, was provided by none other than @chronic (Chronic Dev team founder) who last week tweeted,
“I think Skype is strongly contributing to my battery drain, anyone know if it’s possible to fix? (without deleting, need the IM part of it)”

There is no doubt the IM part of the Skype app kills your iPhone battery. Thus, I’m bringing a charger with me to the office. Thanks Skype.

Oh, and the IM part of the app sucks too. It NEVER loads history beyond one screenful and doesn’t always receive messages. That is strange given the battery drain you would think it must be checking all the time. Sadly no. If I haven’t seen an new IM within an hour or two, I know I need to try and refresh. Once I missed over a screenful of something interesting. I had to login through my Mac to load the history to read the full conversation. Like I said, the app will not load history.

Yes, I’d say it’s the worst app on my iPhone by far. I wonder if it would still be this bad if Microsoft hadn’t bought them?

I know things have been depressing ever since the USA shutdown MegaUpload. Well here is something I hope cheers you up. Open Safari on your iPhone, iPod or iPad and goto iOSLiveTV. There is no jailbreak required. The home screen gives you seven choices (United States, United Kingdom, Deutschland, France, Italia, PoccNR and XXX). The channel selection is massive. I haven’t looked through them all, but the United States includes (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, Syfy, USA, A&E, Showtime, Cinemax, FX, ESPN, ESPN 2, Fox Soccer, TNT, History, MTV, Food Network, Discovery, CNN, Spike, truTV, Speed and more). The network stations include a East and West feed and there is even a channel guide showing what comes on next.
I’ve spent a few hours streaming over 3G and the quality is really great. There are a few adds, but nothing intrusive once you start streaming. The few times it stopped all I had to do was tap the play button again and it picked right back up. The stream is about 40 seconds behind the cable feed. Watching over 3G will eat through your data plan fast so you probably want to stick to wifi. Websites like this have popped up in the past, but they never last long. I’m sure you’ll be reading more about iOSLiveTV’s legal troubles soon.

Countries to Choose TV From

Channel Guide Showing What Comes on Next

Live Stream of ESPN

David Beckham at the beach with iPhone

Jessica Alba

Demi Moore

Lenny Kravitz using the coolest headphones I’ve seen on an iPhone!

Paris Hilton

Justin Bieber

Sandra Bullock

George Clooney

Sharon Stone

Miley Cyrus

JennyMccarthy

Megan Fox

Jennifer Aniston

So you can see the text I received last night from AT&T. Since I was at the USA El Salvador soccer game I ignored it til this morning when I hit *DATA# (*3282#) to see how much data I have used this month. As you can see I was just barely over 3GB. The previous month I went over 10GB and never got a message from AT&T. It appears their stated policy of throttling unlimited data plan users at 3GB has begun. Next I ran a few speedtests to see if I was in fact getting throttled. The results show my download speeds are about twenty times slower than my previous unthrottled test back on March 5. To be fair, that was a really high result. I typically get between 2-3 Mbps. So my download speed has been reduced by a factor of ten. Forget about streaming or downloading torrents at that speed.

So what to do now. As you might recall I switched over to Straight Talk for a month and found the service equivalent to AT&T. At only $40 per month it is way cheaper and I didn’t get throttled when I went over 3GB. I used just under 5GB for the month. I would highly recommned Straight Talk for your iPhone. However, since I’m on a family AT&T plan there are other factors to consider. Mainly, I don’t pay the bill. Also, if you have an iPhone 4s your data speeds will be slower as the iPhone 4s on AT&T uses the HPSA+ technology which is faster than 3G.

At least there are options. This will become a much bigger issue with the 4G LTE iPhone 5 as data consumption will drastically increase. We’ll see how the carriers respond. I’m also on the lookout for the next lawsuit against AT&T. Anyone what to take me case to court?