iPhone4idiots

Clear, Realmac Software $0.99, is a simple touch based list keeping app that is quite powerful. Your grocery list, things to get done at work list, party invite list and general notes are all clearly displayed in this tight little app. Clear has been one of the Top Paid apps in the App Store ever since it was released just over a month ago with good reason. While it takes a few days to get used to the gestures used in Clear once you do you’ll probably never use the native Notes app again. Continue Reading…

Verizon? Hell no, not until LTE anyway. Sprint? If you want horrible data speed. AT&T? Too many dropped calls. Actually for me the problem was AT&T started throttling my data and I felt screwed. There is nothing I could do about it other than switch carriers so I did. Straight Talk is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator that offers a $45 unlimited everything plan. That’s right unlimited talk, 3G data and texts for only $45. That’s about half of what I was paying AT&T to get throttled. I was worried the coverage would be bad, but it’s been great. While not perfect the amount of savings should make this the iPhone carrier of choice for many. Watch the video to see how easy it was to switch from AT&T to Straight Talk and how I’ve found my new carrier to compare.
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Late last year AT&T began throttling the top 5% of data users on their grandfathered unlimited plans. I mentioned in a previous article how this throttling reduces your iPhone’s speed by almost a factor of ten making your iPhone slow and frustrating to use. Watch this quick video to see how the throttling beings and continue reading to see why ATT is doing this and how you best can avoid it. Continue Reading…

Want to have iPad like multitasking on your iPhone then Zephyr might be the tweak for you. Zephyr, $2.99, is a Cydia tweak from Grant Paul (aka @chpwn) who has worked on numerous jailbreaks and Cydia tweaks. Zephyr adds two multitasking gestures. Move between apps with left to right swipes and show the multitasking bar with a swipe up from the bottom. I didn’t download this til recently as I’ve always had Activator mimic a Home button tap for the swipe up from bottom gesture. However, many people kept talking about how great a tweak it was so I finally decided to try it. I think a lot of people are just sucking up to what has to be one of the 20 most important people in the jailbreaking community. That said, I do like the swiping left to right to move between apps. It feels very natural and is fast. As you can see in the photo I have Disabled the “Swipe up from Bottom” feature. I really don’t care to see the multitasking bar and I prefer this gesture to mimic a press of the Home button for when that fails (IMO, Home button failure is the biggest problem on an iPhone). I could choose another gesture to mimic the Home button tap, but I really don’t need to see my multitasking bar. Other than turning off Pandora I never use it. What would be nice is if @chpwn adds a third gesture to Zephyr. A five finger pinch to close any app. That would make this a must have Cyida tweak. Instead it is one I recommend you give a try to see if you like.

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!

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…

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.

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.