Tech, Life and Everyday Living
Motorola Droid RAZR Review The past month I’ve had the chance to fully test the Motorola Droid RAZR. This phone is big and thin, and it’s very nice looking. I do have to say that it’s a much better phone than the Bionic, so...
Droid Bionic Review
I recently had a few weeks with the Droid Bionic and some accessories. In the spirit of full disclosure after about 4 days with the first Bionic, the device went dead because of the battery, and after...
Apple's Let's talk iPhone Announcement Apple has it’s iPhone event tomorrow. It says Let’s talk iPhone, but we all expect them to announce iOS 5 and iCloud, as well as a new iPhone of some kind.
The Times to start listening and following...
Droid Charge Review The Droid Charge by Samsung, is a decent Android phone, but it's very underpowered and outdated as far as the Android software.
It has a 4.3-inch, 800x480 display, but inside it only packs a single...
iPhone OS 4.0, just like the iPad, supports external bluetooth keyboards. While it’s already very useful (and super bulky), Apple added some little nice extras to it; like function key support (youtube link):
[via 9to5mac]
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(Via AppAdvice.)
Category : Polls
Steve and folks just announced iPhone 4.0 and it’s a doozy, there are tons of new features above and under the hood, here’s a rundown of the seven “tentpole” features according to apple.
Read on to see what they are.
Filed under: iTunes
A little-heralded feature of iTunes 9.1 is the ability to convert higher bitrate songs to 128kpbs AAC files for iPhone or iPod touch sync with iTunes. How do you do it? It’s a simple check box option in the Summary tab when your iPhone appears in the iTunes source list. When the box is checked, on the next sync, all your songs on your iPhone that are not 128kpbs AAC files will be removed and then re-added, being converted on the fly.
The first time I did it, about 400 songs on my iPhone needed to be converted. It took about ten minutes to do the conversion. Once the first large conversion is done, the iPhone syncs your music as fast (or slow) as it ever did (unless you’re refreshing your iPhone’s library every time you sync). If you keep ‘convert higher bitrate songs to 128kpbs AAC files’ checked, any new songs added to your iPhone will automatically be converted.
It’s important to note that this on-the-fly conversion does not alter your original files inside your iTunes library — those will remain at whatever bitrate and in whatever file format you had them in.
How well does this work? I saved a whopping 1.5GBs of space on my 8GB iPhone. Others here at TUAW saved between 2-5GBs. Of course, how much space you save will be dependent on what bitrate and file type your songs are now. The guys here who saved 5GB said their conversions took a few hours initially. As for audio quality. I didn’t notice a bit of difference on my $20 headphones. However, I’m not an audiophile. If you’ve got an ear for music and are using the latest Shures, you might notice some quality degradation.
TUAWiPhone 101: Save space on your iPhone without removing a thing originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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With iPad preorders officially starting tomorrow, attention has shifted to iPhone 4.0 software and what features it might bring to both the iPad and future iPhone models.
Apple Insider is now adding fuel to the long-standing rumors that the next big update to Apple’s iPhone OS will feature support for multitasking — that is, the ability for third-party apps to run in the background.
As anyone with a jailbroken iPhone knows, the multitasking limitation for third-party applications in the iPhone OS is purely artificial. Whether it is for security purposes, performance or battery life, Apple has chosen not to allow third-party developers (or even third-party Apple created apps) to run concurrently in the background.
This means that if you want to listen to Pandora while surfing the web in Mobile Safari, well, too bad. Of all the complaints levied against the iPhone, this is probably the one that impacts consumers the most. It doesn’t help that you can, for instance, use the iPod application while surfing the web or using other apps.
Push notifications have mitigated some of the need for many use cases for multitasking — but it’s not a true solution. Continue Reading
The Palm Pre Plus is the same old Pre with a few upgrades. They got rid of the home button, but it still has that cheese cutting edge on it, they changed the color of the keyboard. The Pixi on the other hand is a non-slider unit that feels a little bit more sturdy, and the Pre has a cheap plastic cover on the MicroUSB door that has almost come off a few times, but the Pixi has a small flap that feels a lot sturdier and stays in place a lot better. With the inclusion of the word Plus on the phones, Palm has upped the storage in the Pre to 16GB and in the Verizon version they doubled the RAM, the Pixi doesn’t change except they included WiFi.
When I had the 1st iPhone, as soon as the jailbreaking software became available I decided to take the plunge and jailbreak the phone, not only for the added features, but for making the phone completely my own. During my time with the iPhone 3G, I had no need to jailbreak as most of the apps and usability of the jailbreak became irrelevant, as I wasn’t all that excited about custom themes or anything else of the sort.
A few days ago I noticed that the now pulled Google voice apps I had been using stopped working, so I once again decided to take the plunge and perform a jailbreak using the blackra1n version. I hooked up my iPhone 3GS to iTunes and performed a full sync including backup, then opened the blackra1n app and clicked on the make it ra1n button, and a minute or so later I had a jailbroken iPhone. I then proceeded to install the Cydia and Rock installer apps, and then installed the GV Mobile app, which worked great.
I hate to say that the only reason I jailbroke was for the one app, but that is the only reason, and now by looking around the other app stores, I have been reminded why I jailbroke in the first place. I have my calendar on my lock screen, the temp in the status bar and you can add a lot of left out functionality.
So if you are looking to add features and functionality to your iPhone, go ahead and jailbreak, it’s gotten so easy to do, and there are virtually no risks.
Verizon and AT&T seem to be in a never ending battle over who has the better network. Verizon however has begun taking low blows at AT&T in what I believe is iPhone envy, but neverless, they claim that every new smartphone they come out with is the next iPhone killer.
What the carriers don’t realize is that most people choose their carrier because they have the phone they want, not because of the network. If someone really wants an iPhone, they will switch to AT&T because they have the phone they want
The phone is made of two pieces, the display and the keyboard, it has a 3.7 inch capacitive touch screen with a resolution of 480×854. It has an ARM Cortex A8 CPU (a 600MHz OMAP3430 chip down-clocked to 550MHz), 256MB of RAM, 512MB of ROM and comes with a 16GB microSD card. The device is speedy, and is similar in specs to the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS, but I was somewhat surprised that some of the functions like pulling down the notification shade was a little too sluggish for my tastes.
The Motorola Droid comes out on the Verizon network tomorrow, I’ve had one for almost a week now, and will be posting my full review of the phone soon.
