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Today on Weekly Dragnet

The Big Gent: Part 1

The Big Gent: Part 1

Today on Weekly Dragnet

The Big Bomb

The Big Bomb

So the iPhone 3G came out, the 2.0 firmware was released to all iPhone 1.0 users, we are all happy and content now, right? Well, kind of. The 2.0 firmware is a major step forward for the iPhone platform, this is true, however we aren’t quite to that “perfect device” status yet. The single greatest feature of the new firmware update, at least in my opinion, is the introduction of the app store. Those of you that had a hacked firmware running on your original iPhone know how great apps are on the phone. Those of you who didn’t, well now is your chance to find out what everyone was raving about. I am very happy with the app store, so much so that I don’t miss the Installer.app all that much. Hold that, that isn’t completely true. There is one MAJOR feature I do miss from the Installer.app, the ability to have apps that would customize just about every single little part of the phone you can think of. From Changing the carrier logo, to changing system message display text. This is completely missing in the app store, maybe it’s on the way, maybe it’s not, no one knows. I did jailbreak my 2.0 firmware to see if I could get back some of the customization, but I found little benefit and it actually made the phone even more unstable than it already was, plus it wouldn’t let me update some of my purchased apps. Needless to say, back to factory 2.0 I went. I can understand that Apple wouldn’t want this fine grain tweaking of the OS for security and stability reasons, that I get. However, here is the solution; create a packaging method that enables the OS to handle theme packages. These bundled up theme packages could then be created with a plugin to Xcode or even a simple stand alone theme creator for the non techie, to be sold and installed through the app store. Lets face it, the phone is amazing, but when you’re flipping through pages of icons, nothing says “this is my phone.” Below are 2 screen shots, one from my old hacked 1.1.4 firmware and one from my newly installed from the factory 2.0 firmware. The new one is simply boring. I am hoping that eventually Apple will do the right thing, and let there be some forms of customization, because after all, like all the features the iPhone is missing, other phones have had those features for YEARS!

WHERE THE HELL IS MMS!!!!????

So, as you may or may not know, I have just zero cell phone signal in my house. Since this is my only phone line, this poses a pretty large problem. “You can get a landline phone though” no, no I can’t. I refuse. So what does that leave me with? Well, VOIP of course. My goal would be to have the VOIP work on my iPhone when I am at home, and as soon as I leave it goes back to regular cell usage. With the announcement of official third party apps on the iPhone, I was hopeful we would get a Skype or something similar. I was also afraid that AT&T would further screw their customers by forcing apple to block VOIP apps. Well, it looks like VOIP apps are a go. So far there is one, Truphone. This is a native VOIP app on the iPhone. As of this writing it only makes outgoing calls, so it doesn’t solve my problem 100% but its half way there for sure. Once the Apple backend servers are up that allow apps to “run in the background” I am sure this will change. It also has the nice feature where when you make outgoing calls it uses your cell phone number as the callerID so the person you are calling knows it’s you. There is one downside, you do pay per min on the VOIP calls on top of your normal cell phone minutes. It is pretty cheap, but still. Ideally (if they were smart) AT&T should make an iPhone VOIP app that I could use at home, much like the similar t-mobile service. Unfortunately, AT&T is almost sure to screw up and miss the boat / do everything wrong, so I don’t have high hopes.

Anyway, if you are looking for some hot VOIP action on your iPhone right away, this is your only option. But, it definitely does work. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, the call sound quality is soooo much better than cell.

Price:FREE!
Link: Truphone

Day 1: The Mobile Me switch over didn’t happen quite as smoothly as every would have hoped. Although this kind of thing is sort of expected with a massive service change over of this magnitude. It was scheduled to take about 8 hours, but took more like 48 to be up and running enough to be able to use it. This doesn’t really affect my overall feeling of the new service, just something to mention.

Switching User Name: The first step (for me anyway) was to switch my main Identity (formerly .Mac) name to one that I was using as an email only account. This would convert my email only account to an individual account and leave me with just the one name. I attempted to get ahold of Apple twice during the upgrades to get this taken care of, but as you would expect they were far too busy trying to get the service going to be able to help me with this account problem. So I waited until most of the system issues were solved and tried again. After speaking with one of their reps on chat, I had the account name switched over and setup with very little pain (with the exception of the 16 security questions he asked that I couldn’t remember the answers to) but hey, thats their job and it’s good they do it.

New Features: With the switch to Mobile me, us old .Mac users were buried in new features and a completely reworked system that was actually going to be useful now. Among some of the new features are:
- Fancy new web interface
- Bigger iDisk. 20GB
- Better integration with iPhone
- “Push” email and calendar
- New email addresses of course @me.com

Although I don’t really use it, the web interface is really nice and usable, it feels very much like a desktop app. The bigger iDisk is nice, still not quite big enough, but much more usable at 20GB than it was at 10GB. The push email and calendar are great, mailing and calendaring are much more seamless between the iPhone and your desktop now. It seems that a lot of people really don’t like the “@me.com” but I am in the other camp, I really like it. I started using my new @me.com address 3 or 4 days before the launch of Mobile me and have completely switched to it being my main email address.

Overall: To sum it up I would say that I paid the $99 for .Mac and found it to be kinda useful, with the “free” upgrade to Mobile Me, I would say it was money well spent. If you never had .Mac and are thinking about getting Mobile Me for the first time, I would say definitely check it out. Apple has a nice long 60 day trial to really see if it fits your lifestyle and workflow.

If you need to sync your data across multiple machines constantly and always have your data where you are, this could definitely be the solution for you.

Apple’s 60 Day Trial of Mobile Me

Today on Weekly Dragnet

The Big Frame

The Big Frame

We went and saw WALL●E the other day, and I must say it was a really good movie. It was quite a pice of art. They somehow managed to give the little robot more character and personality with no speech, than most real life characters in movies have. There were some connections to real life as well. They hinted at destruction of Earth by man, that at this point is imminent. Being Pixar, they of course got some Apple product placement in there. There was an iPod that WALL●E had, and when WALL●E was done charging his solar cells, he made the epic Mac “bong” noise, a nice touch for sure. This movie is yet another huge success to add to Pixar’s list. If you are a fan of Pixar movies, this is a must. Even if you are not, it is still a must. I think it will appeal to the geeky audience as well, who are interested in space travel, robotics, and AI.

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Recently my girlfriend and I moved to a new house. Everything in the new house is perfect, except for 1 thing that is a huge pain in the ass. We get very little to no cell phone reception in the house :( Currently I have AT&T and she has T-mobile, both of which get the same weak signal. We refuse to have a “home phone” because they are completely pointless. Soon we will both be switching to the new iPhone 3G. Somehow we need to get signal into the house. The data connection isn’t as big of a deal because in the house we will have WiFi, but the voice is where the problem lies. After doing some research I came across what seems to be the only product in its category, the zBoost Dual Band YX510 PCS/CEL. Quite a name. This product is sold as a “signal booster.” Idea being you put the big antenna outside where there is signal, and put the receiver inside where it can pass the signal along to your cell phone. It comes in several models, the reason I chose this one is because it covers both the 800MHz and 1900MHz GSM frequencies that AT&T uses.

Install:
The install went pretty smooth. In the box you get the following: (1) Receiver with antenna, (1) outdoor antenna, (1) power plug, (1) 30 ft piece of coax cable. We mounted the receiver in the living room (center of the house) and ran the coax along the baseboard and out the back door to the porch. We picked up (4) 2′ pieces of 3/4″ pipe and (3) 3/4″ joints. The antenna cable is run through the 8′ of pipe and mounted to the top of the pipe with the antenna. The base of the pipe is affixed to an umbrella stand, but can be attached to anything that will hold it up.

Everyday Use:
So, the first couple days it seemed to work pretty well. Before the zBoost, we had between 0 and 2 bars on our phones. After the install we were initially getting around 3 to 5 bars. All seemed to be well, but around day 3, all signal boosting seems to have faded away. I have moved the antenna to just about every possible location it would fit, but signal is still lacking. Unfortunately it looks like it may not be the miracle we were looking for.

Final Verdict:

I believe that the product does indeed work as advertised, but you have to remember that it doesn’t create signal, it merely take the existing signal you do have outside and passes that through to the inside of your house. In our case, I think the signal outside just isn’t strong enough. This of course means we are somewhat screwed in a day and age where your cell phone is your main form of communication. I refuse to get a “home phone” so I will be investigating some alternative ideas.

Link to Amazon product page: zBoost Dual Band YX510 PCS/CEL

Rating:

So the iPhone 3G comes out tomorrow, but since the 2.0 firmware was let out a little bit early today, I of course installed it immediately! I was using a hacked 1.1.4 firmware previously. There were several reasons that I have been wanting 2.0 for a long time. The biggest being the Exchange support and Enterprise WiFi.

Best New Features
- Exchange Support
- App Store
- WPA2 Enterprise WiFi
- CISCO VPN

Apps that I initially installed on day 1
- Twitterific
- AIM
- PayPal
- Evernote
- eBay
- SmugPost
- LocalPicks
- Pandora
- Remote
- Monkey Ball!!

I will say that I miss the complete customization that you have with the hacked firmware, but it is so much better to be able to sync all my email and contacts wirelessly at work. I work for CISCO, so I am also very much looking forward to using my VPN on the phone, once that is all working I will be truly mobile. So far for a day -1 review, I would say the new firmware is going to be very nice to use day to day, and will get a lot more people moved to the iPhone platform.

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