….my first tech blog

I got really really bored of checking iTunes for updated and new applications, so i had a nosey on the web to see if there was an RSS feed… and there is!

Its very very easy to read in this format, this is how it looks in Google Reader…

“Recently Added Free iPhone Applications”
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RecentlyAddedFreeIphoneApplications-PinchMedia

“Recently Added iPhone Applications”
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RecentlyAddedIphoneApplications-PinchMedia

Recently Updated iPhone Applications
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RecentlyUpdatedIphoneApplications-PinchMedia

I’ve found these to be both useful and frustrating… because the rate at which I now install random applications has gone through the roof……(I now have an Indiana Jones Whip and a Simulation Lighter Flame)

Yipee!

OK so nearly every guide on the ‘net for Winpwn gives you instructions which do_not_work.

I followed the instructions on iClarified to no avail…. my phone did get jailbreaked but i had no signal.

I managed to find some further instructions to sit on top of the iClarified solution that i can confirm work perfectly.

> Restore your phone back to the standard iPSW
> Create your custom pwned iPSW, do NOT select “activate phone” or “Youtube fix” - only select “Install Cydia”
> Take out your SIM card (this is important)
> Put the phone into DFU mode
> Pwn your iPhone as normal
> Once pwned (during the time that iTunes says your phone has been restored and gives you a countdown timer), unplug the iPhone, insert your SIM and plug in again.
> Now set up the phone in iTunes as a NEW PHONE - DO NOT DO A RESTORE (also important)

I can confirm this works.

So after resigning myself to the fact that i bricked my iPhone, i decided to call the store i got it from who directed my to Apple Care… i explained the situation to the guy and he asked me what OS i was running (Vista Business) and asked me to create a new local account on the PC called iphone and give it admin rights.

He asked me to disconnect he iPhone and turn it off, then login to the new account.

Once the PC had logged in he asked me to hold down the HOME key on the iPhone then once i had the Apple boot logo he asked me to plug the cable in - this spawned iTunes.

He then told me to wait until the phone was recognized by iTunes then do a normal restore - which downloaded fresh 2.0 firmware and started to restore.

I asked him why simply performing this action under a new user account would make it work, and he was unsure… I’m fairly technical and i can’t even begin to hazard a guess as to why.

I have now logged back in to my normal account and iTunes has found my phone no problem at all.

I can’t guarantee that this will help anyone else - or whether it only applies to Vista… but if you have the [6] or [13] errors when trying to restore firmware… give this a shot.

It appears that iTunes 7.7.1 is doing more harm than good at the moment. I updated this morning and have since tried to re-flash my iPhone back to fresh 2.0…

Fail.

I’ve tried this restore a number of times now in both recovery mode (where you see the iTunes logo) and in DFU mode (black screen) and get either [6] or [13] errors.

I then uninstalled 7.7.1 and managed to locate a copy of iTunes 7.7.0.43 which I installed and then attempted the restore again which also failed.

So as it stands, i have a brick.

I’ll keep playing and update this post if i figure anything out - failing that if anyone has any suggestions please leave a comment.

Last week i was donated an old first gen iPhone dock, which i took to our engineering dept and attacked with an electric precision grinder….the result is a little messy but very very usable.

I’m modifying another dock right now to give to a friend - based on that I decided that blogging it might be helpful to others!

Some photos below….

So…. save yourself some cash and recycle your old docks!!! You only need to take a small amount off the back and a little more off each side.

As i have found out, Windows Media Streams and Real Audio Streams are not natively supported on the iPhone… while browsing my so far favorite application (Tuner - which is currently missing from the app store as it happens) i found the BBC Radio 1 Stream Relay (192k)

I’ve been on a few forums and people are asking if this is possible…

When Tuner is back on App Store i strongly recommend you purchase it - it was only £2.99

UPDATE - 19th July 15:40

I’ve tried this stream again today and it appears to be unavailable. I’ll keep testing it throughout the day and report back my findings.

We have iPhone 3G, its good… its very good, but its not perfect.

When the first generation iPhone was released and a friend of mine got it right away, i was very quick to poke fun at his shiny new device that was - as far as i was concerned - old technology. Sure, it had multi-touch which you cannot deny is a revolution in mobile phone interfacing… but the camera was poor in the iPhone compared to other mobile phones, edge data connection on the iPhone when HSDPA was live and kicking on other handsets, integrated GPS was becoming more prevalent, no MMS, no video camera function  etc etc… the list goes on and on….

Now we have a few of those hardware features resolved in the 3G iPhone, but things still aren’t up to par with other handsets on the market.

As i see it, the only features i would like to see in the 3rd generation iPhone are as follows:

• More internal storage (32gb would be nice)
• 5MP camera with auto focus and flash
• video recording (30 fps ideally)

Software features that people complain about such as MMS and copy/paste are of little interest to me right now. You can tell by the apple business model that they just don’t want you to MMS people… they would rather you pay £60 a year to Apple for a MobileMe account and email your photos to each other than pay 30p per MMS to your operator….

I’m not one for asking for a huge amount of extra features in a new device, i understand that if they give you everything right away, you’ll have no need to buy the next device in the series… but as of now, those are my 3 wish list items for the next generation iPhone.

What are yours?

I know I’m probably a year late with this excitement, but Apple have truly gone way beyond what we used to rely on for predictive text. You don’t even need to spell the word you’re typing correctly…

For example, if i type “Gelko mu bame ia gaery abd I havr eues” it corrects each word as you type and we end up with “Hello my name is Garry and I have eyes” meaning that you can actually type really quick on the iPhone. It actually helps to try less to type accurately. I’ve found that if i try to type fasted and not worry too much if I’m hitting EXACTLY the right letter that it just figures out what I’m typing. As I said, I’m maybe a year late with this excitement but to anyone who is considering moving to the iPhone for the first time then this is a BIG BIG plus.

I also tested the Google Maps navigation on the way to the office, and i think its safe to say that even though it doesn’t have voice guided turn by turn navigation, its very very capable and i don’t feel any less equipped than i did with my N95 running Route 66. One major benefit already on the iPhone Google Maps is that you can search for a full postcode (Route 66 would only let me search for the first 5 digits, meaning you don’t fully get to where you need to be).

Obviously you don’t have the benefit of the masses of POI information that your dedicated Sat Nav app may provide, but there are a number of location based POI services available on iTunes Appstore (which I’m currently testing and will report back soon) which can compensate for the short falls in Google Maps. This all may be irrelevant though if TomTom get to release their Sat Nav offering for the iPhone

Final thing to report is very upsetting. Last night when getting home from the cinema (Went to see Hancock by the way - which was very good) when getting out of the car my iPhone fell out of my coat pocket and hit the pavement (from about 0.5m high) There was very small scratch damage to the bottom of the phone and a couple on the side.

After having a serious panic, i rebooted it right away and tested all major functions (WiFi, GPS, 3G Data, Sound, Camera etc) and its all OK.

I’m not for one minute suggesting that you all throw your iPhones about to test their durability but be safe in the knowledge that if you do drop it (as i did from about 0.5m) you might be OK.

The irony (or just bad timing) of it is that I’m off work tomorrow and i was going to buy a case for it!

I’m new to the iPhone world, i specifically didn’t jump on the bandwagon first time around because the first generation phone was simply not well enough equipped for me. I previously had a Nokia N95 which was - in my opinion - the best phone on the market for a long time (only beaten by the 8GB N95).

I also had major issues with the fact that some of the great functionality I relied on heavily on my N95 (Shozu, MS Exchange Push Email, GPS, Shazam TrackID to name a few) was not available on the first gen iPhone.

Well…I picked up my White 16GB iPhone 3G from the Apple Store Trafford Center Manchester last night, and i’ve had it for exactly 24 hours now.

It’s been a good exercise really, i have been lugging around 30GB of music on my Microsoft Zune Media player for a long time now of which I’d say i listen to no more than 10GB - 15GB…. so my music collection has gone on a serious diet. Along with that i have a new contract with O2 so i took that opportunity to get a new number, ditch a severe amount of contacts and evade those sales calls who get your number from god-knows-where.

During my first 24 hours, i had no network service with o2 from about 21:30 when my signup ended at the Apple store until around 07:50 this morning when i finally got signal and started to receive text messages from o2…. anyway, as i said, my first concerns were the functionality i relied on with the N95 - being replicated in the iPhone, so i installed Shazam and Shozu from the App Store as soon as i got home over my home wireless network. (They’re both free, however i expect Shazam will start to charge some time soon) I tested both these apps right away and was very pleased with their level of compatibility (in terms of GUI Navigation) with the iPhone.

When i got the phone it was on about 75% charge and by the time i had finished playing with it (which included watching a 1 hour episode of Top Gear from the BBC iPlayer iPhone interface, syncing some music and video podcasts and of course installing the apps… the battery level was around 50%

First job this morning when i had some o2 signal was to get my office push email set up on there to pull my contacts and mail down off our exchange server…. now I’m used to this being done on my N95 using Nokias free app ‘Mail For Exchange’ and the setup process is a little cumbersome to say the least, you have many fields to fill in before you can proceed. When it came to setting it up on my iPhone, it was done and fully synced within minutes - so a big big thumbs up there. Another big plus with the iPhone Exchange Support is that you can view all folders in your mailbox! By default it pulls down the folder hierarchy and you can select a folder to view and it will pull down the relevant mails. Winner.

We then had the obligatory GPS / Google Maps test while in the car share journey to the office which totalled about 30 mins of GPS tracking while receiving emails. I was expecting this to have some impact on the battery (I’m very used to my N95 being attached to a plug socket to get topped up with juice after performing these functions) but to my surprise, the battery level hardly moved! Again, thumbs up here.

Next job was changing the ringtone (for a quick guide on how to do this follow this link

I spent the majority of the rest of the day with push email turned on along with GPS and WiFi all while listening to some albums…and the battery held up surprisingly well!

I would rate the Apple Store staff very highly following my 2 hour (and first ever) experience in there last night - so thanks to them for keeping the spirits up of the folks in the queue.

I’m 24 hours in, and I’m already convinced that as of right now, this is the ultimate phone on the market. There’s nothing on the market today by Nokia or HTC to name two major competitors that can even come close to the sheer usability and design of this phone. Sure there are a few niggles - poor camera / no copy paste / non replaceable battery / no video recording…..but what this phone does do… it does very very well.

I hope my enthusiasm remains!

I hope to test the directions function in Google maps tomorrow so I’ll report back then

I’m pretty sure that this information is all over the net, but to be honest it’s here mostly as a resource for myself and my iPhone-owning friends to be easy to find.

To add a custom ringtone, you need to follow these steps.

• Locate an mp3 you want to use as a ring tone
• If its a full song, trim it down to 30 seconds long (by using an audio file editing package such as Adobe Audition)
• Now import this 30 second file into iTunes
• Right click it in the library and select convert to AAC
• Find this new file and move if out of your library folder
• Rename the extension from .m4a to .m4r
• Import it back into iTunes - it will then be recognized as a ringtone
• Sync to your iPhone and bob’s your uncle!