Why Buy An Apple iPhone?

The Apple iPhone 3G S is a kind of phone that has grown on the fame of the first generation. In addition to the entirety of well-loved applications and innovations, it also offers a speedier internet connection made possible by the 3G or third-generation wireless internet network. This phone however, is typically for those that have yet to purchase an iPhone. There are many design features on the iPhone that will draw new people to both the iPhone and Apple’s products.

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The first advantage is the high quality of the calls, proving that Apple made an excellent decision in forming an alliance with AT&T wireless. Whether you have 2G or 3G you will get superior sound quality as it is a network with a huge bandwith and excellent support. However, you will experience the occasional dropped call. The 3G is more refined, and allows for a greater call experience.

The new generation of iPhone comes with innovative asthetic features! As an example, the recessed headphone jack was a typical complaint for the first model. This really made it harder to utilize headphones other than the ones that had been produced by Apple. Many of these flaws are resolved in the iPhone’s new design. The second model even has a change in the plating at the back. Rather than the aluminum backing we’re used to, this Apple model has a plastic backing. These design features allow the phone to be lighter. Well for all of you who like to send text messages with their phones on flat serfaces you may not like the round back.

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The App Store is the most important new feature. You don’t need iTunes anymore to get an application because you can buy and download them right on your iPhone. It is hoped that many of the flaws in iTunes will be resolved sooner rather than later. There are an increasing number of apps, thus adding to the Apple iPhone 3G S’s functionality. It is still the most versatile mobile you can purchase due to this handy feature.

The second generation model possesses other features which we would anticipate from an iPhone. The iPhone 3G S maintains its outstanding media player which boasts awesome sound and video quality. The iPhone 3G S boasts stunning video quality. It has a 5 inch Liquid Crystal Display.
The altering of storage options is one of the newer innovations. The new model comes in 16 GB along with 8 GB features. The original model’s storage offerings have been discontinued, as per a corporate decision.

The wonderful cost is one more great feature in the iPhone 3G S.
The two types have been offered for $199 and $299, making them excellent deals with the options that they have.

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Is Apple giving Opera for iPhone the Google Voice treatment?

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When Opera Software submitted their browser to the App Store, there was a flurry of blog posts and speculation as to whether it would be approved or rejected.

Fifteen days have passed since then, with neither approval nor rejection being announced.

Granted, Apple has been extremely busy with the launch of the iPad. However, we have heard of developers getting applications approved in a matter of hours. If Apple has amped up enough reviewers to make sure that iPad and other applications are moving through the approval process swiftly, why has Opera languished?

I don’t have any insider knowledge on how applications get reviewed, but I keep imagining a huge building full of cubicles with reviewers hunched over computers. Each time “Opera” pops up on the review screen, the reviewer presses “Return To Queue” because none of them want to be the one who either rejects it or approves it.

Perhaps Opera has been stuck in the same holding pattern that Google Voice has been in for the past 7 and a half months. If Apple has actually rejected the Google Voice app, then Google has kept quiet about it. That’s entirely possible, although I’m not sure why they would. They had no problem making it clear that Apple required them to rewrite Google Latitude as a Web app. Perhaps they don’t want to do anything to strain their working relationship with Apple, which is reportedly very tense in some areas.

TUAWIs Apple giving Opera for iPhone the Google Voice treatment? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Why I will buy an iPad, and think you should too

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Cory Doctorow doesn’t like the iPad because it is laden with DRM. In other news today: water is still wet.

Joel Johnson and John Gruber already took apart one aspect of Cory’s argument, the kid tinkering/creating with his new computer.

I’m going to focus on another part of it: my mom.

Last year my mom called me and wanted to buy a new laptop. Her old e-Machine, which I had routinely patched, updated, and kept going as long as I could, would no longer work.

She saw a US$400 laptop in the Sunday paper and asked me what I thought about it. I told her that she would be much better off spending more and getting a refurbished MacBook. She bought the $400 laptop anyway.

When I asked her why, she said that someone at work told her she couldn’t take home files from work if she had a Mac. When I asked her what kind of files, she said “Oh, mostly Word and Excel.” She was surprised when I told her that not only was there a version of Office for Mac, but it was actually newer than the Windows version.

TUAWWhy I will buy an iPad, and think you should too originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mail Notifier subscription service for the iPhone

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When Apple introduced ActiveSync and Push email support for iPhone email, there were two reactions: 1) “Yay!” and 2) “What’s this going to mean for battery life?” Any sort of “push” technology will reduce the battery life, but it is a trade-off many people are willing to make, especially when it comes to email.

Mail Notifier is one of several applications in the App Store designed to avoid the battery drain of keeping an active connection to your mail server. I’ve been using it for a couple of months and it has worked very well with my Gmail (actually, “Google Apps”) account. In fact, there have been times when I was sitting at my computer and my iPhone told me I had mail even before I saw it in Mailplane. Does it actually save on battery life? That’s a difficult question to answer without doing tests in a controlled environment, but anecdotally and unscientifically I would say that it does seem to have improved my battery life.

One of the nice features that Mail Notifier offers is the ability to set a “silent period” when you won’t be disturbed by alerts. This is something that I wish Apple would provide globally, i.e. “Disable all push notifications between 11pm-8am” or each push application would implement individually, e.g. “If it is my move in Words With Friends during the day, play a sound and display an alert, but if it’s my move between 11pm and 8am, just display an alert, but keep quiet. I might be sleeping.”

Mail Notifier is also said to work with free Hotmail accounts and AOL, although I did not test either of those. If you use webmail instead of Mail, you can setup Mail Notifier to open a web page instead of the Mail app. You can also setup different sounds for different accounts. That is a handy function if you have more than one mail account, or if you have a “multiple iPhone household” and want to avoid the “Which one of us just got an email?” confusion.

Overall, the app has worked very well, and as advertised. However, there is some “small print” to attend to. I was surprised to see a large number of 1-star reviews on the Mail Notifier iTunes/App Store page. Then, I noticed a list of “top in-app purchases” for Mail Notifier. As I scrolled down to read the comments, I found that most of the 1-star reviews seemed to be about the fact that Mail Notifier is actually a subscription service, rather than just a one-time purchase. This came as a surprise to me. I was provided with a review code (see note below) that must have included at least 1 year of service, since I have not seen any renewal notices in the app. I did some looking around to see just how obvious this would be to a new user who happened to be browsing the App Store.

My conclusion is that it really depends on whether you came in through iTunes on a Mac or Windows computer, or whether you used the App Store on an iPhone or iPod touch.

Read on to see more.

TUAWMail Notifier subscription service for the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gmail enables OAuth, Syphir for iPhone already using it

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Google has introduced OAuth authorization for Gmail, meaning that approved applications can access your Gmail account without you giving them access to your Gmail username and password.

OAuth has been used as Flickr and Twitter for some time, but is a new development for Google.

Previously, if you wanted to get push notifications on your iPhone when you received a message at Gmail, you had two options: trust a third-party application with your username and password, or automatically forward a copy of all of your email to a different email address and trust that they would not save a copy of your email. As you can imagine, neither of those made security-conscious users very comfortable.

There is already an iPhone app available which uses OAuth, SmartPush ($2.99) by Syphir promises to give you finer control over notifications from Gmail on your iPhone. We hope to have a review of SmartPush here on TUAW in the near future, so stay tuned for that.

TUAWGmail enables OAuth, Syphir for iPhone already using it originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple tweaking iPhone to work better on AT&T’s network

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Powerpage.org cites a Wall Street Journal article reporting that Apple has worked with AT&T to “rejigger” how the iPhone works with AT&T’s towers, resulting in a reduced load for some tasks. It was not clear what changes were made, but apparently a “crash course in wireless technology” allowed them to figure out how the iPhone can get along better with AT&T.

Such news indicates the lengths that Apple is willing to go to in order to be a good partner with AT&T. While few people are singing AT&T’s praises, apparently there is an effort within the company to improve the network in large cities to reduce the number of dropped calls. According to Powerpage, “A random performance test released in February found that AT&T’s 3G network speeds had improved by 84%.”

The problem is that AT&T’s 3G speed has never been the main issue. AT&T is, and has been, very happy to compare themselves to Verizon when it comes to 3G speed. When it comes to reliability (i.e. how well you can actually use that speed) and availability, however, AT&T’s 3G has consistently come up short.

Not to mention that whole tethering issue that AT&T hasn’t mentioned in several months, despite having originally promised it would be available by the end of 2009.
If Apple is working on a CDMA/Verizon-compatible iPhone, AT&T’s efforts are probably going to be too little, too late. After almost three years of consistently disappointing iPhone users with poor 3G availability, dropped calls, late availability of MMS, and even later availability of tethering (assuming it is ever available), iPhone owners have little reason to stay with the company.

TUAWApple tweaking iPhone to work better on AT&T’s network originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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SecondBar puts your menu bar on a second monitor

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The menu bar is a quintessential piece of the Mac “experience.” On the left, it shows all of the menu items for the currently active application; on the right, it shows icons from various menu bar application programs: the date/time, WiFi status, MobileMe sync status, and many, many more.

The whole idea is to make the menu items easy to find and easy to “hit” with a mouse, by being connected to the top of the screen (Fitts’s law and all that). But what if you have two monitors? Suddenly the menu bar might be all the way over on the other side. Yes, I realize that complaining about using a Mac with two monitors might be the quintessential “first-world problem,” but the more minor irritants you can remove from life, the better.

SecondBar is an app which will extend your menu bar to a second monitor. I’ve been using it for a while and it works pretty well for what the author describes as an “alpha” build.

TUAWSecondBar puts your menu bar on a second monitor originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Don’t panic over these iPad delivery exceptions

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UPS DeliveryLots of TUAW readers have written in today, worried about their iPad deliveries. Since they received shipment notices, many folks have been tracking their progress, and are now seeing messages like:

  • UPS INTERNAL ACTIVITY.
  • SHIPMENT IS HELD TO VERIFY COMMODITY DESCRIPTION WITH THE CUSTOMER FOR CORRECT CLASSIFICATION
  • “Your package has experienced an exception”

If you received one of these notices, you are not alone. Apple has taken similar measures in the past to make sure that deliveries do not arrive before the official release date. In fact, Boy Genius Report suggests that Apple is purposefully withholding clearance papers for the iPads to make sure that they are not delivered early.

As anxious as these next few days of waiting will be, and as nerve-racking as it is when this is your iPad, I fully expect that 99.99% of the iPads scheduled for delivery on Saturday will be delivered on Saturday.

We’ve also heard directly from someone who works “for a certain shipping company” who reports that they will have double the number of drivers out in their particular delivery area on Saturday, due to the increased traffic. I would expect that other areas would see similar increases. Nobody who works for a shipping company wants to have to go back to Apple and explain why they couldn’t meet delivery needs.

That being said, the same source does not expect exceptions to be made for areas without Saturday delivery, so you may have to wait until Monday for your iPad to be delivered. Don’t panic — we’re sure UPS will do everything it can to get your iPad to you on time. If you’re not sure about the delivery policy in your area, you may want to contact UPS to verify.

Image via UPS.com. Please note, this man is not actually delivering an iPad. If you see him, do not try to wrest it from his hand.

TUAWDon’t panic over these iPad delivery exceptions originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Steve Jobs can’t wait for your hands and fingers

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There have been no shortage of jokes and sniggers about the “iPad” since it was announced, and it’s getting more and more difficult to tell reality from a Saturday Night Live skit. Just the other day my non-technical wife asked me, in all sincerity, if “iPeriod” was a real Apple product (no, honey, just someone making a “joke” … but there is an app for that.)

Apple isn’t helping matters either. In the press release regarding the iPad’s imminent arrival, Steve Jobs is quoted as saying the “iPad connects users with their apps and content in a far more intimate and fun way than ever before” and “[w]e can’t wait for users to get their hands and fingers on it this weekend” in reference to the iPad’s “revolutionary Multi-Touch[TM].”

Really, Steve? Really?

The only people I expect to be this excited to get their “hands and fingers busy” over the weekend are teenagers who have just started dating.

Read on for more…

TUAWSteve Jobs can’t wait for your hands and fingers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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