iMessage sent as sms/mms text
Something to watch out, well for me since @o2 changed their policy on sending MMS is that an iMessage can go as a SMS/MMS message out of your allowance if it is unavailable. This only applies to the iPhone (actually I don't know about iPad with 3G) but you can turn this feature on or off in within Settings > Messages > Send As SMS (see image below).
Apple support doc: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3529
Cost of iPhone 4s with o2
With O2 finally releasing their tarrifs last night I was looking at the tariff and phone costs for iPhone 4S this morning and thought this might be helpful for anyone else doing the same. It does not include data plan as thats a personal preference or 24 month plans as they're crazy :)
Apple store is down
I've been using my iPhone 3g for over 3 years 3 months (longest I've ever kept one phone) so this update cannot come fast enough?
Anyone else making the jump to the 4s or still waiting to see what October 11th and Google Nexus Prime brings to the table?
Happy new year to everyone
Thanks to all the people that follow mytweets and blog posts. 2010 hasn't been the greatest of years for me personally but here is to 2011 being a lot better! (with more posts)
Twitter iPhone has been updated to 3.2.1
Probably my most used app on the iPhone, Twitter, has just released a dot update.
- Push notifications for @mentions and messages
- Enable geotagging in your account with one tap
- Improved display of shortened URLs
- Fix connection error caused by a device clock being set incorrectly
- Additional retina graphics
You can get the full picture and download here.
Now if only they would update Tweetie for Mac as recent news has been saying it isn't dead yet.
username and password not verified with twitter app
Recently I have not been able to use my Twitter iPhone app due to getting the message:
Your username and password could not be verified. Double check that you entered them correctly and try again.
Google didn't really help me then I got an iCal reminder from an event in August and it dawned on my that my date/time wasn't set correctly. As it turns out my phone thought it was August 28th 2010 today (really its October 24th 2010). A quick change and it all works fine. It would of been nice if the error descriptions was a little bit more detailed but its working now and hopefully this helps someone else.
n.b. I am aware as well about getting the iPhone to set the date & time automatically which I thought I had - subsequently its set now
Don't sell me 500mb/month limit and tell me its good
O2 are putting in a low, 500mb a month (thats around 16mb a day, don't forget that!), limit for mobile data and their excuse reason is:
"We don't think it's fair that the many should subsidise the behaviour of the few, and we think that we have a responsility to our customers to address this kind of imbalance." ... "97% of our smartphone customers currently use less than 500MB of data every month"
To me that actually says "3% of our users are causing such a strain on our network everyone needs to pay the price"
You can argue that some people might only use 200mb/month and thats fine, but thats what they are using today! As core functionality like "facetime" (which Nokia and a lot of other phones had before it was "new") and HD video become the norm this is going to go up, quickly!
Lets put 16mb per day in to context. Using typical examples from O2 this is how it breaks down:
| Usage per day! | |
| YouTube video (4.5 mins) | 2 videos |
| Music track download low quality) | 1.6 trakcs! If you use spotify premium or last.fm. BOOM! |
| Basic web page (100KB) | 166. Facebook before you login is 86 KB |
| Rich web page (300KB) | 50. My twitter.com page is 246KB so that is 50 page refreshes |
When you look at these figure and think, "I won't look at 166 basic web pages a day" just remember you need to include all the other apps which are also using your bandwidth like emails and push services. Start going in to a app like Dropbox and pulling up that PDF then thats your daily limit gone quite quickly.
I'm not just saying "give me unlimited". I'm not stupid. "Network resources are finite. You can't offer infinite consumption of finite resources". All I am saying is find out why these 3% are using 1Gb a month (or more) and see what needs to change there. It might be as simple as the 3% are jailbreaking their phones to tether to their machines. In which case they are breaking the TOC so dump them.
I don't know the right answer here, but 500mb is the wrong one! Before we commit to anything as users we need to know some basic information:
- over the last 12 month have I even come close to the 500mb limit?
- can i put a restriction in place to physically stop me from going over the limit?
- how well (and accurately) will this be reported to me? (And don't say by text message as that uses the precious, buckling, network that we are trying to protect)? *there is sarcasm in there*
Update: Once you hit your limit your data speed will slow down. You will not be charged more. Which is nice!
My blog has moved
Please update your bookmarks and feeds for my site.
I now have a Mango Blog at:
http://www.andyjarrett.com/blog
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/andyjarrett
Turn your iphone into a wireless hard drive for free
I don't really talk about apps on my iPhone that I've downloaded but in this case I figured it was well worth blogging about.
A couple of things to point out Air Sharing before I go on;
- This is a actual app from the app store, so no need to jailbreak your iPhone
- Its only free for the first two weeks. Then it goes to its regular price of $6.99
- The next, 1.01 update is going to be free too
Air Sharing is a new application for the iPhone that basically turns the phone into a wireless, mountable, hard drive. With the app running you can drag and drop files on to and off the iPhone and what's even better is that it can be mounted to any Mac, Windows and Linux PC. Alternatively the files are accessible via a web browser. For security there is the option to password protect the folders, or allow guest access to a public location.
Air Sharing also acts asa viewer, so from the phone you can view any of the files in the following formats: iWork, Office, Web Archive, Web Page, PDF, HTML, RTF, RTFD, Plain Text, Source Code, MPEG-4, H.264, 3GPP, Images, etc.
Take screenshots in/on the iPhone
If you haven't seen the entries floating around already, you can take screen shots of your iPhone with the new v2 upgrade.
To take a screen shot all you have to do hold down the home key (bottom square button) and push in the top button. The screen then will flash for a second then you're done. You'll find the image on your camera roll where you can sync it up to your Mac/PC and do what you want with it.
You can see a live demo in action atCnet