Posted in Apple, Technology

Siri Has an Attitude (and knows the answer to ultimate question of life)

Well it seems as the iPhone 4S starts to trickle down to the rest of us over the next 24 hours, (or later) there are others who are already having some hands on time with the SIRI beta inside the iPhone 4s. I saw an article yesterday in which Jason Snell of MacWorld.com got to play with the SIRI beta in about an 11 minute video. If you go to about 5:18 in the video, you will see a funny reference to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book/movie.

Continue to watch, because just after that, it seems the SIRI programmers have added some quick wit to the digital assist as well. It’s a pretty funny little bit to watch. It’s pretty cool to watch exactly what SIRI can do on the iPhone 4S, and because it is still in Beta, there is a lot to be done. I do think, on a side note, that SIRI will come to the iPhone 4, eventually. Either way, as more and more people get their hands on the iPhone 4S, they are all trying out the new digital assistant to see what all it can do. There is even a few videos out there showing us what happens if you tell SIRI “I love you“. So as the days come and some of you start messing with it, let me know what you come up with. In the mean time, I think that this is the best one yet, and it happened just before iFixit started to do the teardown of the phone.

iFixit: “Siri, may we disassemble you for all to see?”

iPhone 4S (Siri): “42”

iFixit: “I didn’t ask for the meaning of life, Siri…”

iPhone 4S (Siri): “42 is the number of seconds you have left until I initiate the self-destruct sequence…”

iFixit: “Message received.”

-Rusty G

Posted in Apple, Rants, Technology

Stop Cluttering my Screen with CRAP Apple!

Maybe I am the only one seeing this, as the iOS gets updated EVERY year, but I am seriously getting ticked at the amount of icons that I have to have on the home screen. Remember iOS 1? Those were the simple times. Look at this, my iPhone from stock now has to have 2 home screens to fit everything on it!


What?!?! If you saw my post earlier, you saw I already don’t like the idea of Music and Video being separated into two different apps. They are doing the same function. Playing media, you know what else USED to do that? the iPod app. I don’t want my iPhone looking like an iPod Touch. It looks tacky. The bad part is, even apple groups together the crap you don’t use, under utilities. Voice Memos, which seemed to have turned blue? Did I miss that? Contacts? Why did we ever pull that out of the phone app? That is duplicating what you already have. I guess there was such an outcry to have a one click access to it? Who really uses the compass? The only utility I use is the calculator. I don’t use Weather or Stocks and I hardly use the notes app. Oh wait, we added a ‘new’ app. Reminders. I guess this adds a checklist or some other feature to reminders that are already in the calendar. I just won’t really ever use it. Also, why can’t the iTunes and App store be one icon? When I click on the iTunes store on the PC or Mac, it’s one place, why not on the phone too? I don’t need all this crap filling up my screen before I even get started. I LOVED the folders when they finally implemented it in iOS 4, and I think it was a GREAT design choice. Less clutter is better! Oh, Newsstand and Gamecenter, I don’t like you much either. I use the feature of gamecenter RARELY to find people to play with, but I never actually click on the icon. I don’t think I will ever use Newsstand either. The phone just has too small of a screen to read anything on. ALTHOUGH, the new reader feature in Safari is great! (Another GREAT design choice!) Why can’t I pick a custom install where I get to choose what shows up? Just like iBooks, I don’t have to install it, but if I want to, it is a free download away. Please work on this in the future. Maybe iOS 5.1? Here’s to dreaming.

Posted in Apple, Rants

iOS 4.3.1 Data issues and strange uploads – Phoning Home?

Ok, so I have a really weird data leak and I need help with it, as it seems I am not getting any help from AT&T or Apple. AT&T can’t tell me where my data is going, and Apple hasn’t heard of this issue as of yet, which I guess is fine, since it is only a 10 day old issue. I’ll see if anyone else has this and can help, or maybe an Apple Rep can help.

Lost yet? I’ll give you the background. I have had an iPhone 4 (GSM) on iOS 4.1 for the longest time because of the jailbreaks not being untethered until recently. I don’t upgrade my phones software unless the jailbreak is untethered and confirmed for Windows (either redsn0w or greenp0ison). I saw this tweet from the iPhone Dev Team saying that iOS 4.3.1 was jailbroken untethered, and jumped in! I skipped iOS 4.2, 4.2.1 & 4.3 because of jailbreaks that were tethered, and were lost once you rebooted the phone. Well let’s just say EVERYTHING was fine and dandy on 4.1.. but then I upgraded to 4.3.1.

For the Find my iPhone that was added in 4.2, and the personal hotspot that was added in 4.3.

So I updated and started having issues. With my themes, the background for the Lock Screen and Home Screen had gone missing in my themes. When I tried to apply a different theme, I kept getting a black background with a square and blue question mark. So it looked like from 4.1 to 4.3.1, Apple has changed the location of the home screen and lock screen wallpaper locations. No problem, I just moved the wallpaper to the locations that the themes were looking for them, instead of trying to find where Apple had moved the new ones, or possibly renamed them, to make them harder to fine. Stupid Apple.

Ok, so I kind of did a work around to make my theme work, but I used to be able to change my background in the settings on the phone, now I will have to use iFile or SSH into the phone from my laptop to change my wallpaper. Stupid Apple.

Then I came across this little gem today… My iPhone is apparently sending CRAP loads of data either late late at night or early in the morning, at the cost of 300+MB a pop! It’s a good thing I have the “Unlimited” 5GB of data. So let’s start a timeline here so you get an idea where I am going with this.

April 4th 2011 – roughly around 10:30PM I backup 4.1, before I update to 4.3.1 as you see below.

Just for reference I started my new career as a Tier 1 Tech Support on Tuesday 4/5/11 the next morning at 8am.

So the first full week goes by of me being at my job, and we finally got desks, workstations and laptops on Friday 4/8/11.

Then yesterday, Wednesday the 13th, for the first time in a long time, I booted up Pandora (over 3G) just after getting to work at 8am. I let it run pretty much all day, except for my 1 hour lunch break and left to go home at 5pm. So we can say roughly 8 hours out of the day, I ran Pandora. Then today (4/14) I did the same, booted up Pandora and for say maybe 7 hours of the day, because I paused it a lot more because of meetings and conversations I was having in the office. So we have a total of 15 hours of Pandora being used in a two day period. That’s it.(They have a 40 hour cutoff for free accounts)

So I went to check my usage on my account since I have a 5GB cap. Wow was I surprised! I went to investigate and found a few little instances where my Phone was spitting out some serious amounts of data, and at times I wasn’t even awake!! The worst part, is that it was doing it over 3G and not my wireless connection. So let’s see those “issues”:

See that? What happened here? I have a lot of data being used across my phone. And I don’t know how either. So I looked into it, and it seems that I have had over 2.5GB used in the past 10 days, which is what the at&t account page lets me see. So let me put this in a table like view, so it’s all grouped together.

364,139KB (355.6MB) 04/05/11 11:47pm (im in bed asleep by 10 or 10:30pm)
322,353KB (314.8MB) 04/06/11 11:12pm (asleep)
138,392KB (135.15MB) 04/10/11 07:46pm (I was up, but watching netflix on my xbox)
359,160KB (350.74MB) 04/10/11 11:13pm (asleep, but later that night)
448,801KB (438.28MB) 04/11/11 10:56pm (asleep, the next day)
675,764KB (659.93MB) 04/13/11 06:49am (i don’t wake up till 7am)

The thing that gets me, is this is all since I update to 4.3.1 on the 4th. Now I think someone will say that it is because I have a jailbroken phone, but you can’t say that, because I have had a jailbroken phone since iPhone 2G. I always jailbreak them. I also noticed that I was having battery issues as well, and my battery was getting worse than before. See below:

So then I thought, let’s go back to the previous months to see what my data use was. AT&T has a data calculator to show you what you have used historically so you can make decisions on changing packages. So let’s see what that looks like.

Wow. Nowhere close. Except for Christmas, because I was out of town and using tethering on my iPhone for my laptop when I couldn’t get a good landline cable or DSL connection. Nothing over .5GB at all. That seems to be my normal usage (skipping December) for the last 6 months, well 5. So you see what I mean? I think I need to go back to 4.1. The only problem is, I will lose Photoshop Express because they quit supporting 4.1 and I can’t have the latest version of the app if I go back. Boo..

I need help. Any others with this problem? Can you help? Leave comments below or check out the two threads I have joined on the Apple forums.

4.3.1 bug by Judyabro

or the one I started (with the exact same question)

Magical Overnight Data Uploads or just plainly data loss

I’ll link back to this page as well.

Posted in Apple, Technology

At&t adds 2GB wifi hotspot option for $20

Well with no attendance of Apple at MacWorld for the last 2 years, it seems there isn’t any Apple news coming out at all, except for this little nugget. It seems the Wifi hotspot feature that is going to be standard on the Verizon iPhone, will soon be standard as well on the AT&T iPhone as well. The developers have seen the beta version of iOS 4.3, and it seems to be good. With this update, the software does allow for the iPhone to become a hotspot, but that doesn’t mean anything on the carrier side. So one half of the idea is soon to be. It sounds like Apple will be releasing the 4.3 update on Valentines Day. The good thing is, it seems that AT&T agreed to add this option to the iPhone and well, all other smartphones that support it. In a press release from last week, it seems that date will be February 13th that this goes live. The package will be an extra 2GB for $20/month. So it seems that the 14th release date of the 4.3 seems to be right in line with the new option. So this seems to be getting more expensive to have an iPhone and have it run its full capacity.

$39.99/month minimum Voice Plan

$25/month for 2GB of Data

or

$15/month for 200MB of Data

or

$30/month for ‘unlimited’ (for original customers who are grandfathered in, or those who lost it and get it back)

Then there is texting:

$20 for unlimited

Then however you want to connect to your iPhone and share the data:

$20/month for tethering

or

$20/month for wifi hotspot

CRAP!

via [Engadget]

Posted in Apple, Technology

Verizon iPhone Review for Everyone!

Ok, so I am not switching to Verizon, and I am still loving the AT&T iPhone 4 that I have, but there are a lot of you who would love to get one or jump ship over to the Dark Side, so this is for you.

Today is the day that all Verizon wanna be’s and Verizon current subscribers have waited for. Well at least the latter half can in a few hours. All pre-orders for the iPhone 4 on Verizon for already existing customers starts somewhere around 2 or 3am CST, I think… double check me on that, it may be midnight, I don’t know. BUT, before you make that jump, I wanted to make sure you had some more information. There were a lot of reviews out there today, and there were some one sided reviews, so I went through a couple to give you a run-down of what everyone had to say. So here goes:

CNET:

CNET was a little one sided, but they are in San Francisco, and I will say, it seems AT&T is a slower more horrible connection on the west coast. They seemed to lean to the Verizon of things, but it is great if you live in San Francisco! So you can see the full review over at http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-20030471-233.html or even the Kent German run down over at http://reviews.cnet.com/verizon-iphone.

The funny thing was they said the new iPhone doesn’t have 4G, and that was a complaint. Well news for ya, according to the governing body that sets the standards for 4G, NO ONE has 4G yet!

I do like the audio quality test they did, but again, that is in San Fransisco.

Engadget:

Engadget was little better as far as being a little less biased, but it did seem AT&T seemd to win out with them. Now I don’t know where they are based out of; I think it’s New York, I don’t know. You can see their full review over at http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/02/verizon-iphone-review/. I will say, wherever they tested at, AT&T KILLED the data speeds. Awesome. They didn’t seem to get into the testing as much as CNET did, but still a good overall review.

TechCrunch:

TechCrunch seems to hate AT&T as well and he already canceled his AT&T account by using Google Voice as his replacement. I don’t particularly think that is a good way of going about things, but if you don’t like the service, you don’t like the service. You can read their full review over at http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/verizon-iphone-review/.

One of the biggest complaints I would have for the Verizon iPhone is not having the ability to do data and voice at the same time. The wifi hotspot has no means to me, since I have a jailbroken iPhone and I have MiWi or whatever it is. And I don’t have to pay the extra $20/month.

I am sure there are other reviews out there, so make sure you get a well rounded idea before you make the leap. Google it, or check over at ArsTechnica or CrunchGear….

oh by the way.. guess who didn’t get a review unit? GIZMODO!!! ha ha ha ha!!!!