Looking at a post by MacRumors this morning almost had me laughing. I have been watching the IFA in Germany through many of the tech blog websites and seeing all of these cool new gadgets being announced. As I was watching the Samsung announcement, I was looking at their new GIANT Galaxy Note phone coming with a 5.3″ screen. WOW. What I had interest in was the overall design of the phone. I thought the phone had looked kind of familiar. I went back to look at the rumored iPhone design from Macrumors. Then I went back to the announcement of the new Samsung Phone. Wait a minute! See if you see what I see:
Wait a tick, if I move the camera over to the other side, and I make the button longer.. I would swear they are the same phone. Now this is a little early to tell. Especially since all the parts (parts, and more parts) are still leaking. So until the phone actually gets here we can’t say. I am having a hard time believing the phone will be different, especially since the one of the newest “leaks” show the same front face again! Even the same metal band that goes around the current iPhone 4, CDMA and GSM. The other rumor that seems be popping up is that there will be an 8GB cheaper version sold of the iPhone 4 or 4S due to the iCloud upgrade that is coming. This does make some sort of sense, so you can get more people on the iPhone and make more money. Why have huge memory when everything comes from the iCloud? All of this is pure speculation and rumor at this point, but we shall see in the coming months. I will say though, if they do go with the bigger screen and bigger home button, it looks a lot like Apple copied Samsung.
-Rusty G
Tag: apple iphone
White Unicorn iPhone is OFFICIAL
Even though Sony seems to be having issues with the PSN, and losing members credit cards, Apple seems to be having a BIG day; two major announcments from the big ‘A’. They finally made the official announcement that our iPhones are not tracking us, but that they are tracking local wifi and cell tower spots, to help improve and possibly bring future features via a “crowed-sourced traffic database”. (Sources:Apple Insider, Boy Genius Report, CNET, Engadget, TechCrunch,ArsTechnica & GigaOm)
As I said before, I don’t really care about the issue, but a lot of people do, so if you want, you can read all of the articles that said something about it, and form your own opinion.
The other BIG announcement from Apple was the WHITE iPhone!!!!!!!!!!! It’s been almost a year since the original announcement of the iPhone 4, being both in black and white, but we never saw the white iPhone materialize, but after a few days of rumors and retail store inventory screenshots, it is finally Official from Apple. We have a set date of April 28th (ArsTechnica, CrucnGear, Engadget, Boy Genius Report & CNET)!!So whip out your debit/credit card and head to the store. Now the issue I see for tomorrow is long lines and those who pre-ordered last June (2010). Will this cause a bottleneck limited supply issue? I would say yes, but only those in the tech world are really paying attention to this, and well, maybe those that pre-ordered it. My question is, will they get priority on the supply? I would think so. So I don’t have to be into work until 9AM tomorrow, so if any store is opening early for this launch, I will go. If not, I’ll just order one, or stop by a store here locally. I don’t think my town will have a huge supply of them here, so I may have to go with ordering one. I would keep watching these sites for further information, as AT&T may do an opening or Apple may open early. So go get your white unicorn iPhone!!
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.
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.
AT&T announces unlimited iPhone Data Plans again (kind of)
Well who didn’t see this one coming? It seems since Verizon officially announced the iPhone data plans, earlier this week, at $30 for ‘unlimited’ access, AT&T couldn’t stand by silently. It was last June (2010) that AT&T announced their new data plans for iPhone users, and it came at a price. If you were any new user of the iPhone or upgrading your plan, you could no longer get the ‘unlimited’ 5GB of data, but that you were paying for at most a 2GB data package for $25 instead of the previous $30. Now with the announcement of the iPhone 4 coming to Verizon, AT&T has to come back, but with a hitch. The only people currently allowed to get the ‘unlimited’ back, are the people who had it previously and lost it. WHO are these people??!! I ask because, if you remember when they started this new pricing plan, if you already had the ‘unlimited’, you got to keep it, and you were grandfathered in. So therefore, as long as you didn’t change your voiceplan or upgrade, there was no need to change your data package. Then if you were a new user who bought the iPhone 4 upon release, you never had the ‘unlimited’ in the first place, so that specific of a demographic is a VERY SMALL number. Wow, everyone else keeps talking about how AT&T sucks (Kevin Rose, Brian Tong & countless others), and I have stood by them because they don’t suck here in the southeast, and they have been a reliable provider since I had the original iPhone, but NOW, WOW! AT&T should just keep their traps shut, or go all out and just drop 2GB cap, and allow for every iPhone user to get that ‘unlimited’ plan for $30!
That’s my two cents..
via [CNET]
Monday 4/19 – Apple wants its iPhone back
Ok, so this whole day has turned into a crazy iPhone news day. In case you haven’t heard, the iPhone (4G – 4th gen, not 4g internet) was publicly released today as a leak. Apparently this guy Gray Powell who is working on the baseband software for the iPhone went out for a few drinks the day after St. Paddy’s day and got a little too drunk. In his drunkenness, he completely left the prototype phone at the bar. The guy who found it tried calling Apple, because it was remotely wiped and he had never seen one like it. A few weeks later it ended up in the hands of Gizmodo and the media hayday ensued.
There is now physical proof that this is the true thing, since Gizmodo was contacted and politely requested to turn the phone in by Apple.
The fun part is, they had it for quite a while and was able to give us some major details. There is a front facing camera, there is a flash. There is larger resolution screen; they don’t know the resolution, but it was obviously better. It uses a micro-SIM instead of the regular. The power button and the volume up and down buttons are all metallic and the phone is flat. There seems to be a mic next to the headphone jack (maybe noise cancellation). They also tore this thing apart and found a bigger battery. The backing also seems to be a clear plastic or glass (allowing cell signals to pass through).
NOW, the thing is, to see how Apple does damage control. Will this be the final phone that we see announced in June? Or will they scrap the whole thing and start over? Will thy change a few things?? What is to come???
Oh wait.. Here is Steve’s RE:
via [Gizmodo]
