Jasonified.

Best thing is that it works with a slim case STILL fitted on the iPhone.

In January 2009 I made this post this post in which I commented on why I thought we would never see Flash on the iPhone.

I didn’t believe it was a performance or stability issue - I believed it was Apple ensuring that their Appstore was the ONLY appstore on the iPhone.

(jail broken phones excluded of course)

The fact is, allowing Adobe to put Flash on the iPhone is basically allowing them to run their own Appstore of Flash based applications and this represents a threat to Apple.

With the release of the iPad we’re seeing discussion on this again but do Apple know something we don’t - will HTML5 make Flash obsolete?

Comments welcome

So Google have finally released the Nexus one “superphone” which apparently is going to challenge the iPhone.

Or is it?

What most people seem to be missing is a fundamental flaw with Android phones which is the limitation of App storage.

The G1 and Droid allow 256mb of App storage.

The Nexus one? 512mb

The iPhone? 32gb

Apple have had 3 billion App downloads, and tens of thousands of apps in the app store. There is no doubt that mobile app downloads are key moving forward.

We are told that the nexus (and possibly other Android phones) will allow storage to an SD card later with a firmware update but why has this not been addressed now?

It seems Google have made a massive mistake and are glossing over it. There will be a lot of disappointed Nexus users especially those that will switch from the iPhone.

www.google.com/fail

You may have heard recently that O2 have lost the exclusive agreement to sell the iPhone in the UK. As a result they are allowing users to unlock their iPhones for other carriers.

This unlock method differs from jailbreaking apps as it’s a legal, authorised and a permanent unlock. This means if you update your firmware your unlock will remain in place.

It’s really simple to carry out the unlock. Just visit http://shop.o2.co.uk/update/unlockmyiphone.html and click on the unlocking form link.

You’ll need to enter some details including the IMEI no. of your phone (dial *#06# in the phone app to get your code) and within either minutes (or days in my case) you’ll get a text message confirming your phone is unlocked. Next just put your new Sim card into your iPhone, plug into iTunes and you should be unlocked.

The only conditions are a) this is only available to contract users who have to pay £10 within contract and fulfill the rest of their contract or b) your are a pay as you go customer who has had the phone a year.

Having said that I know of people who have filled in the form with the code of a pay as you go phone and O2 have unlocked it!

Unlocking your iPhone in this way will make it possible to upgrade the firmware without having to wait for a patched version and can make your iPhone more attactive in the 2nd hand market.

For £10 it’s well worth it.

Recently I upgraded to the iPhone 3GS and noticed almost immediately a significant drop in battery life. The first day of usage I was seeing the %age meter drop at an alarming rate ending up with about 5 hours of standby in the first day.

After some initial testing I realised that my usage time was increasing (albeit at a slower rate than the standby time) but even when the phone was idle.

To quickly explain “usage” and “standby”, Usage is how long you’ve used the phone including background tasks like push, fetching e-mail, receiving SMS messages etc. Standby is how long the phone has been switched on and includes usage time. So, if you have 10 hours standby and 5 hours usage this doesn’t mean you’ve had 15 hours in total. It means the phone has been switched on for 10 hours and of that, you’ve had 5 hours usage.

Anyway, what I noticed quite quickly was that when my usage time was say, 1 hour 30 minutes and the phone was left on standby for 10 minutes, it would end up showing 1 hour and 36 minutes of usage. This didn’t add up.

The first thing was to turn off Push and immediately there was an improvement. This isolated the issue and so I tried removing the account, re-adding the account etc. I even tried switching to another test, Exchange server and running that with Push - nothing improved the situation unless I turned push OFF or used a different Exchange server and account.

Having determined that it was a combination of the 3GS, Push AND my Exchange server I went into Exchange, created a new folder and MOVED all my Inbox e-mail to a new folder “Old Inbox” leaving the default Inbox blank.

Problem solved.

The issue was *something* to do with e-mails in my Inbox which were causing the 3GS to almost continually be connected to the account. This was confirmed when I studied the log files on the Exchange server and could see in the days leading up to the 3GS switchover, file sizes of a few meg in size. Immediately after the switchover the file sizes quadrupled in size and once I applied the fix, returned to normal again.

What’s interesting is I didn’t get this on my 3G, only the 3GS.

Anyway I now have the battery life I’d expect on the 3GS and it’s significantly better than that of the 3G even with Push e-mail and Push notifications switched on in OS 3.0

If you’re using Exchange, the 3G/3GS and Push e-mail and experiencing battery life issues, I hope this helps!

I took my 3GS back yesterday to the O2 store in Basingstoke, UK. Over the last week I noticed some dust particles behind the screen so a call to O2 confirmed it was a fault, under warranty and they’d swap it out.

If you have any issues with dust behind the screen of your new iPhone, my advice is to take it back to be replaced - I’ve also heard Apple stores will do a straight swap too.

My first thoughts on the new 3GS:-

It’s fast. Everything is snappier, apps load faster and 3D games are massively improved. Calendar loads my Exchange, Caldav and several iCal calendars almost instantly.

It does close-ups. The camera is so much better with spot focus and incredible Macros.

It’s less smudgy. The screen is much better, more slick and definitely retains less marks.

It’s off colour. Compare a 3G to a 3GS and you’ll notice the screen has a yellow hint on the 3GS. This is usually down to Apple messing with calibration and usually it’s sw fixable.

It records video. Easy, simple and fast. Click, record, email or upload to YouTube.

It’s loud. Not sure if it’s me or my old phone is not right but the speaker seems MUCH louder playing music/sounds.

I can’t say much for battery life at the moment as it was semi-charged and ideally needs to be completely run down and recharged. I usually find new iPhones take several cycles and a few days to get into the right mood.

The Apple WWDC conference is looming and so is the announcement of the device (or devices) that will be running the 3.0 OS.

The latest beta 5 of the OS was released some weeks ago and Beta 6 has been expected but is weeks late. Rumors are that this is because Beta 6 would be adding functionality and applications that would reveal too much about the new device most notably video recording.

Next week the developer conference kicks off and we’re expecting to see the announcement and presentation of the new device and the final release of OS 3.0.

So what can we expect?

Here’s a run down of expectations:-

• New case. the new case will do away with the chrome surround and change the backing of the device to improve grip.
  
  
• Headphone jack change. this will be repositioned to the bottom of the device.
  
  
• New camera. an improved 3+ megapixel camera is expected with video recording capability.
  
  
• Front camera. A front facing camera will allow video calls and provide iChat support.
  
  
• Flash. the Apple logo will double as a flash for taking pictures in low light.
  
  
• Video recording/editing. the new device will be focusing on video allowing recording of clips which could be sent via MMS, e-Mail even uploaded to YouTube or Mobile Me. Basic video editing could also be included.
  
  
• Nike+ support. Added to the latest iPod Touch there’s no reason not to expect this.
  
  
• Compass. A digital compass will enable turn by turn GPS.
  
  
• FM Radio. ;no more streaming radio over GPRS/3G/Wifi.
  
  
• OLED Screen. better screen and battery life.
  
  
• Battery life. lots of improvements to optimise battery life and extend it by 1.5x
  

Came across a strange issue today. Yesterday my iPhone running 3.0 beta 5 was playing up. It was as if the clock and battery had been screen captured and were appearing under existing icons with the wrong time/level. Bizarro.

Anyway, I tried to reboot, it wouldn’t start up giving me the apple logo. I hard reset and it came back saying “iPhone activated”.

Once it was back none of my 3rd party apps would launch. They would just startup and quit immediately.

The fix is surprisingly simple. Log into Appstore and install ANY app. Launch it to test then launch the apps that were crashing, they should work.

HOWEVER you must do this in all iTunes accounts you have or any apps installed from other accounts / stores won’t work. I did this in my UK and US account and all working fine now.

iPhone 3.0 brings Caldav support allowing you to run multiple calendars and view them individually or together in a single view.

This is ideal if you have your primary calendar for work (on Exchange for example) and your personal calendar with Google. Now you can see all entries across them at the same time whilst accessing each individually.

This article has a great description of how to setup Caldav for Google and it works great. Using this technique I can run two seperate Calendars on the same phone.