Jasonified.

In a recent tweet I mentioned how I believed that location based services are going to be very “last year” and the new next big thing will be proxmity/vicinity services. In other words location puts you in a place and proximity puts you in a room, on a floor, outside a shop, next to a device etc.

(btw I’m not saying location itself is dead it’s just the first part of a process to enhance the offering - you need proximity for the detail)

Just now my Boxcar push notifications for twitter (which should work on my iPad and iPhone) were only coming through on the iPad and it got me wondering….

…wouldn’t it be neat to have a proxmity preference setting that said “I’d like to get push notifications but this is my preferred device (or my preferred device is the one I’m using/looking at) and if another device is nearby and has the same push settings, only display them here”

So, I can have my push notifications set on BOTH my iPad and iPhone but my (soon to be invented and make me millions of pennies) proximity system would ONLY notify me on my preferred device so I wouldn’t get multiple “pings”

One step further is to use my soon to be not invented or patented “proximity chip” (which would be fitted to a watch, ring, embedded under the skin etc) to detect *which* device I’m closest to and ONLY show the notification on that one!

Going further what if we ditch the ship and use a device with a camera that is kinect/3D/face aware which could throw it’s two pennies worth in, telling other devices that IT is the closest thing to me because I’m looking straight at it and so popup the message there.

Now that’s a future I can live in.

So Twitter finally rolled our push notifications for their iOS clients yesterday.

After waiting for “digital decades” (real world months) for Twitter/Tweetie to embrace push we have the finally ability to be notified via a pop-up message whenever anyone mentions us or sends us a message.

But wait, what about re-tweets? More importantly what about actually getting push notifications?

Up to now I’ve been using Boxcar to make up for the lack of push notifications on Twitter for iOS and it works perfectly. It’s almost instantaneous and not only covers entry level notifications like mentions and messages but also Re-tweets, new follows AND lets you know when you’re added to a list.

Since last night I’ve been running Boxcar on the iPad and Twitter with Push on the iPhone and the fact is Boxcar wins hands down.

In most cases Twitter either lags behind Boxcar or notifications simply don’t arrive and whilst Boxcar continues to light up with Re-tweets Twitter remains in its dozy slumber.

Add to this the fact that Boxcar can be fully configured with “Quiet times”, sounds and customisable notifications and the obvious question is why did Twitter bother?

(Oh and where’s the delete option in Twitter for iPad?)

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!