Google Street View is now available in Hong Kong (as well as, Macau). If you haven’t heard of Street View, it’s a feature in Google Maps that provides panoramic views from various positions along many streets in the world.

Google Street View was first launched in May, 2007 and only available for major cities in U.S. As of today, the street view has been gradually rolled out to other international cities. Now, it finally comes to Hong Kong, my hometown.

Explore the World from Your Computer

If you haven’t never been to Hong Kong, you can just sit in front of your computer and point your browser to maps.google.com.hk to take a virtual walk. Telegraph has written up a handy guide if you do not know how to use Google Street View on computer.

Using Google Street View on iPhone

For iPhone user, you can also use the street view feature on iPhone’s Map application. Simply launch the Maps application and type in a location (say, “Central Hong Kong”). If street view is available for that location, there is a “person icon” displayed over the drop pin. Just tap on it and the map will bring you to the street view mode. You can then use your finger to drag around and walk through the street.

The wait is over. Starting from today, you can pre-order Apple’s iPad through its online store or reserve it at any Apple retail store. For now, pre-order is only available in U.S.

Should you pre-order the iPad? As mentioned by Informationweek, the initial supply of iPad may be limited:

Reports have been inconsistent about this, but there’s a possibility that initial demand may outstrip supply. If you’re serious about acquiring an iPad the first day it’s available for sale (April 3), pre-ordering is the best way. Apple is going to let users sign up and reserve a unit for in-store pick-up. Your odds of scoring an iPad will be much better than if you just show up at an Apple Store on launch day. I mean, seriously, more than, like, 10 people might be interested in your neck of the woods, so be sure to pre-order.

My take is if you love to be the early adopter of the “revolutionary” and “magical” device, remember to reserve an iPad via Apple’s website. But don’t forget you will still need to wait for another 3 weeks until you can actually get the hands-on with the iPad.

For international customers, Apple is going to release the iPad in late April. The exact release date will depend on the country you live in. If you’re so serious about the device and can’t wait for the official release, I can think of two ways to pre-order the iPad outside U.S. Either you can ask a friend to U.S. for help or you can use personal shopper service such as Bongo and MyUS which can purchase U.S. products on your behalf. However, expect to pay a premium for the handling fee and shipment cost.

ComputerWorld’s Gregg Keizer has written up a nice post about some common questions about the preorder. If you have any questions, you can further check it out here.

So, what’s your take? Pre-order or not pre-order?

DigiDNA has launched FileApp Pro and is now available for free download for 2 weeks only. In brief, FileApp Pro is a simply file and document manager for iPhone and iPod touch. It allows you to easily transfer files from computer to iPhone via WiFi and manage them on the go.

Advertised as a document manager, not only you can view various types of files, FileApp Pro offers additional features to manipulate files and folders on your device. Some of the features include file renaming, move files/folder, copy file/folder, compress & decompress file/folder, as well as, folder creation. If you need to create a simple text file, FileApp Pro also provides option for you to create and edit text file.

Similar to other document reader applications (e.g. AirSharing), FileApp Pro also comes with a document viewer. The viewer is primitive but supports nearly all common types of files:

• MS Office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), all formats supported
• PDF Reader with function to select exactly which page you want to read
• RTF and Plain Text (UTF-8 encoding)
• iWork documents (Pages, Numbers and Keynotes)
• Open Office Documents (Text, Spreadsheet, Presentation)
• HTML files
• Safari Web Archives
• Comic Book Archive files (.cbz)
• ZIP (Uncompress zip archives)
• Audio (MP3 VBR, AAC, Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, CAF)
• Video (standard iPhone formats : H.264, MPEG-4)

In case you need to share any of the files, simply tap Edit button and select the file. Then tap the lower-left button and select the Email option. The app will send the file via email as an attachment.

FileApp Pro is a handy file manager for iPhone. If you need an app to manage your files on iPhone, it’s worth to check out. Best of all, the company is now offering FileApp Pro for free (but it’s just for limited time only). So, act quick and download the app [iTunes link]!

How many times you come across a web page and you do not have time to read it in front of computer? If you are looking for an app that lets you save a web page and read it on iPhone while you’re on-the-go. Remember to check the “Read It Later” app.

Basically, this app allows you to bookmark & save any web pages you find interesting and read later on your iPhone even without internet connection.

Read It Later service is completely free. But when you download the app to your iPhone the first thing you will have to do is setup an account with “Read it Later”. Choosing a user name and password is all that is required.

The service offers various bookmarklets (i.e. a kind of javascript) to save web page. You can set this app up with your computer’s web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer) so that you can bookmark those pages to read later on your iPhone. You can also add bookmarklet on the mobile Safari browser. Simply follow the on-screen instructions to set it up. It may be a bit tricky if this is the first time you configure bookmarklet on iPhone. Don’t give up, you’ll figure it out and will be happy you stuck with it.

Once you’re done, it’s ready to save any web pages via the bookmarklet. Later, when you launch “Read It Later” app again, it automatically loads the list of web pages you have just saved. Cool, right? The best is it even pre-loads the web pages and caches it on iPhone. That means, you can read the saved web pages even with internet connection.

Some of the options you have with this iPhone app is the ability to auto download the full web content of the pages to your list, or, just a text only view of a particular page. You can change the scrollbar to be “on or off”, or, on the “left side or right side” of the page. You can also configure “auto download” to happen only when you are connected via Wi-Fi. There are also some housekeeping options that allow you to clear both the downloaded files and cookies.

You can easily tag and search through your reading list for easy filtering if you have a lot of sites that you track. Finally, one really cool extra is the saved position feature. Meaning the application remembers where you left off on every article and provides a “Currently Reading” section that syncs that current article position with your computer when you re-open the article.

I have been using this app for some time and I am a complete convert. I just love this application. The “Read it Later” app for the iPhone comes in two versions: Free [iTunes link] & Pro (US$4.99 USD) [iTunes link]. The Pro version comes with additional features such as full-screen reading, tap to save bookmarklet, screen rotation support, etc.

What do you think of Read It Later app?

Not sure where to buy a book in San Francisco International Airport or looking for a fine restaurant in New York LauGuardia Airport? Featured in Apple’s recent iPhone commercial and developed by Mobility Apps, GateGuru is an iPhone app targets to be your personal guide when you’re in any of the top 85 US airports.

Just like Foursquare, Flyertalk and Yelp to provide interesting locations and restaurant for cities, GateGuru is the Yelp for airports offering comprehensive information to locate the best food, shopping and service option within airport. It is extremely helpful little app for anyone that does a lot of flying in the US. Not to mention, the app is free.

To get started with GateGuru you need to sign up. Once that is done, the app itself is very easy and intuitive to use. You can allow the app to discover your location or you can search and choose one of the 85 US airports available in the list. Once you have chosen the airport, you then pick the terminal you are in. Or you can let the app to locate your location. From there, you are presented with a tabbed screen that has four tabs: All, Food, Shop and Services.

Under the Food tab, you get a list of restaurants that you can search through. Choose any of them, you will see what type of category the restaurant falls into (Mexican, Italian, etc) and the list of reviews. The app also lets you write a review, bookmark the restaurant or update the listing that they have for this restaurant if any of the information is not correct. This is similar for both shops and services, although really only the restaurants seem to have reviews.

You can easily share your travel experiences with your Facebook and Twitter friends using Gate Guru by linking your accounts. Moreover, you can gain High Flyer points by rating and adding amenities. You can watch as you climb the High Flyer leader board and get your “Captain” wings. Moreover, the High Flyers tab shows the list of high flyers in your airport. The Captain for a particular airport is the user with the most points. You can compete and watch as you gain points against your friends and also nationally for top spot (or Captain), making travelling and finding stuff in the airports you visit a bit of an adventure in itself.

It’s a pretty good app for frequent US travelers. The only drawback I see with this app is it is not available internationally that it only supports the top 85 US airports. Hopefully, some of the more common international locations will be available in a future update. To try this free app, simply click this direct iTunes link to download it.

While many of you are using the built-in Safari browser on your iPhone or iPod touch to surf the web, there are a few alternative browsers available in App Store that offers additional features. Here is one: VanillaSurf.

VanillaSurf is a free mobile web-browser app for the iPhone that rivals the native Mobile Safari app. The app is built-in on the same web browser engine as Safari but it offers some excellent functionality that is not currently available with the Mobile Safari app.

As you launch VanillaSurf for the first time, you should notice its interface is very similar to that of the built-in browser. You have an address line with a search icon at the top and number of icons at the bottom that lets you: surf back and forward, set your options, download, actions, bookmarks, tabs and full screen.

So, you can see what functions quickly set this app apart from the Mobile Safari: download, actions and full screen.

With VanillaSurf, you can download anything from the web, as you normally do on your computer’s web browser. Once you have download the file, you can view the file within the internal browser. Or you can transfer it back to your computer via a web interface. Simply follow the on-screen instruction and you should know to how do the transfer. The process is very straightforward.

The actions tab offers the following: New Bookmark (which I will assume all understand), Send URL, Screenshot, Open in Safari and Lock Rotation. The Send URL will send the URL of the current page you are to the email and embed the link into your email. That’s pretty useful. The Screenshot does just as it states, it takes a picture of the screen and places it in your camera roll (note: it is just a screenshot, not the entire page, just what you can see on the screen). The Open in Safari option opens the current page you are on in the mobile Safari app. Finally, the Lock Rotation sets the web browser to either landscape or portrait mode and disable the auto-rotation of iPhone. That’s handy feature especially you surf while lying in bed.

VanillaSurf offers an option tab to further customize its settings. In the options tab, you can turn “load images” on or off, “Ad-blocker” on or off and enable private surfing, if you wish. There are two different themes you can choose: Classic and Black. Also, you can clear your history and cookies. The options you can set for your tabs are many, everything from how new windows are opened to how they open for the same or different domain.

You can easily import bookmarks with the import/export bookmarks tab. Again, you use the built-in transfer function that allows you to link and authenticate with your computer.

The “tabs” window lists all the current open tabs that are available that you can tap on to view.

The full screen button hides the address bar and bottom icon buttons, but it leaves a little (+) button that, when you press, gives you your bottom icons as a see-through set of buttons. If you press (+) again it returns back to the regular screen view.

Performance-wise, it is as fast as Safari. All in all, VanillaSurf can be a great alternative for Safari browser. It may not replace your mobile Safari, but it will be very useful when you need to download a file. To try out the browser, you can download it directly via this direct iTunes link.

Apple’s chief executive Steve Jobs attended the Oscars and his company took this advantage to air the first iPad commercial. With an upbeat song, the 30-seconds short video shows you all the magical features on iPad.

As announced earlier, the iPad will be available for pre-order from March 12 and debut on April 3. For international customers in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, it will be available in late April.

You can check out the video below or simply watch it on Apple’s website (with higher video quality).

iBlueNova is a cydia application that lets you transfer any file (including photos, music, document, etc) from iPhone to other bluetooth devices. Formerly known as iBluetooth for iPhone OS 2.0, iBlueNova supports OS v3.0 or up. Same as iBluetooth, the bluetooth app is a paid application that is available for US$5.99. But it also offers a 15-days free trial period before you need to purchase the app.

iBlueNova claims to allow you to transfer any type of files on iPhone to other bluetooth devices including computer and mobile phones. The app is pretty easy to use. After launched, simply enable both “Enable” and “Visible” to activate the bluetooth transfer service. Then you’re ready to transfer files over bluetooth.

The app offers 4 types of file manager: Pictures, Music, Videos and Other files. “Pictures” lets you access your camera roll and photo album to select the photos for transfer. If you need to transfer songs from iPhone, the “Music” file manager lets you access those song files. To send video in iPod app, the “Video” manager will do it for you. For other kinds of files, you can use the “Other Files” manager which lets you access any system files on iPhone.

To transfer a file over bluetooth, say a photo, you can tap on “Pictures” and select any photo from camera roll. Then tap the lower-right button. This brings you to a “Select a device” interface. Tap “refresh” button on the top-right to discover all available bluetooth devices. Just select the device you want the file to transfer to and it’ll kick off the transfer process after the other end accepts the transfer request. You can always view the transfer activity to see the progress of transfers or stop a transfer.

The app also offers a comprehensive setting screen. You can add a PIN to require an authorization before accepting a bluetooth connection. If you would like to send out all the images as JPEG, there is also an option for you. On top of that, you can choose to save all incoming images to the camera roll.

I have tested the app for nearly two weeks. Overall, it’s pretty easy to use and work as advertised. I can transfer file to my Mac and PC over bluetooth. But the app still needs to be further polished as I experienced a number of crashes and transfer failure. Anyway, you have 15-days free trial period before you need to pay. If you are in search of a bluetooth app on jailbroken iPhone, remember to check out iBlueNova.

Note: Please note if you want to transfer file between iPhone, both iPhones should have iBlueNova installed.

To learn more about the app, check out the video for a bluetooth file transfer demo:

Have you ever experienced this situation while using iPhone?

You tap on an app icon to launch the application. It launches and then closes unexpectedly.

I believe it’s not a rare issue for iPhone users as Apple has officially published a support article about how you can deal with the issue.

First, why does the application close unexpectedly? According to Apple, your device is running too many memory-intensive tasks and has begun to run low on application memory. So, when you try to open up extra application, the device does not have sufficient memory to handle the app launch and thus closes the app consequently. As the article suggests, here are some situations that represnts your iPhone is running low on memory:

• If you have many Safari web pages open on your iPhone or iPod touch, Safari may close and the iPhone or iPod touch will go back to the Home screen (where it shows all the application icons).
• When listening to music or podcasts, watch video, etc. playback may stop and the device may return to the Home screen.
• While using Safari or Maps and listening to music or podcasts, iPod audio playback may stop.
• Applications purchased from the App Store quit immediately after you tap them.

When you come across the issue, you may try the following Apple’s recommendations to avoid the issue:

1. Restart your iPhone – this recommendation is just like Microsoft. When you got a problem on your PC, reboot it! To restart your iPhone, press and hold Sleep/Wake button for a few seconds until you see a red slider. Then slide the slider to shutdown your iPhone. Press and hold Sleep/Wake button to start it up again. Once booted up, try to launch the application again.
2. Minimize the number of pages in Safari – For Safari, try not to open too many pages/browser windows as each browser window consumes extra memory.
3. Use up-to-date iPhone OS – Make sure you’re using the latest version of iPhone OS. (but for iPhone jailbreaker, this option is not recommended until a solid jailbreaking solution is available)

Personally, I would like to add one more suggestion: Kill the unused applications. When you close an iPhone app, the device normally removes the app from memory. But for some built-in application (e.g. Safari), this may not be the case. Let’s say you launch Safari and browse some web pages. Then you go back to home screen. You may think iPhone closes Safari completely and free up the memory. But that’s wrong. The device actually keeps Safari in memory to speed up subsequent launch. So, how can you completely quit the Safari? There is a less-known feature to kill the app. You can further refer to the post about “How to Force Quit an Application for iPhone 3.0” about how to kill the application.

This technique is very useful and lets you quickly free up more memory for other applications.

What do you think about these tips? Do you have other tips to prevent the issue? As always, leave us comment and share with us.

Apple has just announced the WiFi model of iPad will be available in Apple stores on April 3. The 3G model will be available in late April. In addition, you can pre-order it starting from March 12.

Initially, iPad is only available in U.S. For international customers in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, both models of iPad will be available in late April. For other countries that are not on the list, iPad will ship later this year.

According to the press release, iPad will come with the new iBook app that includes Apple’s new iBookstore for browsing, buying and reading books. The iBookstore will feature books from the New York Times Best Seller list from both major and independent publishers, including Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster. But initially, the iBook app will be available in U.S. only.

The WiFi model of iPad will be sold starting from US$499, while the price of the 3G model starts from US$629. For international customer, the pricing is not announced yet.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

In January, we covered a cydia application named PushFix 2.0 that fixes the push notification issue for jailbroken iPhone on OS 3.1.x. Many jailbreak users claimed the application worked great. The major drawback, however, is it’s a paid app which costs US$5.99. (Don’t get me wrong. It’s worth the price. But everyone love free stuff, right?)

If you’re waiting for a free solution to rectify the push notification issue, here is the good news. An iPhone developer has released a free cydia app called Push Doctor that offers the same fix as PushFix 2.0.

How to Use Push Doctor

Before installing the Push Doctor, if you have applied PushFix 1.0 on your iPhone, please uninstall it first. Otherwise, you can move on and follow the steps to install Push Doctor.

1. Launch cydia and tap “Manage”, followed by “Sources”

2. Tap “Edit” and then “add” button to add a new repository source (http://cmdshft.ipwn.me/apt/)

3. Tap “Add Source” and you should find a new repository known as “NERV Repository” added to cydia. Tap “Done” and continue.

4. Search for “Push Doctor” to locate the package

5. Tap on the package and then install it.

6. After installation, restart your iPhone and it should fix the Push Notification problem! Now, you can install any app with Push Notification support (say, BeejiveIM or iPusher) to test out the fix.

Why Push Doctor doesn’t work?
First, let us recap how Push Doctor or PushFix 2.0 fixes the push notification problem. As mentioned in my earlier post about PushFix 2.0,

To truly resolve the issue and make Push Notification work on your jailbroken iPhone, the developer from PushFix.info has rolled out the PushFix 2.0 that officially fixes the push notification issue on hacktivated iPhone by providing each iPhone device with an unique certificate.

The highlight is every iPhone needs an unique certificate to make push notification work. As Push Doctor is a free service, the number of unique certificate is very limited. So, if you have installed the fix and found push notification still doesn’t work on your iPhone, it is very likely Push Doctor runs out of unique certificates.

For those who are not lucky enough to get the certificate, the only solution is to retry again and again. Here is what the developer @anethema said,

The demand is very high apparently, and @anethema is now generating 1 unique cert per minute to put on the server. Try every few hours, eventually it will work. Any errors just means the same that it cannot find a unique cert. Just “reinstall” the package later or the next day.

Anyhow, the fix is free. You can’t complain if there is no unique certificate available. But if you’re frustrated after several trials, an alternative solution to purchase PushFix 2.0 to fix push notification problem.

As always, remember to leave us comment and let us know if the app works for you.

While there are numerous digital ways to write a reminder or leave a message to my wife, I still love to write (and see) message on a chalkboard. It’s just simple (pickup a chalk and write!) and much quicker than typing on iPhone.

Like me, if you also love chalkboard, you probably like this product.

A designer (PlayingGrownUp) from etsy.com has come up with an idea to merge a technologically-advanced device with a low-tech product and created an oversized-iPhone chalkboard. The chalkboard is hand-cut and hand-painted. It measures 14.5″ in width and 21″ in height. The designer can further customize the icons drawn on the chalkboard to suit your need. It will also come with all of the necessary hanging supplies for you to mount the chalkboard to wall.

The chalkboard is available for US$30 (plus shipping). You can order it through etsy.com.

If you haven’t heard of etsy.com, it is large community spans the globe with buyers and sellers coming from more than 150 countries. Unlike ebay that offers all kinds of goods, Etsy focuses on on handmade or vintage items as well as art and raft supplies. You probably can find other creative iPhone-related products there.