iPhones & shiny stuff - fluffypig.com

Amazon Black Friday Deals Week – Ends Today! Hurry!

admin — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:33:06 +0000

What better way to recover from an awesome Thanksgiving than to grab a massive Black Friday deal!

As usual all the big retailers are offering some incredible deals this year and Amazon is no different, in fact they’ve extended Black Friday to ‘Black Friday Week‘ and have been offering great products at crazy prices for the past 5 days. Today is the final day so be sure to check them out before they’re gone!

Here’s a very brief selection of some of the best

JBL On Stage IIIP Portable Speaker Dock for iPod and iPhone (Black) 68% Discount!

Aeron Chair by Herman Miller – Official Retailer – Highly Adjustable – Graphite Frame – Lumbar Pad – Carbon Classic (Large) (47% Discount!)

Canon PowerShot SX230HS 12 MP Digital Camera with HS SYSTEM and DIGIC 4 Image Processor (Black) (43% Discount!)

Plantronics Voyager PRO+ Bluetooth Headset (50% Discount!)

Haier “The View” Docking System for iPad/iPhone/iPod (53% Discount!)

Click here to view all Black Friday deals

Star Wars – The Complete Saga Finally Released On Blu-Ray!

admin — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:11:06 +0000

This Friday, September 16 this classic set of films finally comes out on Blu-ray for the first time. There are three combo packs being released on the same day, a 3 disc set ‘Star Wars: The Prequel Trilogy (Episodes I – III)’, also a 3 disc set ‘Star Wars: The Original Trilogy (Episodes IV – VI)’, and finally Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Episodes I – VI), a 9 disc set!

Click here to finally get Star Wars – The Complete Saga on Blu-Ray!

Top 20 Best iPhone 3G Games!

iPhone Alarm Problem 2011 – WARNING + How To Fix

Shaun — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 16:13:37 +0000

A word of warning to anybody that relies on their iPhone as an alarm clock.

It seems that following the iPhone alarm bug a few months ago the turn of the year has brought more craziness to the iPhone alarm, there were several reports on Twitter last night from countries that had already welcomed in 2011 of iPhone alarms not going off when they should which were repeated this morning from Europe and presumably reports from America & Canada will surface soon.

How To Fix iPhone Alarm Bug

Further investigations have shown that the problem thankfully only occurs with one-off alarms. Meaning that if you set the alarm to recur it will still work. Not an ideal solution but at least we can set alarms that we can rely on until Apple release a bug fix for one off alarms.

Samsung Galaxy Tab – Quick Review (Bargain)

Shaun — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 14:54:29 +0000

Click here to get the Samsung Galaxy Tab for less than half price!

As regular readers of this blog will know, i’m a self confessed Apple Fanboy.

I pre-ordered my iPad the second Apple started taking orders and received it the day before release and i’m still loving it today.

As much as I love my iOS devices it would be impossible to ignore Google’s ever growing Android platform. I’ve checked out a few Android phones but none of them particularly appealed to me since i’m still in love with my iPhone 4.

However, there is finally an Android device that caught my attention and captured my interested.

Samsung Galaxy Tab

As I said I love my iPad but the thing that attracted me to the Galaxy Tab was the size, at 7″ and also quite a lot lighter than the iPad it’s much more portable. It also plays Flash fairly well which of course the iPad famously doesn’t and never will.

There are other features less important to me personally but that stand the Galaxy Tab apart from the iPad such as including cameras and having the ability to use it as a phone.

The Android operating system is improving all the time and whilst it’s not as slick and sexy as iOS many like it’s perceived ‘openness’.

All in all the Galaxy Tab is a great competitor to the iPad and the fact that it’s more portable makes it better to a lot of people.

Bargain

As you probably gathered I would recommend the Galaxy Tab anyway but Amazon have made it impossible for me not to due to their unbelievable price!

The RRP of the Samsung Galaxy Tab is £799 but for a limited time only you can buy it for just £357!! A massive saving of £442.00 (55%)! What’s more, Amazon also offer FREE delivery for that price as well!

Click here to get the Samsung Galaxy Tab for less than half price!

o2 Tariffs for iPhone 4 – No Unlimited Data!

Shaun — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:46:53 +0000

Following the iPhone 4 announcement last week and the news that 2 weeks today the phone will be available all we need to know is how much it will cost.

Apple have not yet released UK prices but with prices at $199 (16gb) and $299 (32gb) UK prices of £150 and £250 seem a good bet.

Bad News

When it comes to contracts, o2 have just announced their new tariffs for iPhone 4, but it’s not good news.

The table below shows some details of the new tariffs including significant cuts in what they are currently offering,

The 3 biggest changes:

Current ‘Unlimited Data’ being reduced to just 500MB with most contracts!
Number of minutes reduced / price increased.
MMS messages now cost 20p each (previously they were taken out of Text allowance, 1 MMS = 4 texts)

Good News

The good news is that unlike the USA who are stuck with a single carrier (AT&T) we have lots of options. It has been revealed that besides o2, Orange & Vodafone who currently offer iPhone 3G/3GS the iPhone 4 will be available on T-Mobile and Three as well. Nobody but o2 has announced their contracts yet but we can hope that when they do there will be some more competitive tariffs available.

iPhone OS 4.0 – My First Month

Shaun — Mon, 31 May 2010 18:17:35 +0000

Being an Apple geek and incredibly impatient too, as soon as I’d finished watching the keynote from the Apple iPhone OS 4.0 event in April I just HAD to try the new OS. There was no way I could wait until ‘Summer’ when it is officially released. So I immediately registered with Apple as a developer and gained access to the early beta versions of the new OS. Here’s my account of how it’s been going.

Early Days (Beta 1 & 2)

The first version I installed was incredibly unstable, it worked ok as a phone and the native apps worked fine (except the camera). Unfortunately most 3rd party apps crashed. As much as I wanted to test OS4 I couldn’t handle the instability at this stage and promptly restored OS3 from my backup. Thankfully there wasn’t a long wait for beta2 to be released and it brought big improvements. There were still a few incompatible apps and more crashes than I was used to but it was much more stable and usable in general. Still no camera or ability to take screenshots though.

Almost Perfect (Beta 3 & 4)

The last 2 releases have brought major stability improvements and I have been running OS4 beta 3 and now beta 4 for a few weeks without reverting back to an old backup. There are only 2 of my existing apps that don’t appear to work yet, they are LinkedIn and the Sky Mobile TV app. I can live without LinkedIn and although I miss the Sky app occasionally, not enough to make me give up the OS4.0 features that I have already grown to love.

Why I Love iPhone OS4.0

There are apparently 100 new features in the new OS. I can’t claim to have tested or even noticed all of them but many I have. Some are huge, some are trivial but still fun or useful. Some we should have had years ago like many other smartphones. The following features are the ones that have been the most useful for me in the time i’ve been running OS4.

Custom Wallpaper

Ok let’s get this one out of the way first! Yes you’ve been able to do it on most other smart phones (and plenty of not so smart phones) for years. Now we can too. It’s not a huge deal but it is nice to be able to customise and it’s amazing what a different look and feel you can give your phone by changing the background image. It’s great that you can set a different image for the Home screen as the Lock screen too.

Spell Check

This is another feature that has been lacking from the iPhone for 2 long. Although as with Cut & Paste I think the way they have implemented it is brilliant so it’s probably been worth the wait. If you’re familiar with Mac OSX the way spell check works will be very familiar to you. It works across virtually all apps, when you misspell a word it will be underlined with a dotted red line. You simply tap the word to receive a number of possible suggestions of which you tap the correct one. Very simple and it’s the feature I have had the most use out of over the past few weeks. I’m much more comfortable sending business emails to clients when I’m confident there are no embarassing speeling mistakes.

Folders

If you’re anything like me – addicted to buying/trying apps and have been using an iPhone for years you’ll have gathered a rather large collection. Mine spanned 9 full pages before I was finally able to do something about them. Introducing OS4 folders! Which have allowed me to reduce my 9 pages of apps to just 3! And that includes the home screen!

Folders are incredibly simple but their effect is huge and is probably the one OS4 feature that I really couldn’t live without. I recently purchased an iPad that is of course running OS3 and I miss folders badly. To create a Folder you simply hold your finger down on an icon so that they wobble and then drag one icon over another, a Folder will then be created containing both icons. It has a go at guessing the name of the folder based on the category of app you put in it but you can of course rename them and add more icons. You can even put a Folder in the dock which is very cool.

The one limitation is that you can only have 12 apps per folder, I would have preferred to have more, even if it meant vertical scrolling but it’s a simple enough task to create say ‘Games #1′ and ‘Games #2′ if more than 12 are required.

‘Multitasking’

Besides ‘lack of Flash’ this is the main argument given against the iPhone. Maybe it’s a fair complaint that there has never been multitasking, although personally I understand Apple’s concerns about reducing performance and battery life by having multiple apps running in the background. Which makes their implementation of ‘multitasking’ perfect, although it appears to be true multitasking it’s actually just a clever way of switching apps. Unless both apps absolutely have to be open (say if you’re streaming music from Spotify or online in Skype) the first is actually paused while you switch to the second and you can switch back and forth quickly and easily.

Double tapping the Home button brings up a sort of dock style application switcher, similar to CMD-Tab in Mac OSX. It displays a horizontal scrolling list of apps that support multitasking for you to switch too.

Scroll left and you get iPod controls as well as current track information and the Portrait/Landscape lock. Scroll right and you get more apps to switch too.

Camera – 5x Digital Zoom

I don’t use the camera on my iPhone that much since it’s not the best quality and digital zooms only make that worse. However, it is still nice to finally have one available.

Tapping the screen in the camera app brings up a slider which you can then slide in or out to zoom. Simple but effective. Auto focus has now been added to video recording as well as photos.

Mail: Unified Inbox & Threaded Messages

Mail for iPhone is great as far as mobile mail applications go but it has been missing 2 key features until now. The first is Unified Inbox which means all of your various email accounts can feed into the same Inbox, saving you from checking each one individually. A huge time saver if you have many inboxes to check.

The second feature is one of the best for me, threaded messages are finally here! As a GMail user it was frustrating to go from nice threaded conversations on my desktop machines to the mess off chronological emails in iPhone Mail. If you don’t know what threaded messages are, it basically is just keeping ‘conversations’ together. So the original email and all replies are kept together rather then being separated by however many different emails you might have received in between.

There are other Mail improvements, the most notable being an attachment viewer which allows you to open a variety of mail attachments right within the app.

iPod Improvements (including create Playlists!)

There are several iPod improvements, the biggest for me is the ability to create and edit playlists on the iPhone itself. Gone are ‘Playlist On The Go’ and instead you edit and create playlists exactly as you would on the desktop version of iTunes and they sync to the desktop version too. It’s very quick and easy, a welcome addition.

There are also some nice UI improvements such as an artwork thumbnail in Album view.

Best Of The Rest

The features above are things that I have personally benefited from during the past few weeks of using iPhone OS 4.0. There are plenty of others that I either haven’t used much or are not important to me, they maybe to you though. Here’s a few of them:

Games Center: Think XBox Live for iPhone games! Not much happening in there yet but should be cool once launched (See image)
SMS Search - Very useful to search for a particular text message
SMS Character Count – Helpful if you’re sending long message to users with older phones or if you need to keep track of how many SMS messages you’re using.
Bluetooth Keyboard - I linked my iPhone to my Apple bluetooth keyboard, it worked great and was kind of cool. For me it’s not a huge feature as I almost always have my Macbook Pro or iPad with me, if you don’t and you actually use your iPhone for heavy email/text production then it could be amazing.
Improved battery life? - Actually I’ve no idea if this is true or not, there’s certainly no mention of it in the keynote which seems strange as you’d think they’d like to shout about it. I have to say though, it really does feel as though my battery has been lasting significantly longer these last few weeks!

I’m sure the more I play with OS4 the more new features I will discover. I feel the best will come a few months after it is officially released once App developers have had time to make use of all the new features, especially Multitasking. I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of use apps can make from it.

iPhone OS4 is still scheduled to be released ‘Summer 2010′. We should know more June 7th when Steve Jobs addresses the WWDC and announces details of the new iPhone at the same time.

What Is iPad?

Shaun — Thu, 13 May 2010 13:38:22 +0000

Check out this second new iPad commercial, very different style to the first (and most Apple ads) with the white background.

Click here for more information

Apple iPad UK Prices Released

Shaun — Fri, 07 May 2010 12:58:47 +0000

After waiting patiently (and painfully) for weeks whilst America was buying all of Apple’s supply of iPads we are now just days away from being able to pre-order them here in the UK.

Pre-release day is this Monday 10th May and Apple have just released details of the release date and pricing structure.

The iPad will be released in the UK on May 28th, 2010.

iPad UK Prices

Click here for more information

iPad is available in the UK for a suggested retail price of:

£429 (inc. VAT) for 16GB Wi-Fi
£499 (inc. VAT) for 32GB Wi-Fi
£599 (inc. VAT) for 64GB Wi-Fi

£529 (inc. VAT) for 16GB Wi-Fi + 3G
£599 (inc. VAT) for 32GB Wi-Fi + 3G
£699 (inc. VAT) for 64GB Wi-Fi + 3G

iBooks

The iBooks™ app for iPad including Apple’s iBookstore will be available as a free download from the App Store on May 28.

Click here for more information

Jack Bauer Interrogates Santa Claus

Shaun — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:23:31 +0000

Don’t Pay £10,000 For Apple’s Magic Mouse

Shaun — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:48:05 +0000

I’m a self confessed Apple fanboy, and the Magic Mouse IS a great mouse. But even I wouldn’t claim it to be worth £10k!

That’s what you would have to pay for it if you wanted to buy one from Amazon though!

Of course Amazon are not selling the Magic Mouse for £10,000, it’s being offered by a 3rd party seller because Amazon don’t have any stock left. Whilst this is a extreme example and (hopefully) nobody is going to pay a crazy amount for a mouse it does highlight the problem with Amazon’s Market Place.

As soon as a product is out of Amazon stock it’s open for their 3rd party sellers to offer it instead. The problem is that they can set their own pricing and often for hard to find items consumers are paying 4 or 5 times the retail price.

Some would say this is fair enough, supply and demand, market forces etc… but often the products are only out of Amazon stock for a matter of hours. When this happens a consumer who orders a product in the morning can pay 5 times more than a consumer ordering later that afternoon for exactly the same product!

Amazon Gift Alert

We have developed a new tool to combat the problem and save you money! – The Amazon Gift Alert & Grab Tool. You simply tell the tool which out of stock Amazon products you want to watch (such as the Apple Magic Mouse) and then the tool checks Amazon inventory every 5 SECONDS! Instantly alerting you as soon as they’re back in stock and providing you with a direct link so you can make your purchase before they’re out of stock again.

We have two different versions for the UK and USA (checking Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com). More international versions are being worked on at the moment.

You can check them out at:

iPhones & shiny stuff - fluffypig.com

Amazon Black Friday Deals Week – Ends Today! Hurry!

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Samsung Galaxy Tab – Quick Review (Bargain)

Samsung Galaxy Tab

Bargain

Click here to get the Samsung Galaxy Tab for less than half price!

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o2 Tariffs for iPhone 4 – No Unlimited Data!

Bad News

Good News

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iPhone OS 4.0 – My First Month

Early Days (Beta 1 & 2)

Almost Perfect (Beta 3 & 4)

Why I Love iPhone OS4.0

Custom Wallpaper

Spell Check

Folders

‘Multitasking’

Camera – 5x Digital Zoom

Mail: Unified Inbox & Threaded Messages

iPod Improvements (including create Playlists!)

Best Of The Rest

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What Is iPad?

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iBooks

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Jack Bauer Interrogates Santa Claus

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