iPhones & shiny stuff - fluffypig.com

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.

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

If You Love The Killers, You Need To See This!

Shaun — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:00:42 +0000

The video below is quite possibly the best live performance of any track i’ve ever seen by any band/artist.

I love The Killers, a lot, I saw them twice on the same tour in the space of 4 months this year (pic opposite is from Manchester) and Dustland Fairytale is by far my favourite track from the latest album Day & Age. When I heard about this performance I was intriguied but really didn’t expect it to ‘work’.

Well I was VERY wrong! It seriously works, it takes the song to another level!

Full Orchestra

So you’re booked to appear on Letterman and perform your latest single? How do you improve on an already amazing track? Bring a 20+ piece orchestra with you of course! Including a harp!

I honestly can’t say how much I was blown away by this performance the first few times I saw it and i’ve seen it 100s of times since and still love it! The harp at the start is stunning and the when the violins are really going for it in the breakdown is just amazing.

Watch the video below and let me know what you think in the comments!

Napster FREE Trial – 6 Million Tracks!

Quickoffice iPhone App – Create Word & Excel docs On Your iPhone!

Shaun — Sun, 24 May 2009 18:02:17 +0000

* IMPORTANT UPDATE June 2011 *

Since writing this article in May 2009 several other apps have appeared that perform similar functions. Although Quickoffice has stood up to the competition well and is still a good app my current recommendation is actually ‘Documents To Go‘

Docs2Go is a Universal app so can be used on iPad too, it’s fast and very stable, here are a few of it’s main features:

• EDIT, CREATE & VIEW Word, Excel & PowerPoint files (Office 2007/2008/2010)
• View PDF, iWork & other files
• iPad/iPhone 4/iOS 4: Send & receive attachments using the built-in Mail app
• Access, view, edit & sync supported files stored in Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, iDisk & SugarSync
• Free desktop app (Win & Mac) with 2way file sync (WIFI required)

IPAD, IPHONE 4, IOS 4 SPECIFIC FEATURES
• Open & edit files in DocsToGo from any 3rd party app that supports the “Open In” feature (the built-in Mail app can now open supported attachments in DocsToGo)
• Supports iTunes File Sharing via USB cable for moving files

Download Documents To Go

— Original article —-

There are plenty of iPhone apps out there to open and view Microsoft Office files on your iPhone.

That’s all very well, but what if you want to edit or even create them?

I’ve been looking for an iPhone app to do exactly that for a while, I was actually hoping Microsoft would develop an iPhone version of Microsoft Office themselves. Clearly they have no intention of doing that but there is a great alternative.

Quickoffice

Quickoffice (UK Version) contains 3 apps in one. QuickWord, QuickSheet and QuickOffice Files.

QuickWord lets you edit and create new Microsoft Word documents. You can change fonts, font sizes & styles (bold/italic etc..), create lists with bullet points and wait for it… cut & paste!

Cut & Paste???

Yes, you heard it right! Quickoffice have implemented cut & paste to the iPhone before Apple have! It’s not quite as slick as the cut and paste Apple have promised for iPhone 3.0 but it really works!

It also has auto-save and auto-restore features.

QuickSheet is similar to QuickWord but for Excel documents. Again you can edit or create new files, it fully supports even the most advanced Excel features. You can easily adjust column heights & widths or insert new rows/columns.

QuickOffice Files is similar to existing iPhone apps such as Datacase and Filemagnet. It allows you to mount your iPhone as a wireless drive over wi-fi so you can drag and drop files between your iPhone and PC or Mac. You can also view most common filetypes and organise, rename and move them on the iPhone itself.

One of the best features that sets it apart from those similar mentioned apps is the ability to email remote or local files without having to download them! You can also remotely access your iDisk which is very handy.

Highly Recommended!

Overall QuickOffice is a fantastic app for anybody that works with Word & Excel files a lot, it’s obviously not ideal using the iPhone keyboard for large documents but for small changes it’s perfect and I am already using an Excel spreadsheet to help me track business milage whilst i’m out and about.

Download QuickOffice

Download QuickOffice (UK)

Prison Break Is NOT Finished (yet) – The Final Break

Shaun — Tue, 19 May 2009 09:38:50 +0000

* UPDATE * UPDATE * UPDATE * UPDATE *

Since writing this article and thanks to assaf I learned that Sky 1 were not being entirely truthful in claiming the ‘Word Premiere’.

Because Prison Break – The Final Break was actually shown in Israel last night! (24th May). It is now available to download from the usual places.

Unfortunately it was not broadcast in HD so I will be waiting for Sky 1 to show it on Wednesday. But for everybody outside the UK or people not interested in waiting for the HD version grab it now!

* Original Post Below *

Yes that’s right. Prison Break is not finished! The double episode ‘Season Finale’ which aired on Sunday in the USA and tonight on Sky 1 in the UK is not the last episode.

There is another double episode still to come!

For some reason Sky have been incredibly bad at advertising this in the UK. Less surprising that Fox have not mentioned it as they don’t have the rights to show it, so of course it’s in their interests to bill the penultimate episode as the ‘Season Finale’.

This blog post exists simply to avoid me repeating myself as I seem to be spokesperson the for Prison Break finale!

Confused?

Let me explain, without ruining it for people that have yet to see tonights episode on Sky 1. The episode does what Prison Break does best and is actually by far the best in a pretty disappointing season IMO. The episode ends 4 years in the future with the death of a major character. But we have no idea how or why they died.

People who watched the ‘season finale’, did you not wonder what had happened? Not feel like you were missing a pretty vital part of the whole shows storyline? Considering it was supposedly the last episode ever?

The Final Break

Luckily the writers did and that’s why there is another double episode named ‘Prison Break – The Final Break’.

The Final Break fills in the gap between the end of real time and 4 years in the future where the last episode ends. So we get to see how what happens actually happened and why as well as tying up lots of loose ends for the other characters.

UK 1 – USA 0

The confusion has arisen because in the USA, Fox who usually air Prison Break don’t have the rights to show the last episode, instead it’s being released on DVD on July 21st. Presumably to milk a last bit of money from the Prison Break faithful.

Luckily for us UK people, Sky 1 is showing the final episode. Not only are they showing it but they have the world premiere of it!

Next Wednesday 27th May you can see the real season finale on Sky 1.

No doubt in a complete role reversal, next Thursday the whole of America will be downloading the Sky 1 version from various torrent sites!

4 Great TV Shows Return Next Month!

Nintendo DSi Released! Compare Prices Here!

Shaun — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:24:46 +0000

So the long awaited follow up to Nintendo’s popular DS and DS Lite console has finally arrived.

The Nintendo DSi was released today and boasts loads of new features including 2 cameras, an online store, built in web browser, music player and slot for SD memory cards.

I’ve just launched a price comparison site for the Nintendo DSi, so if you’re considering purchasing one check out the site and grab yourself the best possible deal!

The site is http://NintendoDSiComparePrices.info

iPhones & shiny stuff - fluffypig.com

iPhone Alarm Problem 2011 – WARNING + How To Fix

How To Fix iPhone Alarm Bug

Related Posts

o2 Tariffs for iPhone 4 – No Unlimited Data!

Bad News

Good News

Related Posts

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

Related Posts

What Is iPad?

Related Posts

Apple iPad UK Prices Released

iPad UK Prices

iBooks

Related Posts

Jack Bauer Interrogates Santa Claus

Related Posts

If You Love The Killers, You Need To See This!

Full Orchestra

Related Posts

Quickoffice iPhone App – Create Word & Excel docs On Your iPhone!

Download Documents To Go

Quickoffice

Cut & Paste???

Highly Recommended!

Download QuickOffice

Download QuickOffice (UK)

Related Posts

Prison Break Is NOT Finished (yet) – The Final Break

Confused?

The Final Break

UK 1 – USA 0

Related Posts

Nintendo DSi Released! Compare Prices Here!

Most Commented Posts