The App store spells death to Jailbreaking the iPhone?

I’d love to say that the quality of Apps on the Apple App store is so superior to those made for jailbroken iPhones that no one would bother jailbreaking anymore. However, this is definitely not the case. While a few of the apps are quite polished a lot are on par with their jailbreak equivalents and many jailbreak apps will never make it to the Apps store as they will upset network providers or apple - e.g. the app that allows you to create multiple iTunes library’s on the phone so you can sync with more than one computer, or VoIP apps that allow you to make calls without getting charged a penny by your mobile provider.

Add to this the fact that most of the apps on via AppTapp on a jailbroken phone are free and it makes jailbreaking your new iPhone 3G very tempting. Some have already managed it as seen in this video:

So what are we waiting for - lets unlock our phones and get lots of free App goodness. BUT WAIT Jailbreaking was tolerated before and some of the jailbreak app developers have been welcomed on to the App store… however, before Apple had no competing service to rival the jailbreak apps and now they do. They will not want users to be able to choose between a free jailbreak app when they are trying to sell a similar App for $9.99 in the App Store.

So what will Apple do. Expect a lot tighter policing of iPhones. Regular updates closing loopholes that hackers have used to jailbreak, and even bricking of phones that it detects have been tampered with. While not illegal it will be a lot riskier jailbreaking your phone this time round.

O2 loses iPhone 3G order

After both my brother and I received a confirmation email from O2 for our iPhone order we were both happy and expecting delivery of our phones today.

It seems a confirmation email is not enough. Concerned that I had received a follow up email confirming dispatch of my phone and he had not he called O2 today. Despite his confirmation email they explained they had no record of his order and they were out of stock so couldn’t help him! He now joining the queues outside an O2 store somewhere.

I double checked tracking on my order and it still shows my phone has been dispatched and picked up by DHL at 12:15 yesterday and it has reached Dartford at 6:21 this morning so fingers crossed.

iPhone 3G hands on

I got a very welcome email from O2 advising the status of my iPhone order:
We’re pleased to inform you that your O2 upgrade order has now been dispatched.

Your delivery details are:
Option: STANDARD DELIVERY
Cost: £0.00
Date of Delivery: Next working day

I then got hands-on an actual iPhone 3G. It feels completely different in the hand - partly because it’s shape is different and also because the back is plastic and not metal. I can’t say whether it feels better or worse- just different. I’m definitely less likely to drop it as it fits in the curve of the hand better.

First port of call was to check out the GPS on google maps. I didn’t manage to get a blue GPS dot but it was quick to locate me based on my wifi connection. Found maps to be overall more responsive.

I next checked out the app store. This works like a combination of the jailbreak appTapp and the iPhone iTunes store. It was quick and had quite a few apps already available to download. Most were chargeable.

The camera was not mentioned during the iPhone 3G announcements and tour and for good reason. It is just as bad as before - no noticeable improvement except again response time is slightly better.

I only had a few minutes with it so didn’t get to test out 3G speeds but I’ve had 3G phones before so know what to expect there.

Not sure if improved responsiveness was because there is better hardware or because I’m comparing to my iPhone which I’ve jammed up with about 30 jailbreak apps.

Will write more when I have my own one tomorrow, then I can download Apps.

App store released? - iPhone 3G frenzy escalates

Today saw the latest version of iTunes which I am hoping will include the app store and a fireware update for iPhones enabling 3rd party apps to finally be installed without jailbreaking your phone. I might keep my iPhone 1 jailbroken and just use the app store on my iPhone 3G.

All my friends that managed to see the “Thank you” message on the O2 upgrade store have now received their confirmation emails so it looks like it’s a happy ending for some.

Now we can laugh again it might be time to see some iPhone comedy videos like this one from CNET:

I even make a cameo in this one:

Review: Gelaskins - protection for iPhone

As gorgeous and slick as the iPhone looks it can very easily have it’s looks tarnished by scratches and marks. That’s why one of the best selling accessories for the iPhone is the screen protector. The thin sheet of plastic protexts the screen from scratches but what about the rear of the phone. Often the phone is lying on it’s back on a desk getting scuffed while the protected screen is face up and unharmed.

I have tried several leather cases but always end up discarding them and going back to an unprotected phone. This is because one of the main attractions of the iPhone is it’s compactness and sleek curves which are lost when a chunky cases is added. No one likes the unsightly bulge in a suit pocket from a chunky phone or wallet.

So when GelaSkins contacted me about their protective skins for iPhone I was very interested to see if this could be a good solution. I must admit that when I first saw the skins they appeared to simply be colourful stickers, I was a little sceptical as to their value. However, after using it I would definitely recommend them.

Firstly the initial attaching of the protective sticker couldn’t be easier. I am not the most skilled at applying stickers correctly as I ruined several screen protectors in the past trying to get it to line up with the iPhone screen without bubbles, so was surprised with how easy it was to apply. The GelaSkins uses 3Ms special adhesive that allows you to remove and re-stick the skin without leaving a residue or losing stickiness. It also doesn’t bubble and I got it in just the right spot first time. My Brother-in-law had less success as he claimed there was some bubbling for him but when he tried to show me the bumps had worked themselves out so he had a perfect finish to.

GelaSkins offer a range of designs from over 50 artists. They really do look eye catching on the phone and make your phone stand out from other plain iPhones. You can also download a matching graphic from the GelaSkins website to use as your phone background image. Then the design appears on both sides of the phone. As several of my friends have the iPhone it’s great to be able to pick mine out from the bunch when they are all lying on the coffee table.

The skin is thicker than a screen protector and has a nice feel to it. It definitely feels touch and despite my best efforts I was unable to scratch it, let alone the iphone underneath. The skins add very little thickness to the iPhone, infact I was still able to use the same leather cases with the skin on.

I was a little worried that the skin would cause the iPhone to overheat as it already gets very hot when using wifi/edge for extended periods. While the iPhone got very warm no more so than usual.

Although the skin is great for protecting the iPhone from scratches they do little to protect the phone from being dropped. If you are looking for protection from dropping the phone then I recommend getting a padded case and phone insurance.

One downside with the skin is that it covers over the most expesive component on the iPhone - the Apple logo. For me this is not a problem - for hard-core Apple fans that might be put off by this they’ll be pleased to know that it is easy enough to remove the skin and show off that Apple logo again without leaving a nasty stick residue.

Gelaskins also make skins for the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP), Nintendo DS, iPods and laptops. The 15inch laptop skins look fantastic.

Upcoming on from the front end

Posts have been few and far between recently but don’t worry I haven’t been sitting on my hands and have plenty to report. Just in the process of moving to a new server at the moment so want to complete that before making much new content.

Coming up:

Reviews:

• Gelaskins for iPhone and PSP - http://www.gelaskins.com
• Best Apps for jailbroken iPhones and which are likely to make it as an official app in future
• Best web hosts for developers/design studios with multiple clients

Features:

• Best new site or redesigns of 2008
• My recent projects including
  • why http://www.k9ulf.com ate up over 10gigs of bandwidth in it’s first month and looks to be increasing
  • On location photoshoots with clients at http://www.beecleanlondon.co.uk
  • How a re-design can help increase traffic, improve customer support (plus breaking out from frames) - http://www.woodside-security.co.uk
  • How a rush job doesn’t have to look ordinary - http://www.littledesignplanet.co.uk

Expect transfers and fixing links etc will take another few days and then I’m back in business. I will eventually be intergrating the blog into little design planet when that gets re-built this summer.

iPhone is Child’s Play

My 16 month year old is turning out to be quiet the technology wizz. Changing TV channels was one thing but taking photos on my wife’s phone and sending them as a picture message to me was quiet another. Today she showed me that she is perfectly capable of unlocking and using my iPhone. Apparently she has been doing this for months but this time it was caught on film. Can’t wait to see what she does when I get her an Eee PC next year.

Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 windows media support

Those of you trying out the Firefox 3 beta or considering it may want access to firefox 2. This is particularly true for developers as you will want to test in both version of the browser and the much loved Firebug plugin is not supported in Firefox 3 yet.

Fortunately there is an excellent guide on getting both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 running at the same time thanks to Hikikomori’s blog redemption in a blog

The problem I encountered is Windows Media Player video embedded in a page will not play. I tried re-installing the plugin but while this works for firefox 2 it does not for firefox 3.

I then recalled I encountered this same problem when first upgrading to Vista. A fix is to copy the needed dll files into the firefox 3 plugin folder. You can just copy the files over from firefox 2 plugins folder or download only the required ones from dll dump.

Quote from last blog post on this topic:

You can find the missing files on dlldump.com

• npdsplay.dll
• npwmsdrm.dll
• npdrmv2.dll

If this doesn’t solve the problem get more indepth help here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=206213

ReadyBoost or ReadyDrag

There has been a lot of mixed feedback on Vista’s ReadyBoost feature. Some say they have noticed significant performance boosts, some no seeing any real difference and others finding a drop in performance.

The problem appeared to be with (1) Their system setup (2) The tasks they were performing and (3) the quality of the memory stick/card being used.

Out of these I’ve found the most significant factor to be the memory stick. I tested 6 different memory sticks/cards on my laptop and the difference in how effective ReadyBoost is huge.

Starting with the bottom of the scale I had an old 2GB SD memory card. I inserted this into the built-in memory card reader and found a major reduction in system performance. Opening Apps or even switching between Apps would often cause lock-ups and pauses. At the time I had no idea what was causing the problem and began to think my system was under performing. I remove the memory card and things return to normal. The speed of the memory card was far too slow for ReadyBoost causing delays while data was read/writing.

I next used a 512mb SD card with “x66″ boldly displayed across the front. This didn’t have the major performance dips caused by the first memory card but I also couldn’t say I noticed a performance boost. After doing a little research I found that memory cards are designed for sequential writes like storing photos as they are taken on a digital camera. Hard disk drives sequential read and write speed is significantly faster than anything you will get on a memory card and so using a memory card provides no real benefit.

ReadyBoost relies on memory sticks faster random access speed. The hard disk has to physically move parts to access data across different parts of the harddrive. The Solid State memory on a memory stick has a faster response time, doesn’t have to spin up from idle and accesses random data significantly faster. So would the memory sticks fair better.

This time I got 2 ReadyBoost logo’d memory sticks for about £17-20 each. The first was a 2GB one from Argos from a brand I hadn’t heard of or remember. The performance increase was noticeable especially in memory hogging programs like Photoshop and games. The 2nd stick was a 4GB Sandisk cruzer u3. There was no notable performance improvement. What was the difference?

I looked up what was the requirements for a device to be classed as ReadyBoost capable. It was a read speed of 5mb/s and a write speed of just 3mb/s. The sandisk must have been pretty close to the bottom end as every now and then when I’d insert it I wouldn’t get the option to use it “to speed up my system” (not you have to diable ReadyBoost or delete the ReadyBoost file and reinsert the stick for the option to show up otherwise it will automatically use the stick for ReadyBoost). When you compare this to some of the better memory sticks like Corsair’s GT range that read at 34mb/s and write at 28mb/s you can begin to see why there is such a difference in how effective ReadyBoost is. I lost the former 2 memory sticks and so I’m now on to a Corsair Flash Voyager. Not the super-fast GT version but still a lot faster than the average memory stick. It isn’t even ReadyBoost logo’d but according to the specs it should be a lot better than the sandisk cruzer I was using. If you live in the US Kingston do a memory stick called HyperX that is exclusive to Amazon.com and is super-fast and good value.

The good news is that the speeds and capacities of these memory sticks is improving all the time so ReadyBoost will continue to be more and more effective.

The bad news is that 1) the ReadyBoost logo is given out too easy and consumers could end up with inferior memory sticks that don’t help them 2) with Solid State Hard drives getting closer to usable capacities will we even need ReadyBoost?

For now check out some of the fastest USB flash drives here:
everythingusb.com

Vista Service Pack 1 Beta Install (RC1 Refresh) on Dell XPS m1530 Notebook

With many holding out on buying Vista until the first Service Pack it’s really important to Microsoft to get it right with this release. I can’t wait for the final buid so I’ve taken the gamble of installing the Service Pack 1 RC1 update although it is about 3 months from being finished. Flying in the face of the forum posts about BSOD when browsing the web since installing SP1 and other complaints I ventured out and installed it on my shiny new Dell XPS m1530.

The Install.

Downloading the “Windows update experience” file for SP1 was quick enough - only a few KB. It contained a registry tweak and instructions in 2 Microsoft Propriety formats - Word doc and XPS (viewable using IE7).

After the registry tweak running windows update reveals all the hotfixes and updates required before you can install SP1. Depending on how up to date you keep your system this maybe 1 install or several. After the installs and inevitable restarts you can download the SP1 installer. This also requires a restart and then a 10-15min wait while it finishes setting up. After this you will be able to use windows update to download SP1. The file size quoted is between 67 and 640mb I guess this depends on the version of vista and your hardware. In my case it was an 80.1mb download (Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit). This took quite long not sure if this was due to the internet connection I was using or the volume of people downloading the update.

Once downloaded and I agreed to the terms SP1 installed itself. And then restarted to configure updates in 3 stages. Stage 1 and 2 complete before a restart for stage 3. During this time you cannot use your computer and are warned against turning it off. This took my system about 20-30mins to complete.

Needless to say I don’t recommend starting this process on battery power of if pressed for time. You’ll need a good couple of hours and a constant power supply and internet connection.

Overall the install went smoothly and exactly as described in the instructions - with one exception. Somehow Windows Live Onecare didn’t start right away and so I was warned about my lack of firewall but after a few minutes Onecare came back to life.

What’s new?

This update rather than adding new features is designed to address performance issues rather than anything else. Vista has been slammed by business users and gamers alike for bringing their systems to their knees or at least noticeably reducing speed with some apps and games compared to XP.

I was not expecting incredible performance leaps with SP1 - or even to match XP with SP2. What I was hoping for was improved file transfer speed, a slight increase in graphical performance and faster wifi/network connections. Having used Vista since release day and using this particular laptop for the last couple of weeks fairly intensively I’ve a fairly good idea of what sort of speed various tasks take so couldn’t wait to see if SP1 made any difference.

I also wanted to see if stability was improved. I rarely saw vista crash completely but it wasn’t uncommon for a particular app to lock up and have to be closed down. Again I’ve never had problems with Vista uptime either but will test if this is an issue under normal use after SP1.

Most of the complaints I’ve read about on the SP1 forums are from users that were having issues with Vista before SP1 anyway so as my Vista was running flawlessly prior to the update I am expecting nothing less.

One thing you will notice is that it now says Windows Vista “Evaluation copy” Build 6001 in the bottom right hadn corner of the screen. This is not to say your version of windows is not genuine but the SP1 is not final so you have the evaluation stamp until you uninstall it.

Test 1: File Transfer speed

I had grumbled at the slow speed in which my laptop would transfer files from one system to another - typically between 1 and 6mb/s even with a cabled connection via my gigaport. There had even been reported problems transfering large files from one folder to another taking a unusually long amount of time.

I didn’t do a test case to compare an exact match to, but I do have a good idea of how long it usually took. In comparison SP1 did make a difference. Previously there was a delay of several seconds before a transfer would begin while windows calculated transfer time and speed etc. Now transfer begins immediately. Transfering to USB stick was about 5mb/s which was about the same as before - this is likely due to the limitations of the memory stick. Transfering from folder to folder on the same hard drive showed significant improvement - Transfers again started immediately and were between 22 and 32mb/s compared to 10-15mb/s previously. Obviously on different hard drives the speed will vary greatly (tested on 250gb 5400rpm SATA). Emptying the recyle bin was most dramatically effected. At times it would take a while to delete a large amount from there. Now the transfer/deleting was instant. Several gigabytes disappeared in seconds with no pausing (I managed to just about see 430mb/s) in the transfer window before it closed). Transfering from a sever on the network to the laptop was 11-12mb/s this was about the same probably due to the speed of the network but again the transfer initiated faster. Final test was transfer from one computer to another via ethernet cable.

File Transfer Improvement: Significant as long as it was Vista that was the bottle neck and not the device/network you were transferring over.

Test 2: Networking/connectivity

I found it incredibly annoying at how long it took to connect to wifi once I started up - especially if coming back from standby. Nothing I could do would would speed it up. Searching for networks and then manually picking and connecting rarely worked out any faster than waiting for the connection to be found by itself. Also my office network would never be identified. It would say identifying indefinitely - although it would work fine for network and web access I couldn’t change it from a public network to work network because the network was unknown - since installing SP1 it now correctly identifies the network. Wifi also connects much faster - within seconds of me turning on the wifi switch I was connected and ready to browse the web.

Connectivity/Networking Improvement:

Improved hotspot detection and connections speeds, resolves some lan detection issues.

Test 3: 3DMark06

Although mainly for testing 3D Gaming graphics the 3DMark also tests CPU and general system performance under extreme conditions. Prior to SP1 I scored 4278, 4180 and 4187.

Firstly I was pleased to see it ran without hiccu
p - some had reported lockups when playing games or using 3D Apps - I guess this was due support for the graphics card or driver they were using not being what it should be. As my system had a mid-range Nvidia graphics card I would expect that support for this would be good.

Results: 4201, 4180

3D Graphic/gaming Improvement: No noteable difference in 3DMark results so Windows XP is still the fastet platform for playing the latest games.

Overall

It felt like there were other performance tweaks to as menu responses and switching windows etc. all seemed zippier. Where formerly there was a few seconds delay between you clicking or performing a keyboard command and it taking place it now seemed instant. This is especially noticeable when opening folders containing many photos. Before it took a while for all the thumbnails to be generated - now it seems almost instant - even on an external device like a camera/iPhone. All my hardware still worked as before or better - even obscure devices like the finger print reader and blu-ray drive seemed to respond quicker due to the OS not being as sluggish. Don’t get me wrong my system ran Vista well before but there is a noticeable improvement to the overall responsiveness and speed of my laptop now.

After a restart I did get a Runtime error with my Blu-Ray/DVD/CD burning software. Also the firewall issue pops up until Onecare eventually starts. Restarting again and these issues cleared - Onecare started first and there were no runtime errors. I guess it takes a few restarts before everything settles down.

IMO if you are having problems with Vista SP1 may not be the quick fix to resolving them. If you are running Vista ok but want to squeeze more performance out of it then this service pack may be what you are looking for. As to improving stability I will report back after more testing but as I had no significant stability issues before I am not expecting to notice any difference. There are a few niggles with starting up windows initially as mentioned but they cleared themselves up and were not a major concern.

Technorati Tags: Vista, Service Pack 1, SP1, RC1, Refresh, performance

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