iPhone and iPod touch: About backups demystifies iTunes’ backup process for iPhones and iPod touches. Nothing too ground-breaking here, though a portion covers how to delete a backup if you want to start fresh.
My favorite task management service Remember The Milk (RTM) has launched MilkSync for BlackBerry, a dedicated application. I have an iPhone so I can’t test it out, but I can only assume that since RTM already offers a Windows Mobile app and an iPhone web app, a dedicated RTM iPhone app could appear in June, or shortly thereafter.
The clamoring for a 3G iPhone to arrive in June with Apple’s release of third-party installable software is nearly deafening, so I figured I’d look into exactly where 3G is up and running here in the US. It isn’t nearly as wide-spread as EDGE (the iPhone’s current data network besides WiFi), and I suspect a good portion of feature-lusters who are calling for this hardware upgrade may not even be able to take advantage of it (yet).
AT&T maintains an interactive map detailing 3G coverage, broken down by state and city. You can toggle 3G’s visibility on the map to get a better idea of where it is and isn’t. I suspect this map is fairly up-to-date as I was told late last summer that Denver was getting 3G in October, and that coverage is listed on this map.
As I understand it, 3G phones can still fall back on EDGE when 3G is unavailable, so if you aren’t a lucky winner of the AT&T 3G Lottery, you aren’t dead in the water.
So AT&T has begun its takeover of T-Mobile’s Starbucks hotspots. A friend in Texas saw that AT&T has already moved into one of his local Starbucks, so he did some poking around.
Now under AT&T’s reign, users can get two free hours of WiFi every day. However, the company also designed a portal to make it easy for iPhone users to log in (blurry screenshot above), complete with the ability to purchase memberships or day passes, and even use a coupon or prepaid card, right on the handset.
This is a great idea for coffee drinkers who want to sign up but don’t own notebooks, and those who simply want to roll with an iPhone.
I spoke with a manager in one of my local Starbucks today and asked about how long the AT&T switchover is going to take. She wasn’t positive, but she believes she heard that the plan is to have all ~7,000 stores finished by summer.
A new Apple support doc details how to turn off SMS preview for new text messages. You need to be using the Passcode Lock feature for locking the iPhone entirely, but in the interests of security and privacy, disabling SMS preview has a pretty unfortunate side effect. If you switch this on, the iPhone will no longer display the first portion of a text message, but it notifies you with the name and phone number of who the message came from.
I don’t do any kind of top-secret work that requires hiding things like text messages, but displaying a sender’s phone number sounds nearly as insecure—if not more-so—than showing a preview of their message.
Google Analytics for iPhone is another one I haven’t tested because I use Mint for tracking stats, but it looks pretty nice. It supports multiple accounts, diagrammed statistics, and is “switchable,” whatever that means.
802.11n is a fairly reliable way to stream content to an Apple TV, especially if you can go 802.11n-only to prevent non-N devices from dragging down the network. WiFi, however, is still susceptible to quirks, and it appears that the iTunes <–> Apple TV wireless handshake is too. We switched to 802.11n-only a few weeks ago in an attempt to improve our 40GB Apple TV’s ability to stay connected to our 250+GB iTunes library (over 210GB of which is video), and it’s worked pretty well. That said, we still run into the occasional-but-frustrating library ejection, sometimes right in the middle of a show. I suspect these dropouts may be the cause of wireless interference due to the materials used to build the townhome we rent, or perhaps our close proximity to other people’s wireless networks and devices. Even if I’m right, though, it doesn’t help our predicament.
I want to be able to store and sync our entire library with the Apple TV so we don’t have to deal with these annoyances. A cheap hard drive would solve this problem perfectly, and it would give us peace of mind to keep purchasing content from the iTunes Store without having to worry as to whether we can watch it in our now cable-less living room.
No, a Mac mini is not an option. The Apple TV, when we got one, cost $300. Now they’re $229 for the base model we have. Mac minis start at $600. For those not paying attention, a Mac mini is more than twice the price of an Apple TV. A price which isn’t worth it to solve what should be a minor problem. Plus, the Apple TV’s new Take 2 UI and features finally pulled ahead of Front Row. Fundamentally, the device is designed for a TV. Front Row and the Mac OS X environment are not.
The kicker is that the Apple TV actually has a USB port that is more or less handicapped to the general consumer. Apple says it’s for doing maintenance and troubleshooting when the time comes. Yea you can hack your Apple TV to do tons of wild stuff, and there’s even a hack for using external hard drives, but that only works on a previous 1.x version of the Apple TV software. Plus, it’s an ugly hack, and the Apple TV Take 2 software is just too darn great.
So what’s a frustrated Apple TV owner with a growing iTunes Store-purchased video and podcast library to do? Why, submit feedback via Apple’s official Apple TV feedback page, of course. If you’re in the same predicament, I urge you to send your own thoughts to Apple as well. For the record, here’s what I sent:
Please allow us to plug in our own USB hard drives to expand the Apple TV’s storage. There’s a USB port on the back of the device that is otherwise unusable. This really is pretty silly, and there isn’t much of a legitimate reason for Apple to keep this functionality locked away. Are you worried we’ll start plugging in hard drives and swapping content? For the users who want to do that (I don’t; check my iTunes Store purchase records), there are far smaller, capacious, and easily accessible devices for doing that called “iPods.”
WiFi—even 802.11n—is not a great solution for streaming content from our increasingly expanding iTunes libraries. Neither is drilling holes through our walls to run ethernet cable. If you want us to keep buying content from the iTunes Store (especially space-hogging video) and enjoying said content on our living room TVs, we need the ability to expand our Apple TV storage by plugging in an extra hard drive.
At least it couldn’t hurt, right? Go submit some feedback, see if it’ll help.
ThinkGeek :: Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt
I would never actually wear—let alone use—something like this. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t regularly thought about it after seeing that Family Guy episode where Peter got his own soundtrack.
Ugh, I completely forgot what day it was when posting this. Considering ThinkGeek’s other gadgety shirts like the T-Equalizer with a functioning equalizer built into the chest, I bought this one way too easily. Oops.
Matt Asay at CNET switched to an iPhone after being faced with the prospect of spending the same money on a replacement BlackBerry (hat tip to Gruber for the find). Overall Asay is happy with the decision, stating that he thought he’d miss using a BlackBerry. But the iPhone’s strengths make up for its weaknesses, some of which the BlackBerry also lacked. A notable portion of Asay’s piece touches on the polarizing topic of typing on the iPhone’s button-less display:
I thought I wouldn’t be able to type on the iPhone without tactile feedback. I was wrong. I’m actually faster on the iPhone than I ever was on the Blackberry, and that’s with only an hour of “training.”
It took me a little longer than an hour to get comfortable with typing on a touchscreen, but I’m in the same boat. I came over from using a BlackJack Windows Mobile phone and a BlackBerry Pearl before picking up an iPhone last year, and I think it probably took me a little over a week to start typing faster than I could on those previous phones. I’ve been really happy since, and I never really miss a physical keyboard anymore. Asay’s final sentence is a good way to end a piece like this:
The iPhone is designed too well to be anything less than inevitable.
MacRumors thinks price drops may be on their way for iPhone and iPod touch, judging from new prices on the Dutch iTunes Store:
To further add to this being a true leak, we had heard rumors that both the iPod Touch and iPhone would be seeing US $100 price drops in the coming months — though, those rumors also suggested Apple would the eliminate of the 8GB model, which is still listed in the ad.
Although, I don’t quite get how the 8GB model remaining in the ad, when rumors said Apple would drop it, adds credibility to this being “a true leak.”
Nitpicking aside, a $100 price drop on the iPhone would probably be pretty spectacular. $299 for 8GB, or $399 for 16GB and what is probably the most powerful mobile device platform by leaps and bounds? The goal of 10 million iPhone sold in 2008 could easily become a practical joke Apple played on the industry for giggles.
Linkblog
2 days ago 