Posts Tagged ‘iphone’

Cook: “Here at Apple, we’re proud to announce our latest innovation. It’s called Bedtime, and it can improve your sleep quality by 160%.”
Ive: “Tim, I think bed time is already a thing.”
Cook: “NO, we invented it!”

I put “how” into my search and these were the suggestions…

Recently my iPhone had stopped charging properly. Every time I would plug the lightning connector in, it would either not start charging or start and then immediately stop. I had to plug it in over and over again until it started working.

After having a search around, someone suggested that it might be due to an accumulation of crap inside the lighting connector port and that you could get it out with a toothpick.

I straightened a paperclip and had a dig around to see what I could find. It is amazing how much lint came out!

Everyone knows that the new Apple Maps are rubbish, and we all want Google Maps back. This is still the case, but there is one area where Apple Maps is actually really good – “turn by turn directions”, aka the sat nav feature. George informs me that this is actually just TomTom, which probably explains it.

I don’t know if I would replace my sat nav with it – it presumably downloads maps on the fly, so what happens if you lose signal on the motorway, and how much cellular data is it using? But for getting around big cities, it looks very useful as I found it a lot better than my actual sat nav, for directions and clarity.

I’ve now installed iOS 6 on both my phone and my tablet. But, as of yet, I haven’t really noticed any difference.

I now have a clock on my iPad. Fine. Not used it. The maps look OK, but I was happy enough with Google Maps, so that isn’t really an upgrade because they have just replaced one thing with another, less accurate one.

The Siri improvements are very exciting, but then I haven’t used it yet. I use Siri for things like sending text messages and setting my alarms, which I can already do, and the Siri servers seem to be overloaded at the moment, as it’s practically too slow to use at the moment 🙁 .

Passbook, shared photo streams and Facebook integration I’m not really interested in, and I don’t like the cloud tabs or whatever they’re called. So, all in all, not really that impressed.

What a disappointment.

First of all, it’s a very poor effort that Apple don’t do live streaming of their media events. It then took them ages to post it – I was hoping to watch it, but when it didn’t appear by 10pm, I just read about it instead. I didn’t find it on the Apple website until the next morning.

Beyond that, the product itself is disappointing. I’ve always upgraded through each iPhone improvement but there seems very little point with this one – it’s just git a bit bigger screen, but other than that I’m simply not excited by it.

The best reason I can think to get it is that I will be able to see more events when I’m in my calendar – how does that justify a £600 outlay?

Chirp is a fantastic new service that lets devices literally talk to each other.

Actually, by devices, I mean iPhones. It’s not specifically for iPhones, but that is the only client they have released so far. It does also work fine on the iPad as well though, so if you have both you can test it by getting them talking to each other. But anyway…

The idea is that a lot of devices these days have speakers and microphones – so rather than having to mess around with bluetooth pairing, instant messaging, emails that never arrive, etc, the devices could just talk to each other – using sound.

When you want to send a link, or a photo, or anything for that matter, you simply “chirp” it and your phone outputs a sound. Other devices listening in can then hear it and decode what it says. The simplicity of it is its brilliance – any device could talk to another, without having to connect, or pair, or any such nonsense. Finally you could share a link or photo to all your friends in the bar without having to mess around with some complicated system – even texting it to them requires you to have their number in your phone for example, but Chirp doesn’t.

It’s an amazing concept; you have to wonder why nobody has done it before.

One drawback I will note is that the devices are actually just communicating locations to each other – so rather than chirping a photo to each other, the photo is actually uploaded to Chirp’s cloud, then the device listening simply hears the location and goes and downloads it. This means all your data has to pass through Chirp’s cloud, which isn’t ideal, but as a chirp is inherently public to anyone who is listening in anyway, you should never use it to transfer private data in any case.

Having recently upgraded to iOS 5, I thought great! I’ll be able to use iCloud to send the photos from my iPhone straight to my laptop using Photo Stream and that will be the end of it.

No more will I have to connect my phone up using my cable, then open iPhoto, then import the photos into iPhone, then select the photos and click “Show in Finder.”

But of course, it isn’t actually as simple as that.

I opened up iPhone, the one that comes with my Mac and didn’t know anything about Photo Stream. Turns out you have to get the new version of iPhone, and that costs £10.49. I reluctantly did, and then found the Photo Stream option and turned it on.

But no photos appeared.

I waited a day or two in case it only synced once every twenty four hours. Still no photos appeared.

So in the end I plugged my iPhone into my Mac and imported the pictures into iPhoto manually. Then I went to right click on the photos to go to “Show in Finder” so I could get them. But that option seems to have disappeared.

In fact, the only way I seemed to be able to get them out was to connect my gMail account to iPhone and email them to myself.

Good work there Tim, I would like my £10.49 back.

Many people used last week as a chance to lay into Apple, describing the iPhone 4S as a disappointing release.

I honestly can’t image why. It really is the iPhone 5 in everything but name, and perhaps a bit of exterior work, but from every other point of view, it’s a whole new phone.

They’ve put the dual-core A5 chip in it, which is the same chip that is inside my iPad 2, it has the dual antenna system, the battery life has been extended, and it’s new 8-megapixel camera not only has a new censor allowing it to capture 73% more light but it also shoots 1080p high definition video as well.

What I am most in love with however, is Siri. Their new voice control system not only allows you to do things just by speaking to your phone, but actually have a conversation with it!

Of course, speech recognition has been around for a long time and nobody really uses it, but this is what Apple do best – they take a niche technology and package it in a way which brings it to the mass market. For example, the first tablet came out decades ago, but it was only when Apple released the iPad did tablets really see the first mass adoption. Hopefully, Siri is the opportunity speech recognition has been waiting for.

I’m what you might call a fan of swearing. I don’t swear more than anyone else on average, but I support the concept of swearing – why shouldn’t we be able to use these words in public, they are just words after all. If I use the word fuck in conversation, it isn’t offensive, it’s just language. It only becomes offensive if I am it at some one – calling someone a “fucking idiot” for example, which is hurtful, but no more hurtful then calling someone a “stupid idiot” – the offence is in the personal insult and the malice rather than the word itself. We should be able to swear in public without fear of offending silly people, and to be honest, I imagine we will be able to in 20-30 years time when the current older generation are gone.

Given this view on words then, it is strange that I, as many people do, still choose to place so much value on the L word. You know, love.

But then, it really is a big deal. It’s a bomb shell when you drop it. Perhaps for good reason, to say you are falling madly in love is a big claim to make. Certainly, not a claim to be made likely. I’ve always thought less of those who nievely through out such a claim early in a relationship – you really need to put the time in before you can see you’re in love.

But time makes fools of us all, and recently I’ve found myself in this exact situation.

I confess. I did it. I used the L word.

As many of you know, I’ve recently begun what I consider to be a new chapter in my life. It’s amazing; it’s everything I hoped for. It’s magical and it feels like such a rush, I never want this feeling to go away.

The reason I said it, it plain and simple. I genuinely am in love. I kind of always dreamed I would feel this way but to actually experience it, first hand is an amazing feeling. I feel like I have been waiting so long for this, indeed I’m sure I have been waiting years for this moment and it does not disappoint.

Everything about this is perfect. The speed and elegance, the front facing camera, the Retina display. I love you, iPhone 4.