Apologies and news round-up
First of all apologies for being slack on the posting in the last week - I’ve been knee-deep in mud at the V Festival, where anecdotally I’d like to point out I managed to squeeze 4 full days of battery life on my iPhone 3G, albeit through judicious switching-off of 3G, wifi, and a bunch of other things, including the phone itself in the latter couple of days apart from when trying to track friends. Anyhow, I digress.
There’s been a few bits and pieces to catch up on for UK Apple followers, so in no particular order:
iPhone/iPod touch 2.0.2 update available in iTunes
The headline does what is says on the tin. Fire up iTunes, plug in your iPhone or iPod touch of choice, and enjoy bug fixes, plus a possible fix for an apparent problem with calls cutting out on the iPhone 3G.
MobileMe trials extended again from an apologetic Apple
Apologies clearly being the theme for this post, Apple has sent grovelling emails to a host of MobileMe subscribers keeping them on-board with updates on what they’re doing to iron out the bugs in the service. They’re also chucking in another extra 60 days free of charge for early adopters.
Tate Liverpool offers something extra for iPhone & iPod touch users
If you’re heading to the Tate Liverpool to check out the Gustav Klimt exhibition, our friends over at The Unoffical Apple Weblog noticed you can get your art on with added iPhone/iPod touch grooviness as you walk around with a guided tour pushed out over the gallery’s wifi network. If you prefer to have some advanced notice of what your tour will sound like, you can pick it up as a podcast to preload onto your device, and if you’re not yet in the Apple touchscreen club, you can even hire an iPod touch at the venue to take round with you. Sweet.
Real-world iPhone 3G experiences - good or bad?
A post by Ian Hendry over on ZDNet got me thinking about just how well the iPhone 3G delivers against the hype and promise of the past few months.
Shortly after picking up my own iPhone 3G I wrote up some very initial responses, and to be honest I still stand by most of these. The biggest disappointment to arise since then was the bugginess of the OS software, something I had been utterly unprepared-for given the relative solidarity of the original iPhone OS experience. MobileSafari was much more prone to freezing up, third party apps would bail out before even reaching their title screen and dump me back on the home screen, and the GPS I’d loved so much proved to be quite inconsistent, even when tried from the same spot several times in a row.
Thankfully a 2.0.1 maintenance update to the iPhone firmware (available for all users of iPhones and iPod touches on 2.0 software) seems to have ironed out some of these, and general reliability seems improved. So my remaining niggles - battery life probably chief among them - are entirely possible to live with, and as so often with Apple products, I find that the overall experience is so enjoyable I’m actually much more forgiving of the shortcomings than I perhaps should be.
What’s interesting about Ian’s post is that the bulk of his comment is really saying how access to a data connection is the real problem, not the iPhone itself. Essentially the summary is ‘I’d love to show this thing off in the Lake District but I can’t because the signal’s pants’, and I agree - surely these are the times you really want to know where the nearest pub is, what the weather’s going to do etc, as opposed to sitting in your back garden challenging the GPS to spot you again (speaking from experience). So perhaps it’s not where the iPhone doesn’t work, but where mobile networks’ limitations are, and what they could be doing about it.
Anyway, off to press that little ‘locate me’ button one more time, just to see…
iPhone and iPod touch users: get your update on
Apple has unleashed incremental software updates to both iPhones and iPod touches running software version 2.0. The new 2.0.1 software offers a bunch of bug fixes - not specified by Apple, but anecdotal reports (including my own experience) suggest improvements in overall stability (hooray), as well as general speeding-up of contacts browsing, backing up to iTunes, and the keyboard, and possible improvement of accuracy in the meter displaying signal strength.
Get yours by connecting your iPhone or iPod touch to iTunes and hitting ‘check for update’ on the ‘Summary’ page.
Updated: Nullriver’s NetShare app allows your computer to use iPhone 3G network connection
I’m writing this on my trusty MacBook Pro, in the comfort of my own home, which is drenched in wifi coverage. However, the MBP isn’t using wifi - well, not for a direct internet connection at least. Instead, it’s piping through to my iPhone 3G, and drawing the internet connection down from there. All thanks to Nullriver’s NetShare app (iTunes link) which appeared, briefly, on the App Store last night before being rapidly taken down, and then reappeared again today.
Tethering a laptop to a mobile phone’s data connection for surfing the web is nothing new, of course, and is pretty much a staple of other smartphones (this last sentence is a trademark of every iPhone reviewer since January 2007). Yet along with a measly camera, lack of turn-by-turn navigation (it’s coming, we’re promised) and my own personal bugbear, lack of video capture support, the ability to take advantage of all that 3G goodness is one more thing Apple ‘overlooked’ in designing the iPhone 3G.
That’s where Nullriver come in. Their app, with a little judicious settings-fiddling on both computer and phone (if I can do it, it can’t be that hard - just hope you don’t have to troubleshoot if it doesn’t work), lets you create an impromptu wifi network between Mac and iPhone (Windows PC support is coming soon), allowing the Mac to draw down web traffic piped through the iPhone. In other words, if you’re not in a wifi zone but can get any sort of data connection - reports suggest it will work on 3G (near-broadband), EDGE (slower) and even GSM (painful-but-possible) - then you too can surf to your heart’s content.
For a mere £5.99, it all sounds a bit too good to be true - and that’s where I’m curious to hear O2’s stance on the matter. We already know we’ve got it pretty good in the UK when it comes to all-you-can-eat data plans, which lest we forget are subject to the usual fair usage policy. Eagle-eyed customers have already scoured the O2 user agreement and found no suggestion that tethering in this manner is in violation, but nevertheless I’ll be paying just a little closer attention to my next online bill just in case this data transfer lark is going to cost me over and above the all-inclusive stuff.
Bottom line, if £5.99 is all this app will ever cost you to get on the internet beyond free wifi coverage, then it’s the bargain of the century for iPhone-equipped road warriors.
UPDATE 2nd August 3pm: at time of writing it appears the app has once again been removed from the App Store. We’ll be keeping an eye on it and you can also follow Nullriver’s blog to stay updated. The app should still work fine for those who managed to bag it. Advantage Apple…