iPhone and blackrain

There are many reports of the geohot blackrain hack causing issues with wireless network operation... Don't do it.


Another BlogPress dump

Snow Leopard shipped with vulnerable flash

This is just plain bad practice. Why bundle flash at all? Maybe I don't want flash. Anyway, Apple geniuses have shipped the latest spin of OSX, Snow leopard 10.6, with a known flash vulnerability. Default installs from the first spin discs will forever have a flash based vulnerability. In the grand scheme of things. This is really not a huge deal because new vulnerabilities are identified every day. Most likely some of those will affect OSX 10.6 software so eventually the discs will be full of holes. The bigger issue is that this is not fixed with Software Update. You will have to do it manually. See the SOPHOS site for more details and a fix.

Was the iPhone 3GS worth the wait?

Yes it is true. There is a small faction of techno-gadget geeks who have put off the purchase of the iPhone. I was one of them. We all know that the iPhones will continue to improve every year. They have had 3 quick years of life, under constant critique, on AT&T’s cellular network. More than 1 million applications have been developed to run on the platform. The new model has enhanced speed, up to 32GB of storage, a magnetometer, voice control software and, yes, system-wide copy and paste.

I caved, and here is my report.


Yes, it was worth the wait. I like it. Relative to a Blackberry, it performs pretty well. All of my smartphone experience (6 or 7 years) comes from Blackberries and I have to say I am satisfied (so far, still a lot to look into).

AT&T in my region (Nashville TN) can’t seem to handle data services too well. Too often I find myself turning off/on the 3G radio to get data services going again. Generally this occurs after going up and down in elevators for some reason (looses signal and finds it again, but no data?)

The GPS subsystem seems buggy, when it works, it’s great. I think this is largely due to poorly written app code. Just about every GPS app I’ve installed needs more work. The only one so far that seems to work as intended is google maps.

iPhone and battery life:

Another thing I would like to mention is the fact that I think the iPhone gets a bad reputation when it comes to battery life. I’ve done some testing and I think it does very well. If I simply use it as a phone, and nothing more, I can get about 4 days on one charge under light usage (30 minutes per day) with all radios on. Some tips: Turn the bluetooth, wireless, location services and 3G radios off (EDGE only, no fancy flips/cameras/iPod) and it will last most of the week.

The problem is that its an iPhone, and that is very hard to do. :) Many of us use it as a laptop replacement. Ghee whiz, I don’t understand why so many people complain about battery life. When used as a mobile computer, it still does well on time.

Tethering and MMS:

C’mon seriously... search for the demo’s online, it works pretty well as far as I’ve seen. Come up with the plan and I’m sure sales will go up. (Fix my data issue noted above and I’ll never leave). I really wonder what the hold up is... Mud in the face.

Some of my favorite apps: