iPhone 3.0 Beta 3 - A user's perspective

This may be a little late to write something about iPhone 3.0 beta 3. But I would like to summarised my findings after a week of usage.

Beta 4 is expected to come out in coming week, hope it will be better and faster.

First impression of beta 3, the moment it is installed on my iPhone, that it is significantly faster than 2.2.1. However, I may be subjective as my iPhone 2.2.1 was jail broken and with all sorts of apps from the unofficial community, such as SwirlyMMS, MySMS, etc.

IPhone 3.0 beta 3 gives me a good reason why I need jailbreak no more. SMS and MMS are now a standard application in one, i.e. you send SMS and MMS from the same app, which is what I wanted all these while.

By typing an email address instead of a phone number, or clicking on camera icon on the left of your message input windows, iPhone knows that you wanted to send a MMS instead of SMS. This is quite a life saving as user need not go to a separate app to do either one messaging.

It will be good, if Apple were to integrate SMS, MMS, Twitter, Facebook, and other IM functionalities into one app, eliminating the need to flip back and fort relevant app for specific function, which essentially doing the same thing, i.e. messaging.

Another improvement is global search function, which again works well for me. I was relying on an app called SEARCH to perform similar function, search content within iPhone.

Global search does not only search messages, it does contacts, emails, podcasts, or rather all Apple bundled applications, including applications itself. This means if you have plenty of apps installed on your iPhone, one common problem is that you need to constantly swiping left or right to look for the app you wanted. Global search simplified the operation by just needed to type part of the app's name, viola, it will then listed, and you can launch the app by touching the icon.

Simplifying user interactions and enhancing functionality is not mutually exclusive and heading into opposite direction. Global search is a good example of such scenario.

I will write more later..

iPhone - my track on PDA to smartphone

Well, many was asking me why I favored iphone instead of phones running either Symbian or Windows Mobile.

I have been using a couple of phones, smartphones.

I was a tester for HTC series of Windows Mobile phones. To me, Windows Mobile is not even advancing since the day Windows CE launched.

The design philosophy is simply not right. It was taken from a PDA approach, and adding phone functionality. The worst is, it was trying to do what a desktop computer should, and of course with a lot of short comings.

I was first using Apple Newton MessagePad 120 which I bought from Singapore back in 1993. It was a truly amazing experience of having a PDA carrying around and it is surprisingly fast and accurate on handwriting recognition, much faster than my later HP iPAQ which I bought in year 2000.

I have never been impressed by Palm's PDA, even at the later date, I bought a Tungsten for my wife, and I still never like it.

Newton sets a high standard for me on PDAs and smartphones that I came across. Frankly, none so far beats Newton on its friendliness, even the iPhone.

I am still keeping an unit of Newton MessagePad 2100, except that the battery connector dropped out, the unit is still functioning well with AC.

After Apple discontinued Newton, I was looking for a replacement, or rather, an upgrade. There comes HP iPAQ which was first seen when one of my colleague bought it sometime year 2000.

I was impressed by the color screen, and bought 2 units, one for my wife, and one for myself.

There's little connectivity on iPAQ, I can slot in a wireless card, which requires a backpack, and the unit become almost 2 X as thick, and of course, heavy.

But both my wife and myself have been suffering from short battery life, typically lasted for 1 hour when actively using it; and often screwing up our contacts on both iPAQ and PC when ActiveSync don't work properly.

I started to admire the long battery life of Palm, and of course Newton.

My iPAQ was later flashed with Linux, seems to work pretty well with a number of Linux distributions available for iPAQ at that time.

After iPAQ, I have not been using PDA for quite some time. I truly believe that PDA must be connected to be useful, and battery life, extensibility, are all important aspect of PDA/smartphone.

Then came Nokia/Sony Ericsson's Symbian phone. I was attracted, and bought Nokia N70.

It was a horrible experience where my N70 is consistently running out of battery when I need most. Screen was too small for me to do anything meaningful except calling and accepting calls.

In 3 months' time, I traded the unit with Motorola Razor 3G, cheapest 3G phone at that point.

The Moto disappoint me with its short battery life and slow response. No choice, go look for an ordinary phone, Sony Ericsson K70, then SE T610i while waiting for iPhone 3G to be at our shore at reasonable price.

iPhone 3G is not perfect either, short battery life, i.e. my usage pattern of getting connected almost every moment requiring me to charge the phone atleast twice a day. I was later found out the short battery life is largely attributed to 3G/GPRS switching which forces the phone to scan for available 3G signal.

But iPhone design philosophy is very much different from Windows Mobile, where iphone is basically user centric, where WIndows Mobile is a shrink-Windows on a phone.

I will blog more on my findings on iPhone in the following days.

iPhone 3G with Body Guardz

Have my iphone 3G wrapped with Body Guardz. Quite badly done, and worst, the adhesive at the side of body Guardz is sticky and attracts furs and dust, which I was not able to avoid. However, it does serve its function to protect the phone well.

I have also noticed that after wrapping up the iphone, I was not able to fully charge the phone when the weather is hot. 

I am using the iphone 3G almost every other minute, and something charging up to 4 times in a day as the battery goes off pretty fast.

Battery life is not due to the design of iphone, but rather my ISP, Celcom, whose 3G signal going limbo every now and then. This forces the iphone to keep scanning and re-attach to 3G when 3G signal dropped and come back at random, but pretty frequent both at my work place and at home.

I can opt to switch off 3G when not in use, but my problem is that I need to access to my mail box at certain intervals. Some users suggested that downloading mails are pretty fast even with EDGE network.

My problem with Celcom is: I do not sense any EDGE signal around my work place and my home. Yes, there are some spots, like PJ SS16, SS14 where I can get EDGE if 3G not available.

So if I do not get 3G or EDGE, the bigger problem comes: When iphone is picking up mails using GPRS, it is slow, and it will bar all my incoming SMSs and calls. This is a serious problem, not from Apple, but from my ISP Celcom who are not able to provide a stable 3G network, or atleast to have EDGE coverage at 3G blind spots.

Next problem. My 3G is 3.6Mbps unlimited data plan. I can only get to the max of approx. 2Mbps, and only in the middle of the night, around 4am to about 5am. After that, it falls back to 384Kbps or lesser. Sometime it is even slower than GPRS, Serious!!

I will seek clarification from Celcom, after their network upgrade ended 22 Feb 09. If the speed is not even up to 1/3 of the advertised speed, then Celcom is cheating me.

Jailbreaking iPhone 3G firmware 2.2.1

Suddenly my iPhone 3G dialer failed to function. It quits after a few seconds.

I cannot figure out why and how to solve it. I had SIAX (SIP/IAX compatible softphone), which comes with a dialer for cellular network besides IAX and SIP calls.

I used SIAX to call cellular, got connected, but cannot put down the phone.

Apparently the dialer app is really having big problem!! Hell!! I got a phone which I cannot call properly!!!

Have no choice, need to decide whether I should upgrade from 2.2 to 2.2.1 which I was not so keen due to several reasons. One being fear of some jail broken apps may fail to function. Apps like MySMS and SwirlyMMS are a few that I have paid and I do not want my investment to go down to the drain after upgraded.

OK. It is not really a pain updating my iPhone 3G to 2.2.1. iTune did the job without complaint.

Now is the critical time, jailbreak iphone 3G with firmware 2.2.1.

Following the instruction here, I have managed to jailbreak using my Macbook.

Since my iPhone 3G is officially unlocked, I have no problem upgrading to 2.2.1 and then jailbreak.

Everything seems to work fine, and it seems to run faster as well.