mobile

Eye-Fi Mobile X2

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Since my new Canon PowerShot Elph 300HS required a Class 6 SDHC card to record 1080p HD video and also included native support for the Eye-Fi series of wireless-enabled SD cards, I decided to pick up a new Eye-Fi Mobile|X2 SDHC memory card.

Let’s be up-front about this: you pay a premium for the convenience of built-in WiFi. A regular 8gb Class 6 SDHC card runs about $10 on Amazon whereas the 8gb Mobile|X2 is 8 times that (although keep an eye out for price drops, I got mine for $60). On top of the higher price, you’ll get poorer battery life in your camera (unless your camera supports Eye-Fi cards in their menu system which lets you turn off the wireless sync to save battery life).

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iOS5’s new features

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It’s been about a week since I upgraded to iOS5 on my iPhone 3GS (and performed the untethered jailbreak) and I’ve since been learning my way around some of its new features.

  • Twitter: don’t use it
  • Newsstand: don’t use it (I use MegaReader)
  • iCloud: don’t use it (except for Find My iPhone)
  • WiFi iTunes sync: only works when the device is plugged into power, so I might as well just connect it via the USB cable to my PC
  • Reminders: I was excited to learn that iOS5 finally added support for synchronizing my Tasks in Microsoft Exchange via ActiveSync. However, the lack of categories, no sorting by priority (or any sorting at all!), and no way to easily clear all Completed entries quickly led me to dump Reminders and go back to iMExchange 2. Nice first try Apple, but this still needs work. 🙁
  • iPad multi-tasking gestures: don’t work on my iPad 1

Ok, now for the stuff I actually do use (why did I upgrade again?). 😉

  • iMessage: being able to chat other iOS users without using my AT&T text messaging plan (the no-longer-available 200 messages/month for $5) is nice. It’s even nicer that biteSMS seamlessly takes over the the built-in Messages app and supports iMessage too.
  • Notification Center: it’s not perfect, but it is a huge improvement over the previous notification system. I like that SBSettings can integrate with it since I’m already used to swiping down from the top of the screen. I’m still configuring all of my different app notifications but for the most part I’m happy with this new feature. I do wish it was wider on the iPad when in landscape mode, however.

Unfortunately, I have run into some problems since upgrading. Slow/sluggish performance and poor battery life were the initial indicators. Sometimes the phone is so slow it takes one of my taps as a tap-and-hold, or just ignores the tap altogether so I end up tapping multiple times on the same element. I’ve gone through some of the tips to improve battery life, which did help, but it still seems like my battery drains faster than it did on iOS 4.3.3. I’m going to stick with it, though (I don’t feel like attempting to downgrade back to 4.3.3 and setting up everything again). There may be a new iPhone in my near future anyway …

iOS5 untethered jailbreak arrives, I take the plunge (again)

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The iOS jailbreaking community got a nice holiday/new year’s gift the other week from pod2g and the dev-team: the untethered iOS 5.0.1 jailbreak for the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and original iPad (iPad 2 and iPhone 4S users might get their own jailbreak soon too). I’d been running iOS 4.3.3 on my iPhone 3GS since last May so I decided to take the plunge to upgrade to Apple’s latest software and then re-apply the jailbreak.

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Amazon dumps Stanza, so I do too

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One of the first apps I put on my iPhone 3GS was Stanza, to replace iSilo from my Treo for reading e-books. At that time, Amazon had just acquired Lexcycle and I remember wondering they would end up combining the Kindle and Stanza apps. Well, now we know the answer: nope. A recent update to the Stanza iOS app (version 3.2) added iOS 5 compatibility, but effectively killed the app on iOS 4.x. It just crashes immediately.

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WebOS is dead … long live, er — uh, nevermind

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Today, just six short months since announcing a slew of new WebOS devices, hp announced they are discontinuing the entire WebOS line. The successor to PalmOS and its related devices like the Pre just never took off and the TouchPad was pretty much dead-on-arrival, crushed by the iPad only 49 days after its release. It’s a sad end to a long, (relatively) proud line of Palm devices, dating back to the original Pilot 1000 in 1996. I can’t really mourn the death of hp/Palm devices though … since switching from my Treo 680 to the iPhone almost two years ago I never considering going back.

But …

HP’s press release doesn’t say that WebOS is dead. The wording instead suggests that the company will find some ways to extract value from its $1.2 billion Palm purchase, even if phones and tablets are off the table. In fact, according to a report yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, HP plans to expand webOS to household appliances and automobiles.

So while you may not be using WebOS on your new smartphone, you might be using it to wash your clothes. 😉

ZoneMinder

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Last summer, my mini-tech project was installing some wireless internet cameras inside and outside the house so I could keep tabs on things while I was away. For the past year I’d just been using the built-in features of each of the cameras (motion detection, e-mail alerts, etc.) which was hit-or-miss since each manufacturer offered different features, some better implemented than others, and none of them perfect.

This setup was fine, but I wanted to be able to better manage the system and maybe even store more history of events (or “live” video) without having it be all e-mail messages with static image attachments. That’s what prompted me to search for open source camera management software, and I that’s how I found ZoneMinder.

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Palm is dead, long live … hp?

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Yesterday, hp announced a slew of new devices running WebOS (which they acquired last year). One thing was missing from their press event though … Palm. hp’s new devices are branded the hp TouchPad, the hp Pre 3, and the hp Veer

Yes, sadly, the Palm brand is now dead, almost two years after the death of PalmOS.

It’s been over a year since I put down my last Palm device and switched to the iPhone, so at this point I’m pretty much over PalmOS, but I’ll still remember it fondly.

Palm is dead …long live Palm!

Apple iPad

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About a month ago I got a 16gb (WiFi only) Apple iPad from work so I’ve had about 30 days to mess around with Apple’s “magical” tablet. If I had to sum the iPad up in one word?

Slick.

I’m not going to bother with the specs, or a general overview of the iPad here. It’s been out for about 8 months and you can certainly read/find all the technical details you want fairly easily (just typing ‘ipad’ into Google yields “about 123,000,000 results”). Instead, I’ll talk about how I’ve been using it, the apps I’ve installed, and my overall impressions.

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Syncing podcasts without iTunes

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Last month I purchased Podcaster for my iPhone (thanks to this thread over on the TiVo Community Forum) and have now been using it for a few weeks.

Podcaster was originally rejected by Apple back in 2008 so the developer put the app on Cydia instead for jailbroken phones. Then in 2009, a slightly stripped down version called RSS Player accepted into the App Store. Finally, this past June, Podcaster for iOS4 devices was approved by Apple (RSS Player is still available for older iOS3 devices).

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