As I Xi It

I just love that DoF!

Oooh, buttons

Oooh, speakers/mic

Oooh, aluminiumy

Oooh, homey

Well, my shiny, shiny new iPhone 4 was delivered promptly yesterday lunchtime. What proceeded that was a series of unfortunate events.

Opened the package, phone in excellent new condition eventhough it’s a refurb, connected to iTunes as per instructions and restored the backup from my 3GS to 4. While that was going on, I contacted O2 via webchat and conversed with “Charles”. I asked him where he was based and surprise, surprise, India! Asked him to remove the bar on my account and activate my SIM. He did as he was told and said that I needed to wait up to 2 hours for my phone to connect up to the network.

Three hours later, back on webchat I went and this time chatted with a “Benjy” who went on to tell me that “Charles” lifted the bar but didn’t activate my SIM. So he went and activated my SIM and told me that I now had to wait a further 2 – 24 hours until I was able to make and receive calls. About 30 minutes later, I get an email from “Benjy” telling me that my SIM was for a different number and that I would have to go into an O2 store to sort it out. Unfortunately, all the O2 stores near me shut at 5:30pm – 6:00pm so that wasn’t an option.

I didn’t trust “Benjy” so called up O2 and spoke to a real person, can’t remember what her name was, probably a Jane or Janet or something. She made no comment about my SIM problems (I just asked to activate my SIM), gave her my mobile no. and SIM code and that was that. A few minutes later, yay! I could see “O2-UK” on my phone. I thought all was well, but I couldn’t make or receive calls from it! A few minutes later again, I was able to make and receive calls, but now I didn’t have data access!! In the end, I manage to solve the data issue by reconfiguring the cellular data settings. It was just one palava after another.

To add to these connection woes, iTunes kept crashing during the photo optimisation process when I tried to upload my photos to it. Lost count how many times I tried. Some googling revealed that iTunes 10 has a bug and you have to deselect “include videos”. I’ve managed to circumvent the lack of vids by using the VLC player app which unfortunately has been pulled from the app store.

Shiny, shiny goodness

While the iPhone 4 has more features, I still prefer the shape of the 3GS. For me, the most striking difference between the two is the retina screen on the 4, it really is noticibly sharper than on the 3GS. Text is really crisp and images vivid. Those blues and turqoises from my Seychelles pics really pop! Speaking of which, I got a Case-Mate Pop case in red for it.

For those who are going to ask why I didn’t just wait for the iPhone 5, well, I would’ve been iPhone-less for a few months. Cant’t possibly be having that.

I can’t fucking believe it! Somebody pilfered my beloved iPhone out my pocket while I was shopping in ASSDA yesterday!!

I had my phone when I’d left the car, checked my phone for a text when I was in the store by the veg section. It wasn’t until I’d returned to the car that I noticed I was an iPhone lighter. Went back in, retraced my steps asked Customer Service if anyone had handed it in but nada. I raced back home and was quickly on the computer to O2  to bar my SIM and phone. Just last week or so, I was thinking of leaving O2, it’s just as well I hesitated since my contract’s up and I’m due for an upgrade. It’s still pretty annoying though, I’m having to shell out for a new phone at a financially inconvenient time.

I’ve been without a smartphone for almost 24 hours now and it’s so bloody annoying. I can’t read my tweets or check Facebook conveniently when I’m in bed. Sometimes I like to check the weather when I can’t sleep or read the news, but I can’t! I wonder how on earth I survived without one before. At the moment I’m having to use my old dumb phone, it’s so small in comparison. While I have internet access on it, it’s not quite the same on a diddy, low res screen.

I hope my new iPhone 4 arrives soon. It’s suppose to be here today or tomorrow. I feel so naked without one.

I really love my iPhone, still shiny and filled with oodles of apps! It’s just so handy, I can check my emails on the run, pretend that I’m in the office, tweet while having dinner with chums, check the Tube status and of course, have a nosey on Facebook.

Some people are really missing out. :-p

For several months, I’ve more or less been able to drop off to the land of nod presto pronto. In recent weeks however, I haven’t been sleeping so well and have felt compelled to play on my iPhone in bed before sleeping, checking Facebook, emails, Tweets etc… Even though I know in my mind that nothing of importance has occurred in the time I’ve taken to brush my teeth, I still have a compulsion to check these social networking things. My iPhone is almost like an electronic nightcap. In fact, I’m typing this on the WP app right now.

There hasn’t been any sort of major life changes (except for this pre-sleep iPhoness) or anything whether it be psychological or physiological. I could keep my phone away from me while I snooze, but I use the Sleep Cycle app to wake me up in the morning (and it works marvellously). The first thing I do when I wake up is to check my emails on my phone. Anything of relevance is usually sent 9am-5pm, Mon-Fri, so it’s not as if there are work emails waiting for my urgent attention.

I don’t think this iPhone reliance is normal, but is there any real harm in it?

Having returned from my travels around Sweden and with many other trips in the pipeline for the rest of 2010, I thought it’d be appropriate to review my top three travel apps for the iPhone. A must have feature in travel apps is the ability to have them run offline without having to use data roaming which can be pretty costly (at the time of writing, O2 charge £3/MB for data roaming in Europe and £6/MB for the rest of the world).

When planning a trip, it’s always handy to have all your flight details and confirmations at hand. To keep organised, I recommend WorldMate. It’s free and the cool thing is that you can just forward your confirmations and booking details to either your unique WorldMate email address or the generic WorldMate email address (having linked your email address with it) and it’ll pretty much set up your trip itinerary for you. You can also manually tweak your itineraries for things like meetings or visits to museums and whatnot.

If you really want to travel light (no such thing for photographers hauling kgs of kit), you could leave your Lonely Planet and Rough Guide at home and replace it with TripWolf. Just select the city or country that you’ll be travelling to and download the guide before departure. Since TripWolf is based on integration of info from the Marco Polo guides and user generated info, it’s pretty much a constant work in progress so you should have the latest info everytime you update it. Most of the guides are free to download within the TripWolf app, but there are some places for which you can download a premium guide for a price, I think it’s something like £4/5. I assume it has more detailed info than the basic guide.

There’s nothing quite like immersing yourself in the local culture by learning the local lingo. To save on having to bring a separate phrasebook, I recommend Lingopal. Unlike the traditional paperbacked phrasebooks, it speaks to you! You can download individual language apps, a few are free and most are paid (only 59p each), there’s also a dedicated app to help you flirt in all their different languages as well as the complete bumper pack of all the phrases (travel, essentials, flirts, insults etc) in 44 languages. It has some pretty humerous phrases including Sophie’s favorite “Oj! Jag tappade glassen… Kan du slicka upp den?” and some of their insults are quite priceless like, my favourite, “Om jag skulle vilja höra från ett ashål hade jag släppt mig”.

I’ve installed the WPTouch plugin for this blog and it works pretty well. It greatly simplifies the interface of the site when viewed on an iPhone or any other mobile device.

Simple, elegant, fast. What more could I ask for?

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I’ve just been testing the voice search on the Google app for my iPhone and I can’t say that it’s as good as I’d expected. When I asked it to ‘search Xiyu’, it returned with ‘sexy z’. I also tried ‘Xiyu online’, but got nowhere close. Now, granted that those aren’t very standard things to search, so next I tried ‘Applied Environmental Microbiology’ and it returned with ‘applying for men to microbiology’. Now, while it’s fairly close phonetically, it’s not really close enough to be of much use. Nice try Google, but I think I’ll stick to good old typing for the time being.

One more thing before I go – I’m actually posting from my iPhone using the WordPress app. It’s fairly capable for blogging on the go. I think other blogging platforms have their own apps too. I love my iPhone.

Now I thought seamless integration of my iPhone with my computer as a remote was cool, then I came across Apple’s own app which lets me control my iTunes via wifi! Works mighty well too, I’m almost tempted to get a Macbook Pro now.

See here for more info.

Today I came across the coolest app ever for my iPhone, it works pretty darn well and best of all, its FREE!! It’s the Logitech Touch app which allows you to control your computer like a touch pad over wifi. All you need is the software for the computer you want to controll here and install the Touch Mouse app onto your iPhone. If you search for “Touch Mouse”, it should be the first app that comes up.

It was surprisingly easy to set up, all I did was install the software on my computer and then opened up the app on my iPhone, selected my computer which it automatically detected and voila, all done. So now I can use my computer with ease while I’m on the exercise bike! How’s that for multitasking?