iPhone 4S launch; a mixed bag

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AppId is over the quota
By Jason D. O'Grady | October 16, 2011, 9:14pm PDT

Summary: The iPhone 4S arrived in U.S. stores on Friday and people had a mixed bag of results with activations.

This year I wasn’t up for an iPhone upgrade, but my wife was. So she’s the lucky recipient of a new 32GB iPhone 4S (in white, natch) with a matching two-year agreement to match. She stayed with AT&T for a) grandfathered unlimited data and b) faster download speeds.

Rather than pre-order or wait in line, we just sauntered into the Apple Store in Atlantic City at around 4pm on Friday. When I called at 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. all models of the iPhone 4S were in “limited supply” — Apple parlance for “in stock… but no guarantees” — so there was no rush. The Apple Store was packed but there wasn’t a line. The whole transaction took about 20 minutes and we activated her 4S in-store without a problem.

The best part was setting up the iPhone 4S from her iCloud backup using the Apple Store’s Wi-Fi connection. Although we didn’t wait for all of her apps to re-download, she was able to download her contacts and calendars while in-store. A message popped up stating that apps would be re-downloaded when the iPhone was back on Wi-Fi. A flawless experience overall.

Bob Fish, on the other hand, couldn’t get his pre-ordered iPhone 4S activated on Friday. Here’s the error message he got while trying to activate his 4S via iTunes:

After having no luck activating via iTunes he took his iPhone 4S to his local AT&T Store to ask if they could activate the phone and they said that they “got a message” to send everyone to the Apple Store to get their phones activated. Ultimately, he made the trek to his local Apple store where he sailed through the activation process using the in-store Wi-Fi connection.

Users on Twitter and this MacRumors discussion thread reported problems activating the iPhone 4S on AT&T on Friday when its servers apparently buckled under the heavy load of activations.

The iPhone 4S activation woes come on the heels of problems with Apple’s iOS 5 servers on Wednesday, which prevented many users from downloading, installing and restoring Apple’s latest mobile OS.

What was your experience like with the iPhone 4S? Any drama?

Jason O'Grady+ is a journalist and author specializing in mobile technology. He has published six books on Apple and mobile gadgets and his PowerPage blog has been publishing for over 15 years.

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Five reasons why I won't be buying an iPhone 4S

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AppId is over the quota
@toddybottom The iPhone 3GS isn't a very good phone?

I love mine! Bog standard 16Gb model, handset replaced once under AppleCare due to dust ingress - no quibble, they just did it. I've never dropped a call (to be fair, ymmv on that count) and it has been rock solid. It will take iOS5 (although I expect some slowdown possibly).

I'm probably going to upgrade to the 4S at some point, but when the new handset didn't appear in the summer, I spent the money instead on an iPad 2. Which I also love.

But who knows? I like the style - new hardware platform (3G, 4) and then a performance boosted version with a sprinkling of extra features (3GS, 4S) as the next handset.

What is incredible is that the 3GS is still being updated with the newest OS for the device, whereas my wife's SE Xperia X10 Mini Pro, purchased a few months after my 3GS, received one update to an already outdated Android release and then nothing more. THAT is planned obsolescence - hackers have proved that you can fit up to 2.3 on it, but SE refuse to update past 2.1, and if you want the SE software that makes the small form factor screen possible to work with, you can't root and update the phone.

Whereas my lovely 3GS is going to get a feature bump when I get home tonight

Oh, btw, I do hope Siri crops up on the iPad 2 at some point. I know it won't, but it would make sense to have it "iClouded".

"Siri, please reschedule that meeting and send to my iPhone."

"I'm afraid I can't do that Dave..."

"Uh-oh..."

Actually, maybe not...

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The mother of all iPhone car mount: ProClip USA

By Jason D. O'Grady | October 21, 2011, 10: 30 am PDT

Summary: I struggled to find a half decent vehicle mounting solution for my iPhone in the past, but the iPhone 4 ProClip USA mount changed all that and definitely is the mother of all car mounts.

If you're like me, probably has an iPhone (or two) and you live by it. Not only to make phone calls and text messages, but for Internet access too. My iPhone is never far away from me, in fact I have a sinking feeling if I have lost my iPhone for more than a few minutes.

Although it is illegal to the driver to use an iPhone (in most of the United States of anyway) it is a very useful device in a car. Maps, GPS and navigation are the most obvious examples of practical uses of an iPhone in a car, but also depend on audio books, podcasts and music to make my trip more manageable. In fact, I do not know what would do without my iPhone in my car, probably go completely crazy to hear announcements.

That being said, I've struggled to find a half decent Setup for my iPhone in my car. I normally plug it and only bolster him in some place of my script. The problem here is obvious: as soon as taking a corner my iPhone goes flying on the ground, usually outside its scope.

I found the answer in a montage of car Clip Pro United States - the mother of all car mounts. I have used several years and normally abandoned because they do not work well or simply fell. ProClip USA mounts vehicle are robust, well built and are available for almost all vehicles in the market.

Can be mounted ProClips place your vehicle, as shown in this diagram:

You need two parts for mounting the device in your script. Together, these two parts create a mounting solution:

a montage of the vehicle - specific to the holder of the device vehiclea - specific to the device

I opted for the following settings for my Honda Pilot:

Honda Pilot-2009 2012 - ProClip Centre Mount (Item #: 854197)-$ 29. 99apple iPhone 4 used a case - support adjustable with tilt swivel and pass through the connector for the connection of the Cable (article no. 516165)-$ 79,99

This configuration suits my iPhone 4 and 4S in bumpers of Apple case impeccably and it can easily be rotated between horizontal and vertical orientation depending on the application. I opted for the owner of the device with the pass connector so that it could easily connect my iPhone to power without having to fish around a power cord.

ProClip Setup is very solid and of high quality. So much so that probably I will get one for my Droid Bionic, which I prefer on my iPhone for navigation in the vehicle. This thing is the mother of all vehicle mounts and well worth the price of admission, especially for travelers and people otherwise they spend too much time in their cars.

Jason or ' Grady + is a journalist and writer specializing in mobile technology. He has published six books on Apple and mobile devices and your blog PowerPage has been publishing for more than 15 years.

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iPhone 4S benchmarks and specs begin to emerge

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AppId is over the quota
By Jason D. O'Grady | October 11, 2011, 11:25am PDT

Summary: Apple doesn’t spec the CPU and GPU speeds of it’s iOS devices beyond vague statements like “it’s 2x faster.” Early recipients of the iPhone 4S have filled the void by posting benchmarks on the Web.

Apple told us a lot about its shiny, new iPhone 4S when it was formally announced by CEO Tim Cook last week — but it didn’t tell us everything and details are starting to emerge ahead of Friday’s official launch. Although it’s not available in stores until October 14, a number of lucky pre-orderers in Germany received their iPhone 4Ses a few days early and were able to glean additional details about the device that weren’t previously available.

For starters, the A5 processor in the iPhone 4S clocks in at around 800MHz according to AnandTech, making it significantly faster than the iPhone 4’s A4 processor, but slightly slower than the iPad 2’s A5.

According to early benchmarks, iPhone 4S Javascript performance is on par with Tegra 2-based Android devices running Honeycomb like the Galaxy Tab 8.9.

AnandTech also posted GPU benchmark results from GLBenchmark 2.1 which put the “4S” right behind the iPad 2 in graphics performance but almost doubles performance over the iPhone 4.

AppVV (via MacRumors) also confirms that the iPhone 4S has 512MB of RAM, just like the iPhone 4 it replaces. This is less than the iPad’s 1GB of RAM and many people speculated that the new iPhone would inherit the larger RAM footprint in the iPad 2.

This gives hope to those wondering about support for Siri running the on the iPhone 4. Although Apple has stated that Siri is only compatible with the iPhone 4S, we now know that it isn’t a limitation of RAM, but more likely a limitation of the A4 processor. Although this still doesn’t explain why Siri couldn’t conceivably run on the iPad 2, since it has the same A5 processor as the one found in the iPhone 4S.

MacRumors also notes that the iPhone 4S achieved a Sunspider total score of 2222.1ms and a BrowserMark score of 89567. An iPhone 4 running iOS 5 achieved a BrowserMark score of 44856, making the new iPhone 4S roughly twice as fast in the browser.

Jason O'Grady+ is a journalist and author specializing in mobile technology. He has published six books on Apple and mobile gadgets and his PowerPage blog has been publishing for over 15 years.

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Gallery: Droid RAZR vs. iPhone 4 and unboxing

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AppId is over the quota
Jason D. O'Grady+ developed an affinity for Apple computers after using the original Lisa, and this affinity turned into a bona-fide obsession when he got the original 128 KB Macintosh in 1984.

He started writing one of the first Web sites about Apple (O'Grady's PowerPage) in 1995 and is considered to be one of the fathers of blogging. He has been a frequent speaker at the Macworld Expo conference and a member of the conference faculty. He also co-founded the first dedicated PowerBook User Group (PPUG) in the United States.

After winning a major legal battle with Apple in 2006, he set the precedent that independent journalists are entitled to the same protections under the First Amendment as members of the mainstream media.

O'Grady is the author of The Nexus One Pocket Guide, The Droid Pocket Guide, The Google Phone Pocket Guide, and The Garmin nuvi Pocket Guide (Peachpit Press), the author of Corporations That Changed the World: Apple Inc. (Greenwood Press), and a contributor to The Mac Bible (Peachpit Press). In addition, he has contributed to numerous Mac publications over the years, including MacWEEK, Macworld, and MacPower (Japan).

When he's not writing about Apple for ZDNet at The Apple Core, he enjoys spending time with his family in New Jersey.

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With iOS 5 and iCloud, more memory is better than less for your iPhone, iPad

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AppId is over the quota
Summary: The common wisdom is that the arrival of iCloud and iOS 5 will let us store our stuff on the cloud and buy an iPhone and iPad with less memory. However, a recent developer blog post warns that more memory is the better choice.

The common wisdom is that the arrival of iCloud and iOS 5 will let us store our stuff on the cloud and buy an iPhone and iPad with less memory. However, a recent developer blog post warns that more memory is the better choice.

The issue was presented by developer Marco Arment, the maker of the useful Instapaper, the off-line content reading service and application.  The post says the problem arrived with iOS 5 and its automatic backups to iCloud.

It happens that developers have stored data in several temporary caches. This was data that was useful to the application (and for the user experience) but wasn’t backed up in the iTunes sync cycle.

Now the data could be redownloaded, but that might take a long time depending on the available bandwidth (think Wifi vs. Edge) as well as the size of the cached files (the very reason that this data is not included in the usual backup and sync). Apple didn’t flush the caches so everything was fine and developers began to rely on storing their data in the caches.

However, now with iOS 5 and iCloud, Apple wants developers to reduce the amount of data overhead for their apps. If data can be redownloaded, it should be. Arment quotes some developer notes and memos:

1. Only documents and other data that is user-generated, or that cannot otherwise be recreated by your application, should be stored in the /Documents directory and will be automatically backed up by iCloud.

2. Data that can be downloaded again or regenerated should be stored in the /Library/Caches directory. Examples of files you should put in the Caches directory include database cache files and downloadable content, such as that used by magazine, newspaper, and map applications.

The problem as Arment explains it is that the cached data is now cleared when capacity falls to some low point. For Instapaper, this means content stored for offline reading, but it could effect apps that deal with map data, e-books and podcasts. If the user fills up the device with content, the caches with the content might be flushed.

He reports that one of his customers recently packed her iPad full of games, video and materials to read for a long-distance flight — a natural action — only to discover that her actions had triggered the cache cleaning routine. No reading for her.

Of course, downloading large amounts of data in the wild may not be practical or possible.

But even with available, fast, unlimited internet connectivity, randomly deleting an app’s data is still a problem:

When customers save an article with Instapaper, get a book in iBooks, or download a podcast with Instacast, they expect it to be there next time they launch the app. Even though it’s technically redownloadable, customers see that as their data — they put it there, and it’s theirs to remove if and when they see fit.

When the cleaner wipes it out, it appears that the app has failed and deleted their data. And customers won’t know that it’s an iOS 5 behavior — they’ll understandably blame the app developers. Even though it’s not our fault, it’s certainly going to become our problem.

There needs to be a file storage location that behaves the way Caches did before iOS 5: it’s not backed up to iTunes or iCloud, it’s not synced, but it’s also never deleted unless the app is deleted.

My guess is that Apple will fix this issue for developers shortly. Still, buying the iPhone and iPad SKU with more memory appears to be the best choice for performance and productivity.

David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years.

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I might jailbreak my iPhone for IntelliScreenX

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Jason D. O'Grady+ developed an affinity for Apple computers after using the original Lisa, and this affinity turned into a bona-fide obsession when he got the original 128 KB Macintosh in 1984.

He started writing one of the first Web sites about Apple (O'Grady's PowerPage) in 1995 and is considered to be one of the fathers of blogging. He has been a frequent speaker at the Macworld Expo conference and a member of the conference faculty. He also co-founded the first dedicated PowerBook User Group (PPUG) in the United States.

After winning a major legal battle with Apple in 2006, he set the precedent that independent journalists are entitled to the same protections under the First Amendment as members of the mainstream media.

O'Grady is the author of The Nexus One Pocket Guide, The Droid Pocket Guide, The Google Phone Pocket Guide, and The Garmin nuvi Pocket Guide (Peachpit Press), the author of Corporations That Changed the World: Apple Inc. (Greenwood Press), and a contributor to The Mac Bible (Peachpit Press). In addition, he has contributed to numerous Mac publications over the years, including MacWEEK, Macworld, and MacPower (Japan).

When he's not writing about Apple for ZDNet at The Apple Core, he enjoys spending time with his family in New Jersey.

View the original article here