iPhone - page 424

A couple of weeks ago, we posted a link to a stress test the guys over at iFixYourI performed on the iPhone 4, showing that while it was fairly bend proof, it easily shattered when dropped.

The problem with their test was that since the iPhone 4 hadn’t been released yet, they had simply conducted their test with an empty iPhone 4 case and display, which prompted our commenters to raise some excellent points that a hollow iPhone 4 was more likely to be easily broken than one with all the electronics innards tightly packed inside.

Here’s the follow through. iFixYouri have done another drop test on a real iPhone 4. Frankly, I’m surprised how well the real iPhone 4 holds up to dropping it from waist height onto concrete: three successive drops breaks the phone, while the fourth shatters it, but I’d actually consider that pretty good for an unprotected handset made largely out of glass, wouldn’t you?

Those in the know of how cellular antennas work have been expressing misgivings about the design of the iPhone 4’s antenna for a while now.

As a simplistic summary of the problem, with the iPhone 4, Apple chose to essentially make the stainless steel band wrapping around the phone act as the phone’s antenna by separating it into three distinct chunks delineated by the gaps in the handset’s frame. Superficially, that should give the iPhone 4 more reception bars, but as MAKE’s Dave Matthews said two weeks ago: “Having been in the cellular business most of my career, I think it’s really odd that you’d want an antenna grounded by a moist hand.”

It looks like this fear may have been grounded in reality. Numerous users are reporting — with video proof — that the iPhone 4 loses up to four bars of reception when it’s actually picked up. If you don’t touch the bottom of the phone, you’re fine, but as soon as you connect the left side with the bottom of the phone… reception goes in the toilet.

TomTom is a popular turn-by-turn navigational app for the iPhone that has recently been updated to support multitasking and iOS 4. The new app released on Tuesday is version 1.4 and TomTom has advised all users to upgrade to this version immediately if they are running iOS 4.

Waiting in line outside an Apple store is no longer just for fans: it’s business.  Two enterprising guys have put up tent space and chair space on website airbnb for spots in line for the iPhone 4 launch

A spot in the San Francisco tent — for the full-on can’t-wait-for-it fanboy experience — will run you $400 a night, more than the price of the new iPhone 4.

And you have to share the tent, too:

“Rent the tent I pitched outside of the Apple store in San Francisco and be the first person to get an iPhone. I have a 2 person tent and figured that if I couldn’t get my friends to join me, I would rent out the extra spot. I’m hoping to earn enough to cover the cost of my phone!”

Another airbnb listing offered a chair outside an Apple store for $200. It’s no longer being offered.

Perhaps the chair has already been occupied?

Via airbnb

A study by warranty provider SquareTrade found that 26% of all iPhones fail — break or suffer hardware malfunctions —  in the first two years of use.

Of course, SquareTrade sells warranties to cover all your iPhone health issues so the info requires a grain of salt. But their study of 25,000 customer claims did find that iPhone reliability is on the upswing. You can read the full report here [PDF].

Last year’s report covering the iPhone and iPhone 3G put the failure rate at 33%. For the iPhone 3Gs, they found most snafus came from power, followed by touchscreen, battery and button issues.

Like the Apple gear they love to dissect, iFixIt’s teardowns seem to just get better and better. Benefitting from the kindness of a customer whose iPhone 4 was delivered early yesterday by FedEx, the premier DIY evangelists took apart and photographed in beautiful detail a brand new iPhone 4, describing the many amazements Cupertino designers and engineers have rolled out with Apple’s newest portable communication device.

Among the discoveries this time out are:

• the ease with which the battery is accessed and removed.
• iFixIt’s CXO Luke called Apple’s integration of the UMTS, GSM, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth antennas into the stainless steel inner frame something that can “only be described as a work of genius.”
• The 1.3mp front-facing and 5mp rear-facing cameras have independent boards, making it possible to remove the cameras without damaging the phone.
• 512MB RAM confirmed.
• 1 GHz ARM Cortex A8 core processor.
• Chips from Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Numonyx, Samsung, ST Micro, Skyworks, Texas Instruments, and TriQuint.

A look at the photographs — and there are many more at much higher resolution available at the iFixIt teardown pages — really gives one a sense of the delicate beauty beneath the already gorgeous surface enclosure of the iPhone.

Kudos to Apple and its manufacturing partners for delivering such a well-made device, and to iFixIt for tearing the thing apart with such meticulous care and attention.

While the white iPhone 4 wasn’t available from Apple or AT&T for pre-order last week, it’s started to look like those who want a more opalescent handset might have more luck local big box retailer: just two days after info leaked that Best Buy might have white iPhone 4s on Thursday comes indication that Walmart might have them as well.

Bluntly, I doubt you’re going to be able to get a white iPhone 4 anywhere on June 24th: if anyone was going to have them, it would be Apple and AT&T, and their refusal to take pre-orders for the white model strongly hints at some sort of supply chain problem. My guess is that while Best Buy and Walmart may have placed orders for the white iPhone 4 before this problem exhibited itself, they aren’t going to be getting any… this week, that is. If you’re optimistic or desperate for a white iPhone 4, though, it can’t hurt dropping by.

Line-sitting obssessive Greg Packer is at it again, camping outside of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City for the iPhone 4. And this time he’s got a sponsor!

The sponsor is Gazelle.com, a site which buys up your used gadgets based upon a cash offer from their dynamic pricing engine. They then either resell your used gadget or recycle it.

Packer himself — more enthusiastic about line-sitting than he is functionally knowledgeable about tech — doesn’t really seem to have a very nuanced understanding of what his sponsor does, describing Gazelle as an “eBay for electronics.” It’s not, really, but either way, it looks like a pretty cool site for individuals who don’t want to go the eBay or Craigslist route for selling their old gadgets… or at the very least, recycle their own tech easily and responsibly. Their sponsorship of Packer has certainly raised my awareness of what they do, so in that, their money seems well spent.

As for Packer and his motivation for sitting in line, “I was the first in the US to have iPhone 1, so why not do it again?”

Shhh! No one tell him that FedEx is already delivering iPhone 4s to customers, no line-sitting required.

While the ability to set a user background wallpaper under iOS 4 is a welcome addition to the operating system, the default wallpaper choices can be pretty, well, garish. Some of them are just too busy, too high contrast, too gross.

The wallpaper above, called Tranquil, is Jason Kottke’s brilliant send-up of the questionable taste Apple employed when picking some the default iOS 4 wallpaper choices.

Just tap and hold on the image until the “Save Image” dialog appears to apply it as the wallpaper of your iPhone.

Point well made, Mr. Kottke.

It should come as no surprise that with the iPhone’s early delivery the boys at iFixIt have already got their hands on one and are opening it up and exposing its innards for all the world to see.

The process is ongoing.

Kind of like getting advance notice of a trainwreck, isn’t it?

If your iPhone 4 pre-order was unceremoniously canceled by AT&T this week, you might have some notion in your noggin of pulling a Packer and waiting in line to get one.

Well, don’t wait in front of an AT&T store. The company that has managed to victoriously spike the FUBAR line each and every down of the iPhone 4 launch will not be selling iPhone 4s to walk-ins until June 29th.

Or won’t they? According to a TUAW reader:

I spoke with my local AT&T store this afternoon and they informed me that they had received over 50 calls today on the subject (apparently all since the release went out).

They told me that they WILL have iPhones available for folks who show up without a pre-order on the 24th. And that the 29th is when they will start taking in-store orders for those who do not have pre-orders.

Now, the statement from AT&T seems pretty darned clear on the subject. But the employee I spoke to seemed pretty darned convinced that they would have phones available.

In other words, who knows? It’s yet another example of Ma Bell’s garish ineptitude when it comes to smallest detail of handling the iPhone’s incredible demand.

iPhone 4s dropping on doorsteps around the country means that all bets are off when it comes to embargoes, so no surprise here: iPhone 4 reviews from many of the big boys are starting to go live.

David Pogue of The New York Times writes:

If what you care about, however, is size and shape, beauty and battery life, polish and pleasure, then the iPhone 4 is calling your name.

Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin:

The fourth incarnation of Apple’s iPhone is an incrementally improved, familiar device—not a new kind of device, as was the case with the recent introduction of iPad. Yes, the notable features with iPhone 4—both the device and the iOS4, which came out yesterday in advance of the iPhone itself—are mostly tweaks. But what tweaks they are: Apple’s focus on improvement is as much key to the quality of its products as innovation. Still, there’s one flaw it can’t completely eliminate: the unreliable quality of calls placed over AT&T, which remains the iPhone’s only U.S. carrier.

Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky:

We’re not going to beat around the bush — in our approximation, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone on the market right now. The combination of gorgeous new hardware, that amazing display, upgraded cameras, and major improvements to the operating system make this an extremely formidable package. Yes, there are still pain points that we want to see Apple fix, and yes, there are some amazing alternatives to the iPhone 4 out there. But when it comes to the total package — fit and finish in both software and hardware, performance, app selection, and all of the little details that make a device like this what it is — we think it’s the cream of the current crop.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNGj9oNWrlw&feature=player_embedded#!

Pretty much nothing has gone right for Apple when it comes to the iPhone 4 launch, so it’s no surprise that the device that was leaked months early to Gizmodo, crept its way into the hands of a random Vietnamese forum and spontaneously materialized in the middle of the Czech countryside is now arriving two days early on people’s doorsteps, courtesy of FedEx.

This isn’t happening just to a few people: Twitter’s literally full of braggy new iPhone 4 owners, and Gizmodo’s got an entire repository of reports. According to one of these guys, activation of the iPhone 4 was initially fairly difficult, but a call to Apple sorted everything out.

Are you one of the lucky SOBs who got his iPhone 4 early? We hate you. Go to blazes. But now that our own seething jealousy is out of the way, seriously, congratulations. Could you hit the comments and tell us what you think of the iPhone 4? Noblesse oblige to all us non-iPhone-4-owning plebs, after all.

There are over 200,000 apps in the iTunes App Store now and everyone can agree that wading through all those apps trying to find the real gems is a big problem. We all muddle through somehow and find an app gem or two usually by word of mouth, a Cult of Mac review, or other means. I’m happy to announce that I’ve found another way to find good apps and this solution is entertaining to boot — Adam Curry’s Big App Show app.

Warning: This method no longer works. To jailbreak the latest firmware, check out greenpois0n/limera1n/Pwnage Tool

Redsn0w by DevTeam allows you to jailbreak your device, to get complete control over it (see why you should jailbreak here). Currently, redsn0w version 0.9.5b5-3 allows you to jailbreak a device that has already been upgraded to firmware 4.0, without losing the jailbreak data. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.

Please note that this tool will NOT work if you have ANY iPhone 3GS, newer iPod Touch G2 or the iPod Touch G3. (On the newer iPod Touch, serial number begins with ‘MC’.)

Warning: This method no longer works. To jailbreak the latest firmware, check out greenpois0n/limera1n/Pwnage Tool

The Pwnage Tool by the DevTeam hacker group allows you to create custom iPhone firmwares for the purpose of jailbreaking, to get full control over your device (see why you should jailbreak here).

Currently, the Pwnage Tool version 4.0 allows you to update your previously jailbroken device to firmware 4.0, without losing the jailbreak data. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.

Please note that this tool will NOT work if you have the iPhone 2G, newer iPhone 3GS, newer iPod Touch G2 or the iPod Touch G3. (On the newer 3GS, go to Settings –> General –> About, the fourth and fifth digit of the serial number should be greater than 40 and on the newer iPod Touch, serial number begins with ‘MC’.)

The wait is finally over. Apple has conspicuously ignored consumer demands for third-party application multitasking over the last three years, but now anyone with an iPhone 3GS or 3G iPod touch can now freely switch between apps without missing a beat. In many ways, today’s launch of iOS 4 is Apple’s most anticipated software release in almost two years. Not since the opening of the App Store via iPhone OS 2.0 has the company made such drastic changes to its flagship product line.

Having installed and played with iOS 4 on my 3GS a bit more than two weeks ago, I can say with confidence that it doesn’t disappoint — but it does take some getting used to.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueKtv6OITjk&feature=player_embedded

Not sure if you managed to successfully order an iPhone 4 from AT&T after their untested pre-order system collapsed and they started randomly canceling completed pre-orders?

AT&T’s hipster mouthpiece Daniel is here to tell you how you can make sure that Ma Bell didn’t bungle your pre-order and that an iPhone 4 is actually heading out to you, despite the fact that a better spokesperson for the job would be Private Snafu. Don’t mistake him for a corporate suit, though — see, he’s wearing a vintage thrift store shirt, albeit one with stripes exactly corresponding to AT&T’s own corporate colors! But that tossled bed head mop and immaculately groomed beard don’t lie: this is a guy with Williamsburg street cred written all over him.

[via 9to5Mac]

If you’ve got an iPhone 3GS or third-gen iPod Touch and you’ve upgraded to iOS 4, you’re probably ready to give multitasking a try. Good news, then: Pandora have just updated the iPhone app to version 3.1, which now supports background audio playback under iOS 4.

Because of the same RIAA licensing nonsense that keeps Spotify out of the U.S. App Store, Pandora is only available in the United States right now, but if you’re a yank who wants to experience the same background functionality in Pandora that you get already in the default iPod app, you can download the app for free here.

iPhone 3G owners trying to upgrade to iOS 4 are reporting numerous issues with the update process, including updates that take hours and failed updates resulting in the sinister error 3002. Fortunately, though, there are ways to get around both by restoring your iPhone 3G instead of updating it.

If you are having problems with an iOS 4 update that is taking upwards of two hours to complete, the good news here is that the longest part of the update is actually backing up the existing media… a strange problem, given that you should automatically be backing up your iPhone 3G in iterative updates every time you sync. If you have a recent backup (and you should), a full restore to factory settings will eliminate the need to backup your iPhone 3G first, and should allow iTunes to update your handset to iOS 4.0 speedily.

The same is true if you’re getting error code 3002. Just click on your iPhone 3G under iTunes and click the “Restore” button. After the restore, you may have to reinstall some of your apps, but it should allow you to run iOS 4 on your iPhone 3G without any other problems or lost data.

Basically? If you’re having problems updating your iPhone or iPod Touch to iOS 4, do a “Restore” instead of an “Update.” If that doesn’t help, hit the comments, and maybe someone can help you.

The iOS 4 update is probably the most radical overhaul to Apple’s mobile operating system to date, so it was probably inevitable that it would also prove to be Apple’s most hiccup-prone update as well.

Even so, the bug complaints currently floating around the internet seem pretty severe for an Apple product and include:

• The update to iOS 4 never installs and simply reboots your device endlessly.

• Update deletes all contacts, which are not restored in backups.

• Photos that you have synced to your device with iPhoto are extremely blurry.

• Broken MMS and Push Notifications.

• Auto-lock set to one minute with no option to change it.

Those first two bugs fall under the category of “whoa nellies,” and that iPhoto bug has got to be an annoyance for people (like me) who use their devices to keep their photo albums always on hand.

Don’t get too comfortable with iOS 4… 4.1 might be just a few days around the corner if these bugs don’t iron themselves out soon.

The UltraSn0w iPhone unlocking software has been updated to support iOS 4.0.

The iPhone Dev-Team’s has updated Ultrasn0w to version 0.9.3, allowing you to unlock your iPhone running iOS4.

The update was announced on the Dev-Team’s Twitter stream. According to the release notes, it works with all basebands from 04.26.08 through 05.13.04:

iPhone DevTeam’s 3G and 3GS software unlock, now with added PwnApple. Compatible with basebands 04.26.08, 05.11.07, 05.12.01 and 05.13.04! Thanks to @sherif_hashim and @Oranav for contributing baseband crashes.

We will have an easy-to-use unlocking how-to guide coming soon.

NOTE: This post has been edited. It incorrectly said Ultrasn0w was for jailbreaking iPhones.

iOS 4 is now available for download through iTunes, adding over a hundred new features to the iPhone and iPod Touch, including multitasking. If you’ve got an iPhone 3G, 3GS or iPod Touch (second gen or above), plug your iDevice into your USB port and hit the “Update” button in iTunes now.

Busy updating? You can also now officially grab iBooks for iPhone through the App Store as well.

What do you think of the new OS? Let us know in the comments.

It was a big disappointment to many when it became apparent that the white iPhone 4 would not be available at launch, forcing many to choose between waiting to upgrade their handset or getting a different color.

According to iClarified, though, there may be one big box retailer with some white iPhone 4s on hand come June 24th: Best Buy.

According to their intel, there are between 10 to 20 white iPhone 4s ordered by each Best Buy location. It’s unclear if Best Buy will actually get these white iPhone 4s, but it appears they at least expect to receive a limited number of them.

Who knows? If you’ve got your heart set on a white iPhone 4, you might want to try your luck at Best Buy later this week.

It’s not out quite yet, and there’s no official word on exactly it will be pumped through the iTunes download chute, but just to remind everyone: iOS 4 will be available today as a free download to all eligible third-gen iDevices (the iPhone 3Gs and third-gen iPod Touch), as well as as a limited update without multitasking for the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2G.

As a further reminder, if you’ve jailbroken your iPhone or iPod Touch, you’re going to want to hold off installing the update until the Dev Team tells you it is okay, although take heart: they anticipate the relase of a fully working jailbreak for iOS 4 this month.