Technobabble

Interesting article about someone’s experience with an Android phone – the Samsung Charge: Why My Mom Bought an Android, Returned It, and Got an iPhone . This is an article by someone who loves Android. I think for anyone who doesn’t want to root their phone, the Android experience is hit-or-miss. Between Google and the various carriers, there’s no consistency and eventually that leads to a diluted brand. This comment by JamesKatt sums it up perfectly: The problem with Android is that the hardware manufacturers do not want to be generic phone device makers.  They want to differentiate themselves in order to compete successfully in the smartphone market. However, to differentiate themselves, they have to muck up and lock down the Android OS, install their own version of the user interface, and install crappy apps that you can't remove.  They also encrypt the OS so you cannot modify the system. This is why the experience is so poor for Android phone users - other than the one...

Safari on the iPhone OS 4.0 does much better than most browsers on the HTML5Test with a net score of 134/160. Here’s the breakup of the test results with the failures: Doctype – 4/4 Canvas – 12/12 Video – 25/30 Ogg Theora codec support - No Audio – 22/24 Ogg Vorbis codec support - No Geolocation 5/5 Storage – 8/8 Offline Web Application – 11/11 Workers – 0/6 Web Workers - No Section elements – 7/7 Grouping content elements – 2/2 Text-level semantic elements – 4/5 time element - No Forms – 22/27 autocomplete input attribute – No keygen element – No output element – No progress element – No meter element - No User Interaction – 12/19 hidden attribute – No Undo manager - No

Safari on iPhone OS 4.0 (build 8A230m) supports WebSocket. Here’s the output from the WebSocket test : Yes, the browser still reports OS 3_1_2 even though the OS is really 4.0. The AppleWebKit version is newer than the iPad. I was able to run a WebSocket test against Kaazing’s WebSocket Gateway .

Boxee , in their own words, “… is a social media center. With Boxee you can play videos, music and pictures from your computer, local network, and the Internet. You can also share with your friends what albums you're listening to, what movies and TV shows you're watching, send recommendations and more. ” Hooking up a  computer running Boxee to a television is a great way to get access to tons of video and audio content from Hulu , Netflix , YouTube , BBC , Pandora and so on. Boxee’s got a lot of positive press lately. With the recent addition of the Boxee Remote application, the iPhone can now be used as a remote for Boxee via wi-fi. Here’s a video of the Boxee remote application in action:

I’ve been using Nuevasync for since late 2008 for syncing my Google Apps calendars to my iPhone. At the time, it was one of the few over-the-air syncing solutions for hooking up Google calendars (including Google Apps) to the iPhone. When Google came up with native Google Sync earlier this year, I evaluated it and found that Nuevasync was better . Since then, people have commented on my post about various improvements to Google Sync and it seemed like Google Sync was finally at the point where all my original issues had been fixed. So I had to try Google Sync again. The steps to move to Google Sync were straightforward: Backup the iPhone by syncing with iTunes. Since I use Google Apps, I had to enable syncing for my domain . Configure Google Sync on the iPhone per the instructions . I chose to delete all contacts and calendar data on the phone since my contacts were already being synced with Google Apps Contacts via iTunes. I use multiple calendars on my Google Apps Calendar a...

TomTom for the iPhone is finally here! Turn by turn navigation with voice, iPhone holder with enhanced GPS, hands free kit. It's been a long while since TomTom's original announcement but this should help the iPhone compete with Pre/Android.

The iPhone OS 3.0 beta 3 ( build 7A280f ) released yesterday fixes the YouTube bug that has been plaguing people who restored their OS 2.x based backups to their OS 3.0 phone. The bug prevented the YouTube application from connecting with the error “Cannot connect to YouTube”.

The iPhone OS 3.0 beta 2 was made available on Apple Developer Connection earlier this week (March 31st 2009). The new version is build 7A259g . The usual backup-flash-restore-sync cycle worked without a hitch but I do wish Apple would save the arrangement of apps – the sync puts them back in alphabetical order. Here are my notes from some quick testing: Beta 2 is definitely much more responsive. Apps load quickly unlike the sluggish beta 1. Typing is much faster. The copy rectangle is more responsive. YouTube is still broken (restored from backup). Skype works (on 3G) without a hitch. For some reason beta 1 had trouble on my phone. Some apps like Appigo’s ToDo had issues with text not being visible (white text on white background) – that’s fixed as well. The GPS errors (blue dot not showing location correctly) seem to have gone as well.

With OS 3.0, the iPhone has finally caught up with one of the old features of Palm OS – the global find. In OS 3.0, in addition to the screens with application icons, there’s a search screen which searches a whole host of things – applications, contacts, calendar, mail, music, podcasts, etc. Here’s a screenshot of the search screen: There are some configuration options that control the behavior of the home button (via Settings | General | Home) including access to the search screen: Search results can further be customized to include or exclude items and reorder them: One caveat about the global mail search – it only searches the To/From/Subject fields of messages downloaded to the phone. The mail application has its own search screen too, which behaves the same way but it includes an option to search via the server (at which point search results depend on what the server provides):

Here's how one of the most sought-after iPhone OS 3.0 feature works.  I started off with a page in Safari: Holding down a link on the page allows the link to be copied: Holding down an area of the page triggers the copy rectangle: The copy rectangle can be resized to include any content (including images): Once content is copied to the clipboard, it can be pasted. Here’s an email composition screen, where holding down on the page, triggers the paste action: As you can see, the Paste action pastes the complete clipboard (including images):

The beta version of iPhone OS 3.0 (build 7A238j) was made available on Apple’s Developer Connection website yesterday. Here are the steps to install the new OS (as tested with an iPhone 3G): Sync the phone to iTunes and backup all data! Subsequent steps will wipe out the iPhone and you will need a backup to restore from. On a Mac which has your iPhone SDK and Xcode, download the OS 3.0 build. It’s about 229 MiB. Connect your iPhone to the Mac. Drag and drop the downloaded file iPhone1,2_3.0_7A238j_Restore.ipsw onto Xcode. The Xcode Organizer should open up and display your phone with multiple firmware choices – the existing firmware on the phone (I was using 2.2.1) and the new 3.0 firmware. Select the new 3.0 firmware and restore it to your iPhone. This will wipe out all data on the phone! The process takes about 12-15 minutes to flash the phone and update the baseband. At the end the phone will reboot and ask to be connected to iTunes. Connect the phone to iTunes. At this...

For a while Nuevasync has been the best choice for over the air synchronization of calendars and contacts with Google (including Google Apps). As a bonus, it has supported multiple calendar syncing since last month. (For contacts I've been using the iTunes data sync to Google Apps contacts.) With the recent announcement of Google Sync I decided to give it a shot expecting it to have better support than any third party sync with Google. Since the iPhone supports only a single Microsoft Exchange Sync, I had to delete the existing Nuevasync configuration (after a backup!) and switched over to Google Sync . I was immediately disappointed on multiple counts: Google Sync did not retain my contact photos. It replaced them with the Google Talk photos for my contacts. (This is documented.) Google Sync lost all my birthday settings for contacts (since it is not supported by Google Contacts. (This is kinda documented if you read between the lines.) Google Sync supported only my default...

This week Amazon released a free iPhone app that provides more native access to the Amazon store experience. It has the expected features like product search, product data, reviews and of course, 1-click purchases. In addition, Amazon has introduced a new experimental feature called Amazon Remembers . Amazon Remembers allows customers to snap photos of objects of interest and upload them to Amazon. Once uploaded, Amazon uses MTurk to identify the product and within minutes the app notifies customers with a link to the matching product. In my tests, an iPhone snap was identified as the iPod Touch (since Amazon doesn't sell iPhones), a Pepsi can returned a link to Coca Cola (since Pepsi is not sold on Amazon or some MTurker has a wicked sense of humor), a Palm Z22 was not identified, and a book was identified perfectly. Get the app from the iTunes app store .

Here are the free steps to migrate from Palm's date book (or Pimlico's DateBk6 ) calendar to Google calendar for full iPhone sync. First, sync Palm with Palm Desktop . Next, open Palm Desktop, select the Calendar view, navigate to File | Export, select Export Type as Date Book Archive, Range as All and provide a file name. This will export the calendar data as Date Book Archive (.dba). There's a paid tool called DBA2CSV that converts .dba files to .csv files. However this can be done for free using Yahoo Calendar. Login into Yahoo Calendar and via Settings/Import, import the .dba file. It helps to have an empty Yahoo Calendar. Via Settings/Export, export the calendar as .csv file. Login to Google Calendar (also works with Google Apps For Your Domain GAFYD Calendar) and import the .csv file into any of the calendars. It is a good idea to create a test calendar and test the import before importing into your real calendar. That way if anything goes wrong, you can delet...