Originally posted by Nick Cenik
Honestly, people lining up en masse to purchase iPhones is one of the dumbest occurrences today. It reflects clearly where out priorities as a society are placed. It makes me sick.
I was watching a video many months ago. The person narrating it, pretty much said the same thing.
Honestly why wait in line for hours, when you can be at home comfy and with a few clicks you can get it. True, you are stuck waiting a few days to receive it by mail.
Nick Cenik
quote:
Originally posted by LightsOut
^^^
You two are talking about different things.
Of course it makes sense to get your iphone early in its life cycle when demand is so high and your eligible, where as Nick is using the iphone as a metaphor for societies consumerist tendencies and lack of priorities.
Thank you for saving me the trouble of explaining hehe :)
E2EK1EL
quote:
Originally posted by Nick Cenik
Thank you for saving me the trouble of explaining hehe :)
My bad for not understanding your post dude.
Maybe the iPhone launch lines up are kinda bad for this topic, b/c the line up for these launches do have many diff purposes which includes both of our explanations and more.
I would suggest the perfect example for your post would be, the Tamagotchi line ups during the world launches in 1996. I still don't get why ppl lined up, but I guess it's their thing I suppose.
quote:
Originally posted by jester
I was watching a video many months ago. The person narrating it, pretty much said the same thing.
Honestly why wait in line for hours, when you can be at home comfy and with a few clicks you can get it. True, you are stuck waiting a few days to receive it by mail.
1) Apple only sells retail unsubsidized products that are shipped to your house.
2) Rogers and the others will not ship any device to your home for HUP or retailing pricing, due to all the courier and customer frauds in the past.
3) All the servers that handle these pre-orders; regardless if it's Apple, a major carrier or a major retail chain can't handle the amount of traffic hammer their systems all at once.
The new device reservations system Rogers deployed is a good idea, but if this was for a redesigned device and everyone can HUP ... you're back to 5 to 6 months wait. Apple keeps most of their stocks for their stores and trickle other stocks to the 5 diff carriers we have. The IP4S was nailed 7000 reserves on Rogers within the first 24 hours.
Apple's new reservations system is amazing, but servers can't handle the traffic.
Nick Cenik
quote:
Originally posted by E2EK1EL
I would suggest the perfect example for your post would be, the Tamagotchi line ups during the world launches in 1996. I still don't get why ppl lined up, but I guess it's their thing I suppose.
Hahaha! Man, now THAT was a craze! Insanity lol
E2EK1EL
IntelliScreenX Public Beta Released; Jailbreak App Revamps Notification Center
IntelliScreenX public beta for iOS 5 for jailbroken iPhone and iPod touch has been released.
Last week, Intelliborn had given a sneak peak of IntelliScreenX, which adds tons of features to iOS 5 Notification Center so that you can do a lot more with it.
As we had noted earlier, here's a list of features:
”Ability to access Notification Center from the lock screen.
”IntelliScreenX will also allow you to access the third party custom widgets directly from the lock screen.
”It adds a top-shelf just above the notifications in the Notifications Center to give you easy access to the custom widgets
”It will bring QuickSettings to the Notification Center, which will allow you to access AirPlane mode and Rotation lock, System information and adjust brightness from anywhere.
”Ability to collapse sections, so that you can effectively use the available real estate on Notification Center.
”IntelliScreenX also integrates Twitter, Facebook, Extended Mail, Calendar and RSS feed into iOS 5 Notification Center.
”You will be able to access the full text of the email directly within Notification Center. You can also mark the email as read or unread or delete them.
”You will also be able to see Calendar items for as many days as you want and won't be restricted to just x items.
”You will also be access Facebook news feed or Twitter timeline from anywhere and also like or tweet directly from the Notification Center.
”In case of RSS feed, Intelliborn has integrated the Reader functionality so that you can read the latest news item directly from the Notification Center.
You can checkout the impressive demo of the jailbreak app below:
You can test IntelliScreenX public beta for free by following these simple steps:
”Launch Cydia
”Tap on the Manage tab
”Then tap on Sources
”Tap on the Edit button in the top right corner and then Add button to add the repository for IntelliScreenX public beta
”Enter the following URL - http://www.intelliborn.com/isxbeta and tap on the Add Source button
”After the repository is successfully installed, tap on the Return to Cydia button.
”Tap on the Search button
”Search for IntelliScreenX and select IntelliScreenX from the search results
”Tap on the Install button and then Confirm button to install it
”Tap on the Restart SpringBoard button when prompted
That's it, you should be all set to test IntelliScreenX.
Please note IntelliScreenX is currently compatible with only iPhone and iPod touch running on iOS 5.
As always, let us know what you think of IntelliScreenX in the comments section below.
(Too bad there isn't a untethered jailbreak; I would love to give this a try on the IP4, but I don't feel like carry my 3GS around. That would make it 3 iPhones I have to carry for a while and I don't get to really test the true speed of this app)
EDIT: Forget about this, IntelliscreenX still uses the rock extensions. Which is known for memory hogging & unstable conflicts.
Problems: In the Beta ver
safe mode crashing for many, batt life drainage, keyboard typing delays, conflicts with BiteSMS (LOL), SBSsetting conflict -rebooting (don't know why you would need it when ISX has it's own toggles), memory HOG (The 1st of IS was such a memory hog, this is even worst then before) and more
E2EK1EL
Siri hacked to fully run on the iPhone 4 and iPod touch, iPhone 4S vs iPhone 4 Siri showdown video (interview)
On the iPhone 4S launch date just a couple of weeks ago, we broke the news that developer Steven Troughton-Smith had successfully ported the Siri user-interface and some of the underlying code from the iPhone 4S onto the iPhone 4. The port was functional except for the most important part: talking to Apples servers. Now, Troughton-Smith has followed up with Chpwn to get the server fully working on an iPhone 4 and iPod touch.
Exclusive in-depth iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S Siri comparison video
Troughton-Smith exclusively provided 9to5Mac with the above high-quality video that shows Siri fully working on an iPhone 4. The video not only shows the Siri functionality on an iPhone 4, but is in depth and shows a side-to-side comparison against its newer, faster sibling, the iPhone 4S. In addition, our video shows the Siri Dictation in action. A video showing the iPod touch port is after the break. Troughton-Smith also shared with us some specifics about the porting.
Troughton-Smith tells us that an iPhone 4S jailbreak was necessary in order to accomplish the task of porting the proper files for Siris servers to connect to an iPhone 4. I also sat down with Troughton-Smith for an exclusive interview about the port:
Mark: Where do you go from here with the port?
Steven: At this point its all about confirming this works across devices, making it reproducible (we got it working on two devices today), and documenting everything. It does require files from an iPhone 4S which arent ours to distribute, and it also requires a validation token from the iPhone 4S that has to be pulled live from a jailbroken iPhone 4S, and its about a 20-step process right now.
Mark: In its current state, is the port 100% functional, is there anything you would like to see work better?
Steven: Yes, it seems to be 100% functional. Im working on the rough edges, but everything that works on the iPhone 4S seems to work here.
Mark: Do you ever see Siri showing up in Cydia (or another jailbreak store) for non natively supported devices?
Steven: No, I could not be a part of that. I have no doubts that others will package this up and distribute it quasi-illegally, or try and sell it to people. I am only interested in the technology and making it work; proving that it works and works well on the iPhone 4 and other devices
Mark: So, you also got Siri working on the fourth-generation iPod touch, how is that working out?
Steven: We got chpwns iPod touch up and running with Siri after proving it works on my iPhone 4. Unfortunately the microphone on the iPod is nowhere near as good as the iPhone you will notice that the Siri level meter hardly moves when you talk to it. While it does work, you have to speak loudly and clearly to the iPod.
Mark: How long did porting take you, what was the I got it moment?
Steven: Basically, I already had everything I needed to make it work. I had spent a lot of time mapping out in my head exactly how Siri works on the iPhone. All I needed was access to a jailbroken iPhone 4S to put my hunch to the test. It literally took no longer than 10 minutes to put all the pieces in place and perform our first test on my iPhone 4, and it was an instant success.
(Amazing Job Steven! What do you know, he gained access to Siri's server for now. We all know Apple can block this access once it goes wide spread to the public :( )
E2EK1EL
***Special thanks to Chinamon for reversing my lockdown mistake***
How to extend battery life of your iPhone 4S by disabling Setting Time Zone
Poor battery performance is one of the major teething issues thats been plaguing early iPhone 4S adopters who are flocking to Apples Support Communities forum in search for answers. Apples remained mum on the matter thus far. The problem appears to be affecting some iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS users as well, indicating a likely software bug rather than a hardware defect. iDownloadBlog offers an interesting remedy that may not work for everybody, even though some folks are reporting seeing an improved battery performance.
It appears that the Setting Time Zone function in iOS 5 can lead to excess power drain because the device is repeatedly polling the users location in order to set the time zone based on their current location (which is useful when traveling). To disable this functionality, launch the Settings app, navigate to Location Services > System Services and turn off the Setting Time Zone option. You should see a purple location services icon in the iPhones status bar disappear:
Switching it off may mean that your iPhone will no longer set its own time zone when you travel, but thats a small price to pay for having your iPhone last more than 12 hours on a full charge. We have tested this method on 4 different iPhone 4s handsets, including an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 3GS. All have reported drastically improved battery life after switching Setting Time Zone off.
Yes, its a band-aid solution but a helpful one, at least until Apple delivers a fix through a firmware update. While were at it, you may also want to disable Location-Based iAds and Diagnostics & Usage and leave only the essential system location services running (Cell Network Search, Compass Calibration and Traffic).
Apple rates the battery inside the iPhone 4S as having up to 200 hours of standby, a hundred less than the previous model, in spite of the iPhone 4Ss extra .05W/hrs battery and an hour-longer talk time. iLounge found out that iPhone 4S has worse battery life for 3G data and audio/video playback/recording compared to the previous model. Apple offers this tip on improving battery life on your iPhone:
Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down).
Macworlds interesting iPhone 4S battery troubleshooter mentions using a system diagnostics app such as System Activity Monitor in order to determine which processes are running unnecessarily in the background. This can help pinpoint the cause of battery woes. For example, a faulty contact entry may affect syncing your iCloud contacts. In this scenario, the iCloud sync might end up endlessly looping in the background, enough to quickly drain your battery. Has any of the aforementioned tips helped improve your iPhone 4Ss battery performance? Chime in with your thoughts in the comments.
(I've always set my date and time manually, it was problem back in the Treo 680 days and a habit i have)
malek
I wanted to post this too yesterday and the thread was closed... anyways, i have had the setting changed and it actually helps alot!
E2EK1EL
E2EK1EL
iPhone 4S arriving in Hong Kong, South Korea and 13 additional countries Friday
Apple has just announced that its iPhone 4S will land in Hong Kong, South Korea and thirteen additional countries this coming Friday, November 4, when the company will begin taking reservations in those countries (with the exceptions of Albania, El Salvador, Guatemala, Malta, Montenegro and Panama, where pre-orders wont be available).
The full list of new markets goes as follows:_Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Malta, Montenegro, New Zealand, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania and South Korea. With the_aforementioned_countries included, Apples device will be available in 44 markets come this Friday. The company re-iterated that iPhone 4S will be available in 70 countries and on a hundred carriers by the end of the year, our fastest roll out ever.
iPhone 4S launched October 14 in seven countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, Italy and Canada) before arriving to 22 more countries the following week. The device took off to a strong start, selling four million units during the launch weekend, besting the previous record held by iPhone 4 which sold 1.4 million units during the launch weekend in the summer of 2010. Strong launch impacted the latest web usage share statistics, with iOS widening its mobile web browsing lead by seven percentage points in October.
Audio echo bug plagues iPhone 4S owners during voice calls
Following widespread complaints of excessive battery drain thought to be related to a time zone bug, iPhone 4S owners are now beginning to draw attention to a new iPhone bug. According to multiple threads on Apples support forum, hundreds of iPhone 4S users are experiencing an audio echo during voice calls when using a wired headset. Users across multiple wireless carriers with various iPhone 4S models report that audio quality on voice calls often depletes after a period of time, and the voice of the caller on the other end of the line begins to echo._BGR was able to_independently_confirm the echo bug on one of our iPhone 4S handsets. Read on for more.
When using the Apple hands free headset with the phone during a call, I get an echo problem, one iPhone 4S owner wrote in a thread on Apples support forum. It does not occur immediately. It can very from 30 seconds into a call and as far up to 9 mins in before it begins the annoying echo. If I unplug the headset it goes away but will return when I plug the headset back in.
Multiple readers have contacted BGR via email complaining of the issue as well, which we then tested and confirmed. During our independent testing, we typically found that an echo developed between one and four minutes after starting a call, though some users report that voice calls remain echo-free for up to 12 minutes. We also found that the bug occurs while using Apple-branded wired headsets and third-party headsets alike.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Multiple iPhone owners across a number of forum threads have determined that a simple interim fix for the bug is to enable the handsets speakerphone during a call once the audio begins to echo, and then to disable it. This effectively restarts the cycle, and call quality will return to normal for a period of time before the echo returns.
Apple awarded two new multitouch patents
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday published 14 new patents that were recently granted to Apple. According to PatentlyApple, two of those patents are related to high profile multitouch technology. One describes front-end signal compensation on a display and a second involves a method for forming crystalline ITO on top of a nonconductive substrate. As PatentlyApple notes, the first patent is related to the touchscreen technology that was first introduced on the original iPhone, which made its debut in 2007. It describes how a host device may, for example, correspond to a computer such as a desktop, laptop, handheld or tablet computer. The host device interprets the touch event and thereafter performs an action based on the touch event. The other multitouch patent describes a more efficient way of creating a touchscreen by combining an LCD display with a touch panel.
Prometheus Xex
quote:
"Siri, how much data do you gobble up in a month?"
By Jacqui Cheng
Apple's new iPhone 4S has been in users' grubby little hands for a bit over two weeks now. One of the main features of the 4S is the virtual "personal assistant" Siri, a technology that Apple acquired in 2010 and integrated into iOS 5 for integration with the iPhone 4S. When we put Siri through its paces during our iPhone 4S review, we came away with a mixture of bemusement and optimism. The service is still in beta and has its rough patches, but it's pretty decent at performing Web searches and other basic phone tasks, such as setting up appointments, making reminders, and text dictation.
But one huge caveat to Siri is that it requires an active Internet connection in order to function. Apple sends Siri voice data up to its own data centers for processing and the sends the results back down to your phone, even if you're only trying to perform a task that shouldn't require any network connectivity. This can sometimes be frustrating when you're in a low-signal area with no WiFi available, but heavy data users were quick to point out that there are even bigger potential downsides to using Siri: it could force you over your monthly data quota with your cell carrier if you're not careful. And in today's heavily data-capped world, such a concern is becoming more and more valid.
Because of this, we decided to find out how much data a typical Siri user might expect to use in an average month. We carefully watched our data usage while performing 11 different queries through Siri, split between local phone tasks and tasks that required lookups from the Internet. We also performed four dictation tasks. Your milage, of course, will vary depending on the kinds of things you might use Siri for and how often you might do those things. With that said, here's what we found.
The tasks
We performed six tasks that would be considered to be local tasks. These queries included things like, "Set an alarm for 3 hours from now," "Make an appointment for 2pm on Friday" (and then telling Siri to cancel the task), "Remind me to file expense reports when I get home," and "What is the contact info for Ars Technica?"
These tasks added up to a total of 220KB of data usage, or an average of 36.7KB per query. The actual numbers ranged from 60KB down to 18KB, and we believe this is correlated to the complexity of the specific query and language we used to perform it.
The five other tasks were ones that required lookups onlinesome of them were questions that Siri could get from Wolfram Alpha, while others prompted us to continue to search on the Web (thereby bringing up a Google search page with the wording that we had asked Siri). Some sample questions included "How many calories in a muffin?", "How many movies has Kevin Bacon been in?" (this required a Google lookup, which we said yes to), and "What is Lady Gaga's real name?"
These five tasks added up to a total of 473.5KB of data use, or an average of 94.72KB per query. The range went from 23KB to 187KB, depending on the question at hand.
In total, our 11 queries added up to 693.6KB, or an average of 63KB per query. As you can see above, Siri tasks that are local to the phone appear to require less data than ones that need further lookups on the Internet, which makes sense.
In addition to these 11 queries, we also performed four text dictations through Siritwo short e-mails (one was roughly 15 words and the other 40) and two text messages (6-10 words apiece). The text messages came in at 18KB and 12KBfor an average of 15KB) and the e-mails came in at 36KB and 109KB, respectively, for an average of 72.5KB. Clearly, the longer the message, the more data will be used, and this will depend entirely upon your own wordiness.
What does it mean?
If you own an iPhone 4S and perform all 11 of these same queries every single day for a month over your carrier's 3G connection, you can expect to use roughly 20MB or so in a 30-day month. But it's unlikely that that you'll be asking those same questions, or with the same frequency.
I asked around the Ars Orbiting HQ about our average daily Siri usage, in addition to my (and @arstechnica's) followers on Twitter. After filtering out the snarky responses that provided no information, there appears to be (generally) three groups of people who use Siri on a regular basis: those who use it 1-3 times per day, those who use it 4-6 times per day, and those who use it 10-15 times per day. There were a couple people who said they used Siri upwards of 20 times per day, but those were rare compared to the responses I got that fell into one of my three aforementioned ranges. (As an aside, I was personally very surprised to see some of these numbers. My personal usage seems to be in the range of 2-3 times per day, though Ars EIC Ken Fisher's usage averages at about 15 times per day, he tells me.)
Here's where the numbers are going to get rough. As we've already pointed out, your own numbers will be different depending on how wordy you are, what kinds of queries you're making, and how frequently you do it. So please take these estimates with a grain of saltthey're more like general ranges than exact numbers.
If you use Siri 2-3 times per day at an average of 63KB per instance, you might expect to use 126KB to 189KB per day, or 3.7 to 5.5MB per month. For 4-6 times a day, that might come out to 252KB to 378KB per day, or 7.4 to 11MB per month. If you use it 10-15 times per day, you might end up using 630KB to 945KB per day, or 18.5 to 27.7MB per month.
Czech carrier Telefonica Czech Republic will not sell Apples new iPhone 4S smartphone, one of the fastest-selling consumer electronics devices to launch in recent history. According to a recent report from local Czech newspaper Hospodarske Noviny, the carrier will also stop selling all prior iPhone models. Details are limited, but a spokesperson for the carrier cited Apples business terms as the reason for the decision. Telefonica Czech Republics Hany Farghali did not elaborate, though Apples iPhone reportedly commands a much higher carrier subsidy than competing smartphone models as much as 40% higher, reports claim and that could be a factor. Telefonica Czech Republics local competition, operated by Vodafone and T-Mobile, began selling the iPhone 4S late last month.
