My Mobile Life

It’s somewhat amusing to me that my last post on the blog was about the imminent release of OS 3.0 and this one is to announce that it has indeed finally launched. Obviously not quite as early as I was thinking, but then predicting release dates with Apple is a bit like trying to predict the second coming (okay, that’s in an “in” joke for all the other offspring of Envangelical parents).

In any case I think it is fairly well established that Apple like to keep their release dates quiet so as not to disappoint if they can’t deliver. A very sensible idea in my opinion.

Certainly I have been somewhat taken by surprise with the recent release of the new iPhone 3Gs in the US. In fact that other day I was at the dentist getting the old scale and clean, when the dental hygienist remarked that they were waiting for the new iPhone to be released. Between her persistent scrapings, I managed to ask if she was referring to the release of the new iPhone OS, to which she responded confidently, that “No, Apple are bringing out a new version of the iPhone”. Mind you, there was a lot of speculation about this but at this point there had been no announcement of the new product and it was before the screenshots from China had come out showing what was purported as the new iPhone back panel (in flat black).

Anyway, I didn’t contradict the hygienist or press her too much on the source of her information but was amused that it seemed to be “common knowledge” that Apple would be releasing a new version of the phone even though there was no “evidence” of the fact at that point.

Well, here we are some 3 weeks later and sure enough there is a new version of the iPhone, the 3Gs (Apple says the “s” is for speed, though I can think of more exciting definitions . While, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to purchase one of these new fangled devices, as they haven’t yet been released in Australia, it sounds to me like Apple have provided a much needed boost to a device which has both over and underwhelmed (somehow both are possible at once) the phone’s critics and supporters.

From a user’s point of view, the first generation iPhone while beautiful and aesthetically pleasing does suffer in the speed department. Most of these problems are well documented (albeit chiefly on blogs like this), for example the lag when trying to pull up contacts. I’ve also noticed more recently that bringing up an SMS message conversation can be quite slow which is annoying when you’ve just got to get in and send a quick text.

With any luck, this new version will live up to the hype and fulfill on the performance improvements that Apple have promised. Certainly it seems to be a smart move on Apple’s part, delivering a new version of the phone before the excitement surrounding the initial product release has had a chance to completely peter our.

The other important features of the new phone are the upgraded camera (going from 2 mega-pixels to 3) and the attendant auto-focus feature. An important addition, I think (particularly at night). While, there are software solutions to the problems of trying to focus the first generation camera on something (Darkroom in particularly is one app that comes to mind), particularly at night, I think a hardware solution is definitely the preferred approach. After all, Apple are loved for their ability to deliver solutions (both hardware and software) that just work, and unfortunately the first iPhone in many instances has failed to live up to that expectation on some of the more basic fronts.

Gees, it’s been a while since I posted anything to this here blog. I do apologise for my silence. I haven’t given up on you all, just been a bit busy. What have I been doing you might ask? Well, I’ve been focusing on Adventure Racing. In the last couple weeks this has involved a couple of Rogaine races, one here in Brisbane where I’m based and another up in Cairns in Far North Queensland. 

On the iPhone front, I’ve found that OS 3.0 is improving. You may be relieved to hear this, particularly if you read my recent post in which I talked about rolling back to OS 2.2.1 after running into issues with OS 3.0 and turning my phone into a brick for about half a day. This reversion was somewhat short lived (as Apple have actually made sure that once you’ve installed OS 3.0 you can’t really roll back to 2.x and run it for any extended period of time). So after a couple of days when my phone flipped out and went back into recovery mode I installed the latest beta of OS 3.0 (version 3 at the time) which ironically came out shortly after my post – talking about how crap the previous revision was.

As it stands, we’re now up to OS 3.0 Beta 4 which I suspect will be quite stable and hopefully iron out some of the puzzling issues that cropped up in OS 3.0 Beta 3 (for example the call button on the phone dial screen going missing). Dang!

I’ll be installing the new beta tonight and will quite likely put up a further post on this when I find out a bit more about it but for now I’ll leave you with a funny little thing that happened the other day.

I got a call from my very excited fiancee telling me that she’d done something cool and asking me to guess what it was. I’d been having a busy day and wasn’t catching on to what she was trying to tell me, despite getting clues like “it’s technology related”. After a couple of guesses and a few minutes of suspense she eventually couldn’t contain herself any longer and burst out with “I’ve bought an iPhone”!

She’s had it for about a week now and is totally wrapped. While, not exactly at the front of the curve (doesn’t everyone you see these days sport an iPhone) it’s turning out to be a great choice for her. She’s even listening to audio lectures from her uni lecturer on the go. Quite a good use of the device I thought.

I happened to browse to the Apple website today and noticed a promotion that they’re running in the lead up to the 1 billionth download from the app store. Yes, that’s 1,000,000,000 downloads in less than 9 months. Pretty incredible if you ask me.

There’s a listing on the Appstore of the 20 most popular paid and free applications which users have downloaded to date. Many of these will be familiar to you (Facebook, Shazaam, Google Earth, etc…) and quite a few will probably be new to you, so go check them out.

1 billion download celebration

As part of the celebrations surrounding this momentous event Apple are offering a prize of USD$10,000 (to use in iTunes/the appstore), a MacBook Pro, a TimeCapsule (Apple Wireless Harddrive and router) and an iPod touch. Not bad for some lucky winner.

All you have to do to go into the draw to win is download an application from the appstore or fill out this form and you’re in the game. With some 18 million apps to go before the 1 billionth download, I’m guessing chances of winning are somewhat slimmer then the chance of winning Gold Lotto but hey, funny things do happen.

One of the issues I’ve noticed with the iPhone as I use it is that there seems to be a problem with wifi in the device. Frequently I’ll connect to the network in the office for example and I find that the connection gets dropped very quickly, normally within minutes but sometimes even within a second or two of connecting. When the connection is dropped WiFi is often turned off as well. I will then go and turn WiFi back on, only to find that I need to reconnect to the desired network, at which time the connection is dropped again. This will happen a few times until, eventually I get sick of it and shutdown the device and restart it.

Having done a little bit of research about this problem, I’ve discovered that there are two distinct issues here:

1.) The iPhone will disable WiFi when put into sleep (or locked) mode and not plugged into a power source of docking station. This behaviour appears to be by design. While you can disbable the Auto Locking feature, this wastes battery life as the screen remains on while the phone is unlocked.

2.) The problem with the WiFi connection being dropped immediately appears to be a valid issue, though it’s unclear what causes this.

Okay, in situation 1, there may be times when you wish your WiFi connection to remain enabled/connected (i.e. you’re downloading something, etc…). In this case you’ve got a couple options the first of which we’ve already covered (disabling auto lock). The second option is to use a little application called Insomnia by Cydia. The purpose of this app is to ensure the WiFi connection stays alive when your phone is locked. Check out this little video about it.

With the second situation, I imagine there could be a number of reasons for this, from invalid certificates, range issues, etc… to actual software issus with the iPhone. Right now I think the best way to resolve this is just to shutdown the phone and re-start it. However, I’d be interested to know if anyone else has this problem and if you’ve found any good evidence which points to the cause of the problem and more importantly if you’ve got a solution for this.

One of the things you’ll probably want to do at some stage when using your iPhone is check your usage data. I’ve touched on this a little before and mentioned that while some carriers such as Vodafone offer a nice easy way to do this (i.e. dial 1527 from your mobile) other carriers don’t necessarily provide this service.

Fortunately however, the phone itself tracks your data usage and will give you a summary of the amount of data saved and received. To access this info just do the following:

1.) Go to settings

The settings screen

2.) Select General

The General screen in settings

3.) Select Usage

The usage screen

The other cool thing I learned today (coincidentally in preparing to write this post) was how to take screenshots on your iPhone, thanks to this post.

The first thing to note is that you must have the 2.0 Firmware update. Again you check this in Settings > General > About. So make sure you have the right firmware.

Then to take a screenshot simply hold down the Home button (the black button on the bottom on the face of the phone) and click the Sleep/Wake button in the top right hand corner. Wahlah, you have a screenshot which you can find in your Camera Roll.

Handy to know!

This post comes to you from beautiful Byron Bay. I’m lucky enough to be staying with friends this weekend and I’m sitting on the balcony looking out over Byron and the ocean as I write this. It doesn’t get much better than this.

On to the topic at hand though… contact management problems on the iPhone. One of the first things I noticed when I got my shiny new iPhone several weeks back now, was that as soon as I sycned up my contacts there was a noticeable lag in bringing up contacts from the SMS or Phone functions. Given that those two areas are where most of my time on the phone is spent, I found this quite frustrating.

This morning I found a discussion thread on Apple’s website about this problem which suggests a number of possible work arounds and resolutions, however I’m not overly convinced that any of them guarantee a permanent solution.

So far the most promising solution I’ve found (thanks to the iPhone Atlas website) is to use the Google Mobile app available for free through the App Store to search your existing contacts on the phone. I’ve just installed it and I can say that it is significantly quicker then using the default contact manager.

The main draw back with Google Mobile is that it asks you if you want to allow it to use your default location when you first start up the app. However, I suspect you may be able to get around this by turning off web searching and/or the Safe Search option from the apps settings screen.

I suspect this will speed up performance as well, allowing you to use Google Mobile as your default contact search tool. Once you bring up a contact in the application you see the same screen that you do in the default contact manager which gives you options to text, call or email the person. While this means that you’ll probably have to get used to going to Google Mobile instead of the SMS and Phone apps, I think the time savings will make it worth the switch. At least until Apple have a chance to resolve the software issues that cause the delays.

So far most of the posts I’ve put up on the blog have been about the iPhone, but today I thought I’d touch on a subject which relates more to lifestyle design. Outsourcing!

When I first read Four Hour Work Week in December last year one of the things I got most excited about was the idea of outsourcing tasks that I don’t necessarily have to (and/or want to) do myself. While there is a cost to this of course, for most people living in Australia or the first world today, there is a great deal of benefit to outsourcing some if not most of the simple and menial tasks that we face on a day to day basis.

At the time I first read the book, I didn’t really take on the concept however. There were too many reasons why it might not work for me, even if I could see that it might be a good idea for someone else (like Tim Ferris).

That was until a couple months ago when I met a guy named Matthew, through a seminar I was attending. Matthew had told me about a web related project that he was working on and he mentioned that he was looking at outsourcing the creation of the site. From there I mentioned Four Hour Work Week and ended up lending him a copy of the book which funnily, he hadn’t read yet. When he did Matt loved it so much he ended up purchasing three copies, one for himself and two to lend to friends.

From there Matthew started encouraging me to take on more of the outsourcing ideas in my own life and business, which I finally started to do with tremendous results. It started with outsourcing my ironing, a relatively simple project. While i used to iron a shirt whenever I wanted to wear one, I now save probably 10-20 minutes a week by taking a stack of shirts in to be ironed once or twice a month (average cost is about $1.80 per shirt) and that frees up at least an hour a month, which I can charge out at 5 times the cost that I pay to have the shirts ironed, or simply use to free up more time for myself.

From there it moved on to getting a cleaner in. I’d been living with a flatmate who had very different ideas to me on when and how often we should clean the house. We both agreed that it should be done regularly, but where I preferred to do a little regularly, she liked to clean the whole place at once, even if it was only one time a month. So to take the frustration out of the situation and with a recommendation from Matthew, I hired a cleaner who now comes in 2-3 times a month and does all the cleaning I can ask for at less then what I would charge for 1.5 hours of work. Time saved? Approximately 10 hours a month and boy is the house clean.

After those two moderate successes I thought I’d try the idea on my own business and I haven’t been disappointed with the results there either. I now try to outsource most of the technical work in my business, which I’d often found hard to find time for after working a full day at the office already. Now, I spend most of my time making new contacts and chasing up leads, while others work around the clock (and the world) developing the sites and software that I spec up. End result, turnover is up by 300% and I don’t spend much more time on my business then I did 3 months ago.

Okay, so many of you will be wondering, where do I outsource too? Well the opportunities are pretty endless, from outsourcing your cooking by eating out, to outsourcing car maintenance or yard work. However, I can probably provide a few links that might also be useful to get you started:

http://www.odesk.com

http://www.elance.com – outsource design, programming or web related work
http://www.tooeasy.com.au – a local site for outsourincg your more mundane tasks

Have any sites that you use for outsourcing and can recommend or would just like to tell us what you’ve been outsourcing, register as a user and leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear your experiences.

Okay, so my Mobile Life started in earnest today having purchased the domains for this site and really conceiving the idea for the blog. But as a product of recent events it started a month ago with the purchase of a USB Mobile Broadband modem from Vodafone.

I was heading to Melbourne for a week to do a personal development course and being a full time Web Programmer and Part time Web Designer (in my other life) I decided it was high time I kept in touch with the world… properly. I mean if my girlfriend (a full-time uni student can afford a mobile broadband modem modem) heck, so can I.

So I bustled up for a 2 year contract on a $39 plan which meant that I got the modem for free and a respectable 5Gb of data to use per month (not to mention $500 to use on a hotel somewhere). 5Gb is considerably more than I would ever use mind you, but I suppose it’s a case of better too much then not enough.

The purchase turned out to be a rather wonderful solution to a problem I never really knew I had. I.e. that of being able to connect to the web when I felt like it, and I do mean whenever I felt like it, without having to cough up $30 a day for the privilege of doing it at a hotel or paying over the odds at an internet cafe.

Since then I’ve gone and bought an iPhone. An inevitability really given that I was converted to using a MacBook Pro and giving up my DELL 17″ laptop (read brick) a few years ago, just prior to a trip to the US/Mexico. The last couple years has seen me trade most of my Windows programs for their Mac equivalents or replacements and I find myself preferring to use a Mac when the option is available, even though I still use a Windows Desktop PC in the office of my employer.

In terms of connectivity the iPhone is probably the best thing since sliced bread, particularly now with the 3G version. Having come from a Windows based PDA Smart Phone (the 02 Xda Atom) it’s also a massive improvement in terms of the user interface. Sure it doesn’t have the Word/Excel apps for viewing Office documents but to be honest, I rarely ever used those features anyway. It’s calendaring, mobile mail and the to do lists that are the bread and butter of the mobile warrior. Which is why I was quite surprised to find that there was no built in support for Apple Mail’s To Do lists.

Apple Mail 10.5.4, which came with the Leopard OS, included a versatile To Do list feature that allows you to create items from emails and includes alerts by email or message. However, the iPhone which can be synchronised with your Apple mail preferences doesn’t actually provide To Do list synchronisation. Strange!

Fortunately I found a comprehensive article on the gap left by Apple here on MacWorld and I ended up with a tidy little list manager. I’ve opted for Paze Inc’s My Lists application. A $2 purchase through the iTunes App Store. Overall I find it a good solution though I am somewhat surprised that it doesn’t give me the option to set reminder’s or alarms for To Do items. Something I do regularly in Outlook of Apple Mail when creating tasks. That said it does provide a consistent user interface with the iPhone and includes features like list exporting (by email), etc… which may be desirable to some users.

Okay, so taking a step back to the blog and the vision I have for it. Ultimately this will be a blog for the Mobile Warrior. While I’m not someone who actually has to travel a great deal for my work currently, I have been in the past and I’ve recently been going through a process which involves re-designing my business and in fact my life so that I can travel when I want and do what I want ala Timothy Ferris (Four Hour Work Week). http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/

This is one of the reasons why mobility is important to me and the technoloy that I use to support My Mobile Life will obviously play an important role in allowing me to achieve the goal of a Mobile Life. While it isn’t necessarily essential that I be connected to the internet 24/7, I have found that it’s nice to have the option of connecting to the web, where I want and when I want, as I use the net constantly for banking, communication, business and pleasure. Whether it be looking up session times for a movie, finding directions to an address in a foreign city or chatting with my partner from the other side of the world.

The blog then is about the journey that I’m taking from desk jockey to mobile entrepenuer and about the technology that I choose to support me along the way. My gut feeling is that there a plenty of other people either going through or contemplating their own journey along a similar line and I would love for us to go take the journey together. Here’s to the Mobile Life.