Quickly update a note’s modification date on the iPhone
macosxhints.com iPhone tips
Even though the iPhone’s Notes application is a bit featureless, I’ve found it very useful for everyday notes. Usually I need quick access to few of them (one or two notes) just for reading, but as I create a lot of notes each day, notes fall down the list, making it a bit difficult to find them after three or four days.
One obvious solution is to create a title (the first line text followed by a blank line) with plenty of *** or +++ symbols, to make my special notes stand out from others. The other solution I’ve found (together with the first one) is to edit the note each time I read it, so it goes to the top of the list. What I’ve found is that there is no need to actually change anything in the note — you only need to enter Edit mode (tapping on the note so the keyboard is shown). Even if you do not type anything, when you exit Edit mode (tap the Done button), the note is saved and its modification date is updated.
This is not an overly advanced tip, but I’ve f…
Scroll and zoom PDFs in Mobile Safari on the iPhone
macosxhints.com iPhone tips
If you have a PDF document embedded in a web page, the iPhone won’t let you look through it with one finger scrolling. However, if you start using two-finger scrolling on the document, you can scroll around it like any other web page. The pinch/expand gesture also works to zoom in or out on the PDF.
The iPhone will load it pretty slowly, but it’ll get there eventually.
Jump back one song via headphones and iPhone 2.1
macosxhints.com iPhone tips
This probably applies to the iPod touch, too, but I’ve only tested it on the iPhone. If you use the iPhone’s headphones (or a third-party set with click-control), iPhone 2.1 adds one more feature to the clicker: triple-click to jump back one song. So one click will pause the current song, two clicks will jump forward one track, and three (very quick) clicks will jump backward one song.
Thanks to Rob Randtoul (creator of some of my favorite desktop images) for pointing this one out to me.
Wired.com’s iPhone 3G Survey Reveals Network Weaknesses
Wired: Gadget Lab
Wired.com’s survey of iPhone 3G users’ suggests that widespread data speed problems have more to do with carriers’ networks than with Apple’s handsets.
Recently Wired.com asked iPhone 3G users all around the
world to participate in a study, which involved testing their 3G speeds
and entering their data on an interactive map. The purpose? To gain a
general idea of how 3G was performing — where it’s best and where it’s
worst — in light of widespread complaints about the handset’s network
performance. More than 2,600 people participated (wow!) and we’ve
diligently cleaned up the data to present it to you here.
In the map above, each colored bar indicates the relative 3G download speed for an individual respondent. Purple dots represent several respondents clustered together geographically. (If you don’t see many colored bars, zoom in on an area until the purple dots disappear and are replaced by colored bars.) To speak very generally, the data overall
shows that 3G is performing faster than EDGE (which is expected). In
the best scenarios, 3G is up to seven times faster than EDGE; in worse
scenarios, 3G performed just as slowly as EDGE; at worst, some users
couldn’t connect to 3G at all — which isn’t surprising since 3G towers
are not yet ubiquitous.
Detailed observations from the survey follow.
- By country:
- Participants in Australia reported the slowest average 3G download speeds of about 759 Kbps.
- The most "0" results for 3G download speeds came from U.S. participants — presumably those dropped from the 3G network. In the United States, 63 participants reported "0" Altogether there were 80 "0" figures reported.
- Users in Germany and the Netherlands reported the fastest average 3G download speeds — about 2,000 Kbps.
- In some major metropolitan areas that are supposedly 3G-rich, 3G performance can be very slow. For example, zooming in on San Francisco, you’ll see that 10 out of 30 participants reported very slow 3G speeds — barely surpassing EDGE.
- This
pattern is linea up with femtocell developer Dave Nowicki’s explanation
that in major metropolitan cities where the most iPhone users reside,
3G towers are getting overloaded, resulting in slowdowns or delivering
EDGE-like performance as a result.
- This
- By carrier:
- European T-Mobile users reported the fastest 3G Download Speeds: 1,822 Kbps on average.
- Factoid: Europe has some of the most mature 3G networks, which have been in development since 2001. (AT&T introduced its 3G network in the United States in 2004.)
- Canadian carriers Rogers and Fido tied for second fastest with an average download speed of about 1,330 Kbps on average.
- U.S. carrier AT&T tied for third with Telstra, Telia and Softbank, where users reported average download speeds of roughly 990 Kbps.
- Australian carriers Optus and Virgin users reported the slowest speeds of about 390 Kbps on average.
- European T-Mobile users reported the fastest 3G Download Speeds: 1,822 Kbps on average.
Other figures:
- Overall, 2,636 iPhone 3G owners participated in the study (that doesn’t count more than a thousand entries which were completely blank or so incomplete as to be unusable).
- 1,638 were in the United States
- 233 were in Australia
- 152 were in Canada
- The majority of the remaining participants reported results from European countries
Assess what you will, Gadget Lab readers. In our view, this data is a
strong indicator that performance of the mobile carrier’s network is
affecting the iPhone 3G more than the handset itself. This also
furthers our thesis that it’s highly unlikely that Apple is going to
wave a magical wand and say, "3G problems, be gone," with a software
update. Before Apple can make such a claim, it needs to wait for all of
its carriers to optimize 3G network behavior — in terms of number of
towers, how they’re positioned and how much bandwidth each tower can
handle.
Want to see the raw data from which we drew the above map? We’re
providing a Google spreadsheet at this link: All the data from Wired.com’s iPhone
3G study. That spreadsheet includes data on 3G download and upload speeds as well as
EDGE download and upload speeds (where available), and we’ve taken the
trouble of making all the data more or less consistent (in Kbps) and
fairly accessible. If you use this data to do your own charts, maps, or other analyses, we’d love to hear about them, so please put a link to your own analyses in the comments.
With all that said, Wired.com would like
to extend a thank you to each of the 2,636 who participated in the
study (4,200 if you include those who insufficiently participated).
We’d also like to thank TestMyiPhone.com
for providing the service for participants to test the iPhone — and
especially for buying a new server just to handle the large amount of
users testing their iPhones for our study.
I’d also like to recognize the Wired.com staff members who helped put together this study:
- Dylan Tweney for his arduous efforts in cleaning up this massive amount of data
- Kent Carter for making the Zeemap easily digestible by assigning those wonderful color-bar markers
- Holl Liou for designing the custom color-bar markers
And last but not least, all the blogs that linked to our study, to help us gather so much data: Gizmodo, MacRumors, ArsTechnica, TUAW, The iPhone Blog, T4 Show, iFones and Swik. We owe each of you a big one.
Also see:
- Angry iPhone 3G Customer Sues Apple
- Apple: iPhone Update Improves 3G Network Performance
- Video: AT&T Blames iPhone 3G For Network Issues
- Opinion: Firmware Update to Fix iPhone 3G? I Doubt It
- Participate in Wired.com’s Global iPhone 3G Study
- What’s Wrong With the 3G in iPhone 3G?
- IPhone 3G Users Heated Over Network Issues
Speck SeeThru iPhone 3G Hard Case is its Own Movie-Viewing Stand [Cases]
Gizmodo
Speck’s See Thru Hard Shell case for the iPhone 3G is one of the few cases I’ve seen that makes me go “Oh, interesting” instead of “bah, nonsense.” Firstly because it’s simple, just snapping in two…
iPhone Copy and Paste Between Applications Is Here, But Not from Apple [Apple]
Gizmodo
newVideoPlayer(“/iphonecopypaste_gizmodo.flv”, 520, 308,”"); At last, iPhone copy and paste between applications. However, it doesn’t come from Apple is here, but from MagicPad developer Zac White….
Apple Gives MobileMe Customers 60 More Free Days [Apple]
Gizmodo
Apple’s tacking on an addition 60 days to the 30 days it already doled out to MobileMe subscribers, which means you’ve got an entire three months extra to wait out the issues you’ve been having….
Apple Rolls Out iPhone 2.0.2 Update
Wired: Gadget Lab
Apple on Monday released its second incremental upgrade to the iPhone 2.0 operating system, bringing the version number to 2.0.2. As usual, all the company mentioned was that the update includes “Bug fixes.”
Wired.com is currently running the 242MB update and will begin testing it as soon as it’s done. We’ll provide updates throughout the day on our findings.
Meanwhile, those of you Gadget Lab readers who have run the update are free to comment with your observations.
Apple released iPhone 2.0.2 just two weeks after iPhone 2.0.1, which for the most part addressed lag issues. Some anticipated this update would address widespread reports of 3G connectivity issues, but thus far very few users have reported any improvements in that regard.
Gadget Lab’s observations:
- The update seems to have fixed lag issues in the Address Book.
- Text messaging is snappier than before.
- Backup has sped up: After adding one application, backup took 1 minute and 40 seconds running iPhone 2.0.2; it took 3 minutes on iPhone 2.0.1. On iPhone 2.0, this took 6 minutes.
- NetShare still works (whew).
- E-mails delete faster.
- All 22 apps I downloaded from the App Store are still functioning properly.
Users and other publications have reported:
- The update removes Jailbreak (hacked) apps.
- There are no new features in the Settings app.
- Transition from music list to Coverflow has changed.
- Inconsistent reports about 3G connectivity: Some say it’s improved; some say it hasn’t.
Stephen Colbert Isn’t Afraid of the iPhone’s Kill Switch [Threats]
Gizmodo
newVideoPlayer(“/iphonethreat_giz.flv”, 476, 376,”"); What’s the #1 threat facing America? According to pundit Stephen Colbert, it’s the hateable iPhone. After discovering it has a kill switch to…
Extend the battery life on your iPhone
Thank you Apple for these tips. I find them very useful now that I own an iPhone.
Optimize Your Settings
Depending on how they are configured, a few features may decrease your iPhone battery life. For example, the frequency with which you retrieve email and the number of email accounts you auto-check can both affect battery life. The tips below apply to an iPhone running iPhone 2.0 or later software and may help extend your battery life.