Loopback Filter with Truman Boyes

This morning my son decided that my iPhone should take a nice sub-orbital trip around the office and consequently the re-entry and landing was not as smooth as Houston would have wanted it; the phone landed on the office tile floor and the glass screen was smashed in about 20 places. Interestingly enough the phone still worked and the touchscreen managed to work while the glass was shattered.

I called around to various cell phone shops but most of them are simply dealers that push a particular carrier’s phones. One problem I found is that since AT&T is the only official carrier of the iPhone in the USA at this time, there really are not that many places that service iPhones. Most of the small shops that push T-Mobile phones (HTCs, etc) don’t officially have any iPhone repair capabilities.

I found a great shop in East Brunswick, New Jersey ( http://www.iphonebandaid.com/ ) that I really need to give a good plug for; these guys rock! It’s a small shop off Route 18 South that has some tech wizards that understand a lot about repairing the iPhone. My repair was performed in under an hour (I was told about 1 1/2 hrs, but they had it done sooner), and the price is perfect: screen repair is $50. You really can’t beat it. AT&T will have the phone repaired for about $200 and you need to mail it in to a service center. iphonebandaid.com will do the repair on the spot. I chatted with the owners and they really knew the details of their trade; I was amazed that they also service phones that have been soaked in water. One of the tricks to getting all moisture out of the phone is to open it up and put it in a bowl of dry rice. Seriously. They showed me how they open the phones, the parts inside, and I was really impressed with how genuinely interested the company was in their business. If you are in NJ or NY and you need an iPhone or HTC repair, I highly recommend these guys.

Tomorrow I catch a flight to Hong Kong.

I am happy to say that I really do like my iPhone 3G, that I have had for over a year or so now since I picked it up in New Zealand unlocked on the Vodafone NZ network. I use it on Telstra and Tmobile when in the appropriate country and I find that it serves the needs of what I would want in a phone, a small portable computer, and basically a communications tool. Recently we took a drive up to Toronto, ON, Canada, and a few weeks before the trip I downloaded the Tom Tom USA/CAN maps applications and it really impressed me with not only the GUI, but the functionality and featureset within the Tom Tom application. We were able to find all the places that we wanted to see and basically keep driving instead of looking up maps and googling around for places to stay or dine. Combine this with Yelp (reviews on basically everyplace), and we were very happy to cruise around places that we would otherwise not have stopped.

A month or so back I noticed that my iPhone was lasting only 3/4 of the day, and it perplexed me on how it changed so drastically that I started to look into it. While on Tmobile I use EDGE services so I negated the issue with 3G taking more battery, and I usually keep the GPS active (I think it goes dormant when not running an app that uses it), and of course WIFI is active at my house and most places that I visit. So why did the battery die so quickly? It appears that the issue was with notifications being enabled in applications. They constantly keep data communication going which drain the battery quickly.

Face it, I don’t need to know immediately when someone sends a message on Facebook or some other unimportant application. I am more than happy to launch the application and ’single task’ my way over to retrieve the message. That’s just me. So after making the changes to disable notifications my battery was lasting a whole day or more. Still, there are plenty of times that I have been out and realized that my battery is low and wishing that I had some spare juice to keep it going to check on something on Safari or send an email. I picked it up this weekend: The Mophone Juice Pack Air. It’s basically a case for the phone that has an additional battery in it, it gives another 270hrs of standby, and 4.5Hrs of talk on 3G or 20hrs of audio playback. It’s black, sleek, and works really well when charged via USB. It will even passively charge your iphone and the case at the same time. So far, I am very happy in having some more battery time when I am in a jam or taking a long flight that doesn’t have USB power onboard.

In other news, I have been using Google Docs again (yes they own you), but it’s very convenient and I think the negatives are far less than the positives that Google provides. I remembered thinking that there was a beta offline mode for docs; so I downloaded google gears and then realized that google gears (on mac) only supports Firefox. Surprising that they don’t support Chrome; so anyway after getting the google gears pluging installed I found out that google has pulled support for offline modes on google docs (for now, at least they disabled support for google gears), and they plan for full HTML5 methods in having offline viewing of docs.

So where does Google Gears work? So far it’s working good with Google Reader.

Also I updated the SIP peerings that I have with Teliax to the NYC SIP proxy from the Denver, CO proxies. Local calls from the east coast should now have a lower latency.