Simon’s Blog

This contraption looks like a high-tech way to kill yourself, or worse get your iPhone smashed off your helmet when you ride through low hanging tree branches.

Google is now using a Microsoft Exchange server to provide push mail, contacts, and calendars to iPhone users. Contacts sync to the address book app and Google Calendar syncs to calendar app.  Rejoice.

Instructions

I’ve compared the features of all the DC metro apps, and each has it’s pros and cons. This one gets a bonus for being free while also not sucking. It show you real time arrival times for the DC Metrorail and Metrobus. It’s temporarily free down from a dollar.

I want this for Christmas.  All I need is 3 Xbox’s, 3 screens, a fancy wheel and some kinda super hydraulic racing chair.  Forza 3 comes out October 27th and I’m gonna be all over it. One of the coolest new features is the rewind feature that all racing games seem to be adding (Full Auto, Dirt 2). It’s like the driver is holding the dagger of time in his hand.

From the BBC:

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles – in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

I calculated that transfering 4% of 4 gigabyte in 2 hours came out to 184kbps, the same as the very slowest DSL (my connection is over 100 times faster).  The pigeon actually delivered the stick in 1 hour, and it took another hour to load the data.  That’s less than 1 megabyte per second from a USB stick, are they using abacusus over there?  If anyone wants to check my math please a comment.

From AT&T’s press release:

AT&T plans to begin deployment of HSPA 7.2 in six major U.S. cities, including Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Miami, with initial service availability expected in these markets by the end of the year. All told, the company plans to deploy HSPA 7.2 in 25 of the nation’s 30 largest markets by the end of 2010, and to reach about 90 percent of its existing 3G network footprint with HSPA 7.2 by the end of 2011.

Gee I’m so glad I bought this new iPhone that supports HSDA, which won’t be available in my area until after the next iPhone is out. Way to go AT&T.

High Speed Data Access will be about twice as fast as existing 3G speeds. 3G is capable of a little more than 2mbps on most devices, though the iPhone is capped at 1.3mbps to limit power consumption. HSPA has a theoretical limit of 7.2mbps, though in reality you will get half that which is still very nice. Though by the time AT&T gets it rolled out Verizon will probably already have 4G deployed in major areas. I expect a mass exodus from AT&T back to Verizon when they get the iPhone.

Update: Don’t upgrade to 3.1 yet, it’s buggy and there is no known way to downgrade a 3GS, 3G users can still downgrade.

Finally non-destructive video trimming.

If only Apple would get rid of the useless ’shake to undo’ feature and the annoying coverflow whenever the iPod is turned sideways. I was suprised to see my unofficial tethering still in the settings app, when I tried to connect from my laptop, the option suddenly disappeared from the iPhone’s screen before my eyes. The AT&T profile hack has also been disabled, so no unofficial tethering with 3.1. My first attempt to downgrade to 3.0.1 was unsucessful, iTunes reported my device was not ‘eligible’ for the downgrade.

I can’t wait to arrange apps on my 11 home screens with iTunes 9. The new genius app recommendations show up in the featured section of the app store.