Nokia is at it Again Misleading Consumers

Remember last year when Nokia released the Lumia 920 and they just wouldn’t shut up about the new PureView camera? They even put out a video to show off how good it was at optical image stabilization and wow, was it good!

Oh yeah, it was also faked. If you look closely at 27 seconds in, not only is this video being shot from a box van driving next to the girl, shot by someone else from a bicycle, as it implies, it is also being shot with a full DSLR video rig. Turns out the Nokia Lumia 920 video was actually shot with a DSLR, not with the PureView camera with optical image stabilization (OIS). Continue reading

ZAGG invisibleSHIELD EXTREME Seems Impossible

Some time ago I wrote a favorable review of the ZAGG invisibleSHIELD (for now on called Zagg Invisible Shield, oiy product names these days). It did exactly what it promised, came with a first class warranty and didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Applying it to your device could prove a little difficult but with some practice I’ve become a total pro.

Now Zagg has a new product out and I’m not so sure about it…

Introducing the invisibleSHIELD® EXTREME, a patented award winning, protective film for gadgets. Delivering the same premium quality as the original invisibleSHIELD, this exceptionally tough, and virtually indestructible film features a new shock resistant layer that preserves touchscreen clarity and functions.

So now that we’ve all watched that video, let’s discuss. This simply cannot be possible, am I right? How can a  material that’s flexible and only 0.2mm thick possibly provide this much protection? This is better than the Gorilla Glass the iPhone already has.

I haven’t decided if I’ll be getting the iPhone 5, but if I do, I’ll be buying this new Invisible Shield. If it is even half as good as it promises, I might start using my phone sans case. And you can be sure I’ll review it here, though there’s no way I’ll attack any of my iPhones with a hammer to test this thing. Maybe I can find cheap, dead iPhone on eBay bash. That could be fun.

What do you think, could this even be possible? If it is, Otterbox should look out.

Klipsch X7i In-Ear Headphone

It seems hard to believe that it has been five years since Klipsch released the Image X10 in-ear headphone, the world’s smallest and lightest. Shortly after its release came the slightly larger and $100 cheaper Image X5 for $250 and then the Image X10i which added a remote and mic at $350. However there was never an Image X5i for people with iPhones

Klipsch X7i in-ear headphones

Enter the Klipsch Image X7i, a high-end, uniquely designed iDevice ready headphone for $200. Not only cheaper than the Klipsch Image X5 but beating it in features and style at the same time. Continue reading

iPhone 4 won’t update to iOS 5.1

UPDATE: It’s been fixed! Thanks to my friendly and always helpful Twitter friends @jdyates, @mrfrank505, @ropiko, @richmackey, @josephjaramillo, @Apple9511and @shuether for their suggestions.

Turns out the fix was as easy as using a different computer. Turns out (and I only sort of know what I’m talking about here) the issue came from when I used an iOS jailbreak tool to unlock an iPhone for my trip to Europe and Saudi Arabia. It redirected the activation from Apple to Cydia which is why I got the error message below.

There are two fixes, either edit the host file through Terminal or just do the update on a different computer. Since the command I had to fix through terminal didn’t work, I tried the update on my MacBook Pro and it worked like a charm!

iPhone 4 will not update to iOS 5.1

So I have this iPhone 4 which is in absolute perfect physical shape, only has three months of use yet after around iOS 5 Beta 3, the phone stopped working correctly, the digitizer stopped working reliably. That is, sometimes after unlocking the phone, you could not swipe to unlock, the screen was remapped and a swipe to the bottom didn’t do anything, sliding across other parts of the screen would move the unlock button to a degree but never enough to unlock.

I had to keep this phone unlocked 24/7 or risk having a phone that was unusable. I eventually was forced to buy the iPhone 4S. Since I was running a beta version of iOS and couldn’t undo that after Beta 4, Apple would not honor the warranty.

Do you have any suggestions? DFU restore and regular iTunes restores do not work. I’ve tried numerous times to upgrade this phone to the latest version of iOS 5 and 5.1 with no luck. I have even wiped it from its built in restore feature but that hasn’t worked.

Hopefully someone reading this will have an idea as I am all out of them!

Catching up on a few things

I was thinking today about how much I have to catch people up on. Even though my life isn’t super exciting or anything, I often put out these quick short stories and get so distracted that I never follow up on them. So here we go. Continue reading

I (think I) Saw the iPhone 5

Device in question is against the wall on the left, dark restaurant with an iPhone 4 camera.

Last week I saw a guy using a touch-screen phone that was super thin with a big bright screen and almost zero bezel.

It immediately caught my attention and I asked my friend Kayla, who was facing the table, to let me know if the guy picked it up and used it. It had been, until then, left to sit on the table unused.

The guy this friend was talking to said something that made the guy pull out his phone and pull up the notepad. This was when Kayla and I realized, this super thin phone was an iPhone. Sure enough, the home screen came back up and it was iOS.

It appeared that the screen took up most of the device, it was super thin, and shorter than the current iPhone. The phone was wrapped in matte black, almost like gaffers tape. It is thinner than I was able to convey in this mockup, almost as thin as a Motorola Razor screen.

I’m no good at making mockups but I did my best to illustrate what we saw.

iPhone 5 vs iPhone 4 mockup

These guys were talking about a new cloud service that was similar to “AWS” but had “no net loss.” AWS, for those who don’t know, means “Amazon Web Services” which provide a plethora of syncing and data hosting services, as well as Amazon’s new cloud music system.

We did our best to listen to their conversation as they drank beers but didn’t pull too much from it. Watching the WWDC live right now I now understand more of what they were talking about, which leads credence to the theory that this phone was indeed an iPhone 5.

All this said, I’m pretty sure that some blog like The Unofficial Apple Weblog will see this, post it and turn out that I’m totally high and these two dude work for IBM and everything is totally coincidental. However, I’m hoping that isn’t the case. 🙂

UPDATE: So after being mentioned on the TWiT Network and WWDC coming to pass, a post by Joshua Topolsky came to my attention about the design of the iPhone 5 via another blog post on some other tech site (too many to remember).

Joshua (or his people) made their own mockup and it is scary similar to the design I saw (and tried to mockup myself).

 

This is My Next iPhone 5 Mockup

This is My Next iPhone 5 Mockup

White iPhone 4 Unicorn Arrives with Sense of Humor

Finally. The White iPhone 4 is Here

I find it pretty awesome that Apple actually is making fun of themselves on the front page of their website right now. Yeah, it might be nearly a year late but the “magical” Apple unicorn is finally available to buy. Hats off to you Apple for keeping your sense of humor, you know, the one we never thought you had.

And you know the whole reason I waited from June 24th until September to get my iPhone 4 strictly because I wanted the white version. I eventually gave up and honestly don’t care. For the first time ever I own a black iPhone and my world didn’t turn upside down.

But back on topic. The white iPhone is here, it’s a tiny bit thicker than the black iPhone 4 and we can stop reading rumor posts on it. Thank G-d. Now let’s get those iPhone 5 rumors ramped up. Oiy… Continue reading