The sheer usefulness of finding ’stuff around you’ has meant the emergence of several pretenders, despite the ubiquitous presence of Google Maps itself. AroundMe (at first commercial, but now free) and Vicinity (always free) are also well established now, but in the interests of keeping things simple (and reducing the clutter slightly on your application [...]

[Read more →]

I have a confession to make.
I’m quite old. Mid-40s, at least. Old enough to remember the earliest days of home computing. Dragon, PET, Sinclair ZX81, then Amiga and the earliest IBM PCs and the RM 380z, in my case. Then on through the PC’s AT and then Pentium series and through to the Celerons and [...]

[Read more →]

If you’re a Windows Vista user like me [/FX: sound of a thousand Mac fans gasping] and have upgraded to the latest iTunes version, 8.0.1, you may be stuck looking at the following error message:
 
Apart from the relative inanity of an error for which the software knows the number but can’t translate into helpful English, [...]

[Read more →]

My Apple iPhone doesn’t need charging anymore! Well, at least that’s what I’d like to say.
My intention, while testing the Brando Solar Charger Sheath (called the ‘Solar powered leather case‘ on their site), was to not have to plug my iPhone into the wall or into a PC or Mac - I wanted to run [...]

[Read more →]

Of course, you may well be happy to follow your nose in Apple’s iPhone on-device AppStore. If you’re anything like me, it’s proving rather addictive. Am I the only one who taps eagerly on the icon each day hoping for new updates, new apps, new ideas? The iPhone AppStore is certainly by far the most [...]

[Read more →]

BBC iPlayer goes from strength to strength. The iPhone has become the best way of accessing the quality content of the BBC. Recent changes included an iPhone formatted front end, availability of an entire series, and now streaming radio via wifi.
The radio shows are provided in MP3 format at 128kbps. I listened to Radio One’s [...]

[Read more →]

Today sees Google, HTC and T-Mobile unveiling the G1, the first Android phone, with (seemingly) all its data ‘in the cloud’. Essentially, your Contacts, Calendar, Documents, Emails and Photos all live in Google’s data cloud and sync in real time with local copies (if even appropriate) on the device, over the air. Think of it [...]

[Read more →]

Yes, yes, I know this information is on other pages around the internet, but if you’re anything like me then you keep forgetting which iPhone/iPod-Touch keystroke is which. So, without further ado:

Press and hold the ‘Home’ button for at least ten seconds to terminate the current foreground application. Use this when an application freezes while [...]

[Read more →]

Intomobile is reporting that DataViz is bringing Word, Excel and Powerpoint editing to the iPhone. This is great news, but at the same time, somewhat useless. As James from the site notes:
“If you’re out of the office, no problem. Edit up that proposal and send it back to the office or to your client… [...]

[Read more →]

Firmware 2.1 is out. Some observations so far:
(1) The phone is snapper, definitely, especially in Contacts searching.
(2) 3G reception seems the same, i.e. poor.
(3) The status icons for cellular connectivity have changed again. This previously happened with the 2.0 firmware. I now occasionally get an empty circle that tells me… nothing. See:

At the time of [...]

[Read more →]