Wired How-to has a few good pointers on how to ensure you squeeze as much juice out of your iPhone battery when the charger is no where in sight. Also mentioned were some battery usage myths which you might have heard before, debunked.
Ever since the iPhone was launched, there are many features that people wants to see on the phone, for it to be justify its tag as the Jesus Phone.
With the recent preview of iPhone 3.0, some of these much wanted features will be added to the phone come this summer. Cut-n-Paste, MMS, SMS-forwarding, Bluetooth Stereo support etc.
However, there are still many features that people wanted that were not announced. Video capturing and streaming, Flash, background apps, just to name a few.
I can’t claim to have any inside knowledge nor technical know-how to say whether these features could be done at this current juncture. But looking at what Apple have done for the Macs, it definitely is not beyond their abilities to put them in. The iPhone OS and the Mac OS X share much of the same platform which theoretically, means what you can do on the Mac, you probably can do on the iPhone.
But yet, we don’t. Of course there are million and one reasons they are not there. Steve Jobs don’t like how it looks on the iPhone? Marketing wants to keep feature XXX to be for the next version, so that consumers are “trapped”? AT&T can’t afford to have that feature XXX because it will kill their cell network? Too many but one, that is some simple, might just be the simplest reason why we don’t see all these in there.
Batteries. A look around all major phones now show that battery life per charge go between 5-8 hours talk time. Note that is just an estimate based on just talking.
So what happens when you add videos, Flash, music etc. Plus most of the newer phones have bigger and brighter screens. Will you still get that 5-8 hours?
The hardware and software for phones out in the market are getting better and better. Besides the iPhone, there are still the Nokias, the Sony Ericssons, the Palms and add to that you have the Google Android phones. Their interface are getting better, screens look brighter and sharper, their OS gets smarter and apps do more than just calculate tips.
BUT it seems battery technology isn’t matching the rest of the advances. Yes it is much better than phones years ago. But it isn’t outpacing or at least, match the needs of consumers.
Yes we would want our phones to not just be able to call our family and friends, we want to be able to do video conferencing, on bigger screens, take photos and mail it to everyone on my twitter network, and at the same time IM my colleagues back at work, while downloading the last album from iTunes Music Store. We want to do EVERYTHING with our phone. But based on current battery capacity, our phone will probably lasts 5 minutes before we need to charge it.
Which brings me to why I think we won’t see everything we want now on our iPhone. The operating system or the hardware might support it, but the battery won’t. Not until there is a break through in technology which can give us at least twice or more of current capacity after one charge cycle.
Or they make it nuclear powered. What do you think?
One item from Philnote which I didn’t touch much on was the announcement of the new unibody 17-inch MacBook Pro that comes with the new in-built battery that Apple claims can run up to 8 hours and takes 1,000 charges. With it shipping only after 4 to 6 weeks, we still won’t know how much mileage Apple’s claim goes.
But they have announced the cost of replacing the battery should it fail. AT US$179 (pre taxes), which comes up to something between S$270-S$300 for the battery to be replaced. So just hope those “claims” are somewhat close, or it will be expensive to replace them.
If you are a QuickSilver user on the Mac, you will be familiar with Google’s new Quick Search Box. Quicksilver allows you to search, launch applications and many other functions via a few quick key-presses, all within a small window that pops up when you activate it. Quick Search Box, now currently at beta, works similarly. Hit a key combi and a small window pops up over all other window on your Desktop and you can key in search terms to look for items on the web, or applications on your Mac.
The similarities are not surprising as Nicholas Jitkoff, of QuickSilver fame, is part of the team behind this new project from Google Code. As it is still in beta, do try it at your own risk and help develop it by contributing to the app’s Discussion Group. Download here
Weeks back we constantly read reports about Apple dismissing applications for iPhone apps that replicate apps made by Apple, eg Podcaster, Opera web browser.
But just the past week, new web browsers appeared in the App Store – Incognito, Edge Browser, WebMate and QuickSurf – each appeared to provide web surfing functions like Safari.
Besides the basic web surfing, some apps attempted to differentiate themselves with features not available in Safari, with less hits than misses. For example, to key in the URL for Edge Browser, you’d need to exit the app, go to the Settings section to fill the URL, just to get full screen browsing. Or Hot Browser comes with a “shake” the iPhone to get a randomly hot site.
There will definitely be more such browser apps coming up but if it ain’t free, I don’t see any reasons to switch from Safari.
