One of the cooler features in Firmware 2.2 is Over The Air Podcast downloading makin it easier to get your daily fix of The Onion, TWiT and other obscure, niche Video Podcasts. It’s only made easier since the iTunes App on the iPhone now allows you to queue up downloads but if your bits be bigger than 83,886,080 (10 Megabytes) then you’ll be forced to download your content off WiFi. Common sense would then say “Since my iPhone is restricting me to WiFi for this download, it would be irrational for iTunes to continue again over the Cellular network.”
However, the download doesn’t actually continue. The mobile iTunes Store continues the download only to be met with a denial. You’ve surely seen the pop up saying “This item is too big to download” within the App but it rarely shows up outside. This is the cause of a few network slowdowns so be sure to remember that if you leave a WiFi connection and have a download running in the queue, be sure to pause it and it will prevent a lot of headache.
Written by Tanner Godarzi on November 25th, 2008
Posted in: Tip Stash
Within days of arriving in the hands of iPhone and iPod Touch owners everywhere, Firmware 2.2 has been quickly dissected and reviewed. Thanks to a prolonged testing period, the iPhone Dev Team was able to perform a Jailbreak on the still in development Firmware and perfect it once Apple made it available for download. While available for all generations of iPhone and iPod Touch, there are some key differences between the two such as the lack of Google Street View on the later and lack of Emojicon support on non Japanese iPhones. With a simple hack and a quick Jailbreak, all of this can be remedied.
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Apple has rolled out a recent update for the AppleTV shortly after the iPhone Firmware 2.2 upgrade and iTunes 8.0.2 update bringing it up to version 2.3. The newest update for Apple’s little bundle of media streaming, popcorn inducing box of wonders brings a few features streaming junkies will love. Meanwhile, this update breaks any third party hacks forced on to the AppleTV which also means the popular media center Addon, Boxee, was broken for a while but a fix pushed out by the company patches things right up.
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Written by Tanner Godarzi on November 24th, 2008
Posted in: AppleTV, News
Introduced at this year’s “Let’s Rock” media event hosted by Apple, all range of iPods were updated and much to the glee of sloganeers, the iPod Touch was befitted with a new design and heralded as the frontman of the portable family. If the “Funnest iPod Ever” wasn’t enough to motivate you to get your game freaking on, then you’ll be absolutely enthralled to know that the latest generation iPod Touch sports a higher clocked CPU and beats out the iPhone 3G for gaming.
Touch Arcade, a Blog dedicated to iPhone and iPod Touch gaming reported the speed advantages of the 2G touch when Thomas Fessler, CEO of Handheld Game Corp noticed the rendering capabilities of the latest touch and how drastic it was when compared to the iPhone. Handheld’s 3D intensive game, TouchSports Tennis, renders differently on the iPod Touch 2G smoothly pushing 1,500 Polygons in a single character but when the same scenario is used on an older Touch, it lags and crashes, the iPhone 3G barely passes.
“Where we can easily display two 1500 polygon tennis players with 32 bones each on the iPod touch 2G and maintain fast and fluid game play, the original iPod touch just chokes, and in some instances so do the iPhones. To speed up the touch, we reduced the players to 800 polygons in farther away moments of gameplay, and are now using 1000 polygon models for close ups, bringing the original iPod touch game play performance level close to that of the iPhone 3G.”
The newest generation iPod Touch’s CPU clocks at 532 MHz up from the 412 MHz clock of the iPhone and iPod Touch but still down from the ARM 1176 CPU’s native 620 MHz speed. However, the 2G iPod Touch could also contain a newer GPU but that has yet to be revealed. A side by side comparison video on YouTube clearly shows the impressive load times of the 2G Touch and in terms of load times, it ranks the highest followed by the iPhone 3G, original iPhone and original iPod Touch.
Via: Macworld
Apple’s 2.2 Firmware update for the iPhone came and went leaving for us Over The Air Podcast downloads, Google Street View and a streamlined Safari interface. Amongst the major additions and bug fixes, Apple included a minor, although useful feature that will help you traverse the many Homescreens that populate your iPhone.
It’s great to see Apple is starting to use the Home Button as a shortcut method for Applications but still has room to grow. This tip will make using your iPhone a bit more productive. While away from the default Home Screen which is indicated by the row of dots above the Dock, tap the Home Button once and you’ll be taken back to the default screen containing either the ore chosen Apple Apps or varied with your selection.
Written by Tanner Godarzi on November 23rd, 2008
Posted in: Tip Stash
One of the more anticipate Firmware releases of the year, besides version 2.0, has finally arrived via an iTunes update for iPod and iPhone owners everywhere. The rumor mill has been busy churning out predictions and screenshots of future functionality which so far, has been very much true without a single rock being left unturn. While not as groundbreaking as 2.0, Firmware 2.2 brings some welcome changes albeit with a few annoyances.
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Written by Tanner Godarzi on November 22nd, 2008
Posted in: Reviews
The category of Netbooks is well populated with what is essentially bargain bin laptops in terms of computing power. Everyone from HP to ASUS is well into this new field of computers originating from 10-13″ inch ultra portables to palm sized, inch thin laptops oriented as glorified Smartphones but serve a greater function than surfing the web. This is precisely why Apple will never make a Netbook that is defined by today’s standards as being powered by a single core Atom CPU, small screen and minimal memory. It would mean a massive degradation of the current Mac OS X experience.
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Written by Tanner Godarzi on November 22nd, 2008
Posted in: Opinion
Apple has been busy streamlining the iPhone interface and improving the underlying OS through many Firmware upgrades available for current and previous generation models. The continuation of those efforts have materialized in the much awaited iPhone 2.2 Firmware update bringing various improvements and features to Maps, iTunes and Safari plus other minor interface tweaks. In addition, Apple has recently pushed out a minor update to iTunes bringing it up to version 8.0.2 and including Voice Over support amongst bug fixes.
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Written by Tanner Godarzi on November 21st, 2008
Posted in: News, iPhone, iTunes
When last talked about in June during the annual World Wide Developer Conference, Apple gave a passing mention for Snow Leopard’s release in the time frame of a year from then. A slip from Jordan Hubbard’s slideshow from his presentation at LISA ‘08 points toward a possible Q1 2009 release for Snow Leopard positioning its Delta status at 14+ months. Meanwhile, Intel has been busy rolling out their newest brand of CPUs dubbed Core i7 but revamps to the older Core 2 family could take a prominent place in Apple’s newest iMac in Quad Core form.
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Written by Tanner Godarzi on November 19th, 2008
Posted in: Hardware, iMac
Since Apple launched Mobile Me in July, steady updates have given the Internet reliant service greater stability and much better integration with the devices information is synced to and from. The next upgrade is expected to arrive in a new a point update for Leopard, 10.5.6, which will also include over 90 bug fixes for various aspects of the Operating System. On the note of updates, Apple pushed out point updades for the newest iPod Nano and iPod Classic.
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Written by Tanner Godarzi on November 15th, 2008
Posted in: News
