Tag Archives: Iphone

Steve Jobs has to be the biggest hypocrite I’ve ever seen

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Apple has always been known for their innovation and technology. I recently read an article about how they don’t believe in a “for the people by the people” model, but instead follow one that’s “for the professionals by the professionals”. This has both positive and negative outcomes. Everything that apple produces is extremely clean, professional, and very well polished. However, it forces them to be selective, limited, and exclusive, which is all negative when it comes to the internet. Freedom of expression simply does not exist within Apple. You might think you are free to express yourself, but only according to how, when, and where Apple tells you to.

With this information in the back of your mind, Apple recently sued Amazon for calling its app store Appstore. It has publicly lectured competitors to “create their own original technology, not steal ours”.

Then Apple turned around and blatantly stole Greg Hughes’, Wi-Fi Sync App — but only after first rejecting it from the Apple App Store. Infact, they not only stole the idea/concept and name, but they also ripped off the icon. Greg has sold his app in the Cydia app store at $9.99 and he has reportedly sold over 50,000 copies in the last year. Can you imagine how many more copies he would have sold in the regular Apple App Store? Greg has also reported that when his app was rejected from the Apple store, a developer from Apple called him to tell him how great his app was and how the entire Apple dev team was extremely impressed with it.

I think that Apple needs to decide where they stand. If they truly believe in copyright and patents, they have to use the same stick when judging themselves. They cannot steal other’s work, and then turn around and preach how you should not steal innovation, designs, and code.

If you want to read the full article, you can find it at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/08/apple_copies_rejected_app/

Change the Exchange Calendar Color on the iPhone

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Let me preface this with the fact that, you just can’t do this unless your iphone is jailbroken. For the non-curious, stop reading here.

This one came about as I was recently forced at work to switch from using the Unix email system to the hosted Exchange solution, in order for our calendars to be centrally accessible by everyone. Details aside, after adding my exchange to my iPhone (since I am trying to keep my blackberry off BES), I realized that the color schemes absolutely suck. From somewhere, it decided that purple was the best color, and I couldn’t change it. After aimlessly searching through the Calendar.app on the iPhone for a color changing option, I came to the realization that there was no way to do it. Luckily, my iphone was jailbroken, and there are plenty of ways to do this with a little background work. I found this amazing article: http://chriscarey.com/wordpress/2009/02/10/how-to-modify-iphone-calendar-colors-with-sqlite3/

To summarize it, in case the article disappears:

Start by ssh-ing into your phone

One tip that I can give, if you don’t have sqlite3 on your iphone (which you wouldn’t by default), is to scp the file to your computer, apply the changes, and scp it back to the iPhone.

Here are the RGB Values for the Standard Colors:

Red = (181,0,13)

Orange = (229,98,0)

Green = (47,141,0)

Blue = (15,77,140)

Purple = (103,10,108)

So, with the line:

I was able to make my default calendar (the Exchange one) RED — which portrayes the “important” notion and it’s easily visible.

Hope this helps everyone who is trying to accomplish this. Don’t forget to close and re-start your Calendar.app. If you don’t have a jailbroken iPhone, you can change your non-exchange calendars by syncing them to the iCal app, and changing the color back, and syncing them.

ATT is not worried about loss of iPhone exclusivity

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There have been many interesting things happening in technology lately, but I’ve been really busy lately, and I just haven’t had time to post interesting articles. That said, there was an article about ATT and the iPhone that really caught my attention. The article started with:

“As the carrier with the highest number of dropped calls, lowest customer satisfaction rating, and smallest 3G coverage area, AT&Ts lifeblood over the last few years has been its iPhone exclusivity.”

This is the first thing that caught my attention. Everyone praises how reliable ATT is. They say that the dropped calls are really minimum and that the 3G coverage is very large. Finally, they say that customers are perfectly satisfied. From my opinion, first of all, I’ve never ever had as many dropped calls on all the carriers combined, as I’ve had with ATT. Second of all, the customer service is terrible. Now that said, I had the business customer service, from which only 30% of the people are incompetent. The last thing is about the 3G — I personally do believe that they have a “relatively large” 3G coverage, but the 3G coverage is extremely poor in quality, very unreliable, and 5bars could mean a 2MB/s download or a 200KB/s download.

The next part in the article said:

“AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson spoke about the issue at an investor conference in New York, saying it’s unlikely the customer base will drop AT&T just because the iPhone goes to another carrier. He said that 2/3 of all iPhone owners were previous AT&T customers. So somehow this Stephenson guy thinks 1/3 is a small number, and if 1/3 of all iPhone owners dropped AT&T it wouldn’t be a problem. Umm, most people would disagree with that.”

Are you crazy? First of all, you think losing 1/3 of your customers is OK? This should tell you once again how much ATT cares about their customers. Second of all — I think ATT will lose a lot more than 1/3 of their customers. What Randall is assuming is that the other 2/3 will stay because they are “happy”. The main problem here is that nothing better existed at the time. This has drastically changed. The reality is that 2/3 or more of the people would’ve already left, if it wasn’t for the iPhone.

“Now, of course, no one is expecting that the moment a Verizon iPhone arrives, there will be a mass exodus of AT&T customers.”

From Verizon alone? – no. From Verizon, T-Mobile, and others — Yes. The point is, when there are alternatives, especially cheaper ones (T-Mobile), people will gladly make the switch.

And at last, my favorite part:

“By all metrics it is the worst of the four major carriers in the US. And Stephenson just doesn’t get it. Of the millions of people who now have an iPhone in the US, 33% of them were not AT&T customers before. That’s a big number.”

What’s interesting about that is that it’s 33% of one million! Yes, ATT just said it’s OK to lose 330,000 customers. The second part, and my personal favorite because I’ve been saying this for a long time — ATT is the worst carrier by all metrics!

All this said, something you should know about me: I’ve used all 4 major carriers in the US, at least twice each. I’ve also owned 3 iPhones (1 on Tmobile), 3 blackberries, 3 treos, >5 other smart phones, and a few other regular phones. I personally HATE ATT. And yes, I own an iPad too.

If you want to read the article, you can find it at:

http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-brief/51659-att-not-worried-about-loss-of-iphone-exclusivity