A better way to buy the iPhone 4

Posted by nkbish0p at 20:47 0
Recently I have been researching the best way to buy the new iPhone 4 taking several factors into consideration:

-Value for money (what you get in terms of minutes and messages and what it costs)
-Whether the phone can be unlocked at a later date (important for people wanting to sell to upgrade)
-Network reliability, speed and signal strength.

I believe I have found the best possible option and it is how I intend to purchase my iPhone 4 once the white model becomes available from apple.

The best possible way to buy an iPhone 4

Although it may seem hugely expensive, the first step is to buy your iPhone from apple.com. This will cost you £500 for a 16gb iPhone or £600 for a 32gb which may seem extremely expensive. However bear with me and you will see what I am getting to.

A huge advantage of doing this is that your iPhone is factory unlocked and will always remain unlocked. This is great for using your phone abroad, and also lets you choose your own provider.

Secondly you will want to purchase a sim card from quidco.com here. The cost of the tariff is £25 per month and you will get the following:

-a short 12 month contract
-900 minutes per month
-1gb of mobile data per month
-1gb bt wifi per month
-unlimited texts

But that is not the end of the story; by buying your sim card from here you will also receive

£120 cashback!

Which means that the above tariff will, in effect only cost you

£15 per month!

Over 2 years, the total cost will be £500 plus 24 payments of £15 (do the cashback deal twice)
This works out at £860 or on average £35.83 per month.

Lets compare this to a typical vodafone contract:

Even an extremely cheap vodafone contract will end up costing you more than this:

for example, the £30 per month 24 month contract which includes:

-a long 24 month contract
-300 minutes per month (1/3 of what you get above)
-1gb of mobile data per month
-1gb bt wifi per month
-unlimited texts

and the handset also costs £169

Over 2 years, the total cost will be £169 plus 24 payments of £30
This works out at £879 or on average £36.63 per month. And you are getting 600 less minutes per month!

With more expensive vodafone contracts, the difference becomes even greater.

21/7/2010 app reviews

Posted by nkbish0p at 18:20 0
Right, I have been using a decent bunch of apps this week, so instead of writing them all up as separate posts, I have decided to write about them all together in a single post. I may adopt this format for future reviews if I feel that it works well.

Minesweeper

Anybody that had access to a windows computer before windows XP came out has probably played this before. Basically its the exact same game that used to ship on all computers, its a classic game and great fun. I have to admit that I am USELESS at minesweeper, but its still great fun to play. There are several options to increase or decrease the difficulty so it should be good for any skill level. As a bonus, even on an iPhone 3g the app is quick loading, so on newer models there should be little delay which is great to see on any iPhone application. Also, it costs nothing so there is little to lose by giving this app a go.

Live Poker 7K

If you enjoy playing poker, this app is pretty good considering that it is free. It allows you to play against real people over an internet connection which is always much more fun than playing against a computerised opponent on a game of this type. A drawback would be that as you have to wait for each player to play their turn, you can easily spend a long period of time playing this game without realising it but I guess an advantage is that you aren't losing real money at the same time. Considering the quality of the app, I am actually surprised that it is free, the graphics are better than the average app of this type and it also has push notifications, and a leaderboard to compare you to your friends on Facebook. There is also a built in chat feature which you may enjoy if you are the kind of person that enjoys talking to random people.

Free app a day.com

freeappaday.com is a website that informs visitors about apps that aren't normally free that have been put on promotion for a period of time so the user can download them for no cost. The first thing I noticed about this app was that the graphics are shockingly bad, even on a non-retina display iPhone 3g, so on an iPhone 4 they must be truly horrendous. Also, a lot of the promoted apps are promoted for a very good reason, they aren't very good and will hold your interest for only a short period of time and I imagine most of the apps presented will spend only a short period of time on a users device before they are deleted. It would make little sense if you had to pay for this application and as expected it is free.

Archetype

Archetype is billed as being the first truly decent iPhone FPS style game. This is an interesting market for the iPhone as most of the popular games on the iphone presently are unique to the iPhone and not really aimed at "hardcore" gamers. Hopefully with the release of this app, this will change. As a FANTASTIC feature, archetype is playable online in a similar manner to console first person shooters such as HALO. The best thing about this application is that it shows great potential for the future of iPhone gaming, however at the moment there are several flaws that will hopefully get updated in a future iteration of this app. In my opinion at the moment, the controls for this game could be greatly improved. Basically the game uses two "joysticks" on the screen that the player uses to control their character in the normal FPS manner. I think that these controls are not sensitive enough and they rely on the player moving their thumbs a large distance across the screen before their input is registered. However, this should be relatively easy to correct in a future version update.

I also noted the speedy performance of the application. Considering the fairly good graphics for the platform and the fact that the game is played online the loading times are extremely brief, even on the older ios hardware. To be picky, I would note that the in game sounds are relatively poor however.

Archetype is available for £1.79 in the app store and I would recommend it to anyone that plays console games of this genre to highlight the fact that this type of game is very playable on the iPhone's hardware. It will be made even better in the future when apple adds the "game centre" into their firmware as players will easily be able to compare high scores in a similar manner to xbox live.

Converting video for an apple device

Posted by nkbish0p at 19:40 0

Been a busy week or so, So I haven't had a chance to get much put on this blog for a while, but I have written the following tutorial to help anyone wanting to watch video on their apple device.

Watching a video on your iPod or iPhone is not as simple as many competing products. Your device will only recognise certain types of video and you will need to be able to convert any video you wish to watch on your device into a compatible format before you can view it.

I have used many different programs to do this over the years, but without a doubt the best program I have found is handbrake, and as a bonus it is also completely free.

Today I am going to be writing a tutorial for converting .avi/.xvid videos that have been downloaded from the internet and NOT DVD's, as these will need to be ripped onto your computers hard drive before you can load them onto your apple device.

This tutorial is going to be written for mac, as I am currently using my laptop to convert my video, although handbrake is also available for windows and the process is similar. If anyone would like a more windows based tutorail please leave me a comment and I will post this also.

  1. Firstly you will need to download handbrake from here
  2. Open handbrake and click source, and locate the avi file that you wish to convert for your device.
  3. Open presets (on mac hit toggle presets in the top left) and select the type of device that you have from the drawer that appears on the right hand side of your screen.
  4. Click start at the top of your screen.
  5. Your movie will begin converting and will appear in the "destination" that is written in the main handbrake window (see screenshot below). Video encoding can take some time (I would approximate around half the length to one third of the length of the film you are encoding on an average laptop).
  6. Drag your newly created file into itunes, and make sure your device is set up to sync video!

SHSH Blobs

Posted by nkbish0p at 17:56 0
Before reading any of this article, note this is only for people with newer hardware, specifically:

-iPhone 3gs or 4.
-iPod touch 3g.
-iPad.

If your model does not appear here, you do not need to read this. If you do not know what model of iPod touch you have, read

When you want to restore one of these devices in iTunes, iTunes will only allow you to restore your device to the latest firmware for your device. If you back up your SHSH blobs as you go through each firmware, you will be able to restore your device to any of the firmwares that you have backed up your SHSH blobs for. This is important to people that wish to be able to keep their device jailbroken, or people that would like the freedom to downgrade their firmware.

Even if you don't update your device, if it crashes, you may need to restore in iTunes. If you have no SHSH blobs backed up, you can only restore to the newest firmware which may not be jailbreakable. If you want to restore to an old firmware that can be jailbroken, you will need the SHSH blobs for that firmware for your device.

In this article I will be explaining how you can back up your SHSH blobs. I would advise anyone with any of the above devices to do this, especially if you have an interest in jailbreaking.

First of all I recommend reading this README as it gives a more detailed explanation of what this post is all about.

Secondly, you will need to download tinyumbrella from the "quick links" section of this website for the operating system that you use.

To save your SHSH blobs simply do the following.

  1. Connect your device to your computer and wait for it to be detected by iTunes.
  2. Open tinyumbrella.
  3. Click Save my SHSH.
  4. You are done, disconnect your device.

To restore your iPhone to a firmware that is below the one you currently have (downgrade firmware):

Before you do anything else, download the firmware that you wish to restore to from here

  1. Connect your device and wait for it to be detected by itunes.
  2. Click your device on the left had side of iTunes.
  3. Open firmware umbrella and click start TSS server.
  4. Hold shift (if using windows) or alt (if using mac) and browse to the firmware you wish to downgrade to.
  5. Click OK and your phone will restore.
  6. If after the restore is completed, your device is left in recovery mode, click "kick device out of recovery" in tinyumbrella.
  7. Turn your device off then back on again.
  8. Your phone has been downgraded.
Remember, you can avoid doing all this by simply not upgrading your device until you are sure the firmware you are upgrading to can be jailbroken and will be stable on your device.



Total phone comparison table

Posted by nkbish0p at 14:43 0



Above is a table comparing the best phone currently available from all of the major handset manufacturers in the UK. If a particular feature is the best currently available on any of these handsets it is highlighted green, if it is the worst it is highlighted red.

Due to amoled and LCD both having good and bad qualities, I have not distinguished between these two types of display, however as the super amoled display is better than both, this display wins this category.

Thinner and lighter phones have been rated as better, and larger screens have also been rated as better.

Update

Posted by nkbish0p at 18:21 0
Haven't posted on here for a couple of days, but I am currently working on a couple of big posts that should be up over the next fews days as well as the "unlock" section of this blog which I am also aiming to publish over the next week or so.

Meanwhile if there are any apps anybody would like to see reviewed, leave a request in the comments also I am going to be putting up a poll on here soon to see what kind of things I should be working on on here. Please remember to vote when this goes up.

Follow me on twitter for latest news and updates @bb0Nk
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)