Better notifications for the iPhone

Posted by nkbish0p at 15:48 0

Tweet If the last 3 years have anything to go by, within a month or so we should know what is coming in iOS 5.0, which, if the regular pattern is followed will be released in Summer 2011. One of the few obvious problems left in the iOS OS is its relatively poor handling of notifications (take a look at an Android phone and see how much better theirs is) with intrusive on screen pop-ups and no log of what each notification was if a number are unread, save for a red "badge" on the app concerned.

It seems very likely that iOS 5.0 will include a new way to manage notifications, but if you don't want to wait until then there is a solution. As you might expect this is only available to jailbroken users.

Preperation

This part is fairly recurrent on this blog - skip if you have seen it before.

• You will need a jailbroken iPhone. To read how to do this, read this page
• You will need to add the source www.sinfuliphonerepo.com (If you don't know how to do this read this post

Installation

• Open cydia, tap manage, tap sources, tap sinfuliphonerepo.
• Find "lockinfo cracked" and install it.
• If you want a clock added too, install "lock info clock plugin" too.

This tweak is pretty customisable, you can set which categories you want to have on your lockscreen. You can also access this by swiping down on the status bar at the top of your screen. The app also lets you set status bar notifications and you can add widgets such as the clock and calendar mentioned above.

If you don't like this, Intelliscreen is pretty similar so why not give that a try instead?

Thanks for reading!

Absolutely NOT an alternative to an iPhone

Posted by nkbish0p at 16:25 0

Tweet Surprisingly, one of the questions I seem to hear people ask a lot prior to buying a new phone is whether to buy a Blackberry or an iPhone. Seemingly and as backed up by these statistics Blackberry's are still common in the UK, far more common in fact that in other regions around the world, but sometimes I wonder why.

I'll start with the good points. If you aren't very fond of typing on a touchscreen keyboard, a Blackberry stands out straight away as most of their handsets come with a physical keyboard. This is an obvious plus to anyone that types a lot of emails on the go and cannot be bothered to learn to type on a virtual keyboard. But that's actually about it. Every other "feature" on any other blackberry handset I would say has been better executed elsewhere and I will demonstrate this below by comparing RIM's supposed "flagship" handset to what it is competing with in the market. In my opinion, the iPhone 4 is in a different league to anything RIM has to offer in their Blackberry range so I will be comparing the Blackberry Torch to what I still consider to be a superior handset, the iPhone 3gs.

In terms of software, Blackberry 6 leaves much to be desired for users familiar with iOS, Android or even WP7. In this regard, Blackberry is not even on the same page and seems years behind what it's competitors have to offer. Whilst all may be classed as smartphones, comparing Blackberry OS to it's competitors is like comparing Windows 95 to Windows 7.

A quick look at the spec of these two devices suggests that even RIM's best is only on a par with an 18 month old apple phone, with one obvious exception. There are 20 times as many apps available for iOS than there are for any blackberry and this is the problem. Some features of the Torch are actually better than the iPhone, such as the amount of RAM that it has and the camera, but as the iPhone seems to be continually proving, hardware spec is only one thing you should be comparing when looking for a new phone. Personally I would much rather have 400,000 applications to choose from and knowledge that Apple has a good history of support for it's legacy devices than an extra few mb of RAM or a screen with 40 more vertical rows of pixels.

Feature	iPhone 3gs	Blackberry Torch
Applications available	400,000	22,000
Screen size	3.5”	3.2”
Screen resolution	480*320	480*360
Camera	3mp AF	5mp flash/AF
Video camera	480p	480p
Front camera	No	No
Processor	600mhz	624mhz
RAM	256mb	512mb
Storage	8gb	4gb +micro SD
Battery	1219mah	1300mah
Weight	135g	161g
Keyboard	No	Yes

The question is, if a blackberry isn't designed to compete with an iPhone, why is it priced at a competing price?

A quick look at popular Vodafone price plans for the iPhone 3gs and the Blackberry torch produces the following:

Blackberry Torch, 24 month contract	PP1	PP2	PP3
Minutes	100	500	600
Texts	500	unlimited	unlimited
Data (mb)	250	500	500
Upfront cost	£299.00	£199.00	£99.00
Cost per month	£20.00	£25.00	£30.00
Total cost	£779.00	£799.00	£819.00
iPhone 3gs, 24 month contract
Minutes	75	300	600
Texts	250	unlimited	unlimited
Data (mb)	500	500	500
Upfront cost	£119.00	£59.00	£0.00
Cost per month	£25.00	£30.00	£35.00
Total cost	£719.00	£779.00	£840.00

With price plans including 100 or below minutes an iPhone 3gs would cost a total of £719 over 24 months compared to £779 for a blackberry torch, with the torch including half the data than the iPhone but only 25 more minutes of talktime a month. Admittedly the iPhone has only 250 texts compared to 500 on the Blackberry but with the variety of text-replacement apps available for the iPhone, users normally end up sending less texts than they would do on other phones anyway.

Again. with plans including less than 600 minutes an iPhone 3gs works out cheaper than a Blackberry Torch, at £779 over 24 months compared to the Blackberry's £799. In this case however the Blackberry includes more minutes with 500 compared to the 300 the iPhone offers but the upfront cost of the blackberry is far greater at £199.99 compared to £59 for the iPhone.

For a price plan including 600 minutes, an iPhone 3gs would cost only £21 more over 24 months (working out at less than £1 extra per month) than a Blackberry Torch with exactly the same number of inclusive minutes texts and data. There is also the added bonus of having no upfront cost for the iPhone compared to £99 for the Blackberry Torch.

Whilst a seemingly common complaint about the iPhone seems to be about it's cost, like the iPod that preceded it as competition in the market grows, Apple products are coming closer in price to competing products. While the iPhone 4 may still be an expensive product, the iPhone 3gs should be considered as a great alternative purchase as it offers most of the features of the iPhone 4 at a much lower price point. Whilst updates for competing operating systems such as Blackberry and Android are not always made available for every available handset, whereas Apple has demonstrated for the iPhone 2g and iPhone 3g that software updates can be expected for in excess of 2 and a half years even when the model has been succeeded by a better product.

Please feel free to leave feedback below!

February: This months most popular posts

Posted by nkbish0p at 18:05 0

Tweet Google Nexus S review

A review of one of the iPhone 4's strongest rivals and how it compares to an iPhone 4

Mobile Operating system distribution

A look at how the popularity of each of the main operating systems has changed over the past 12 months

iPad 2

An announcement and information about the iPad event scheduled for March 2. Come back then for latest news and information!

How to get more out of your iPhone battery

An easy way to improve the battery life of your iPhone

Windows Phone 7 analysis

An analysis of one of the latest iOS rivals

Thanks for reading my blog, if you have any suggestions please post them in the comments below. More great articles coming in March!

The iPhone's strongest rival?

Posted by nkbish0p at 19:02 0

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Although it may already be clear that I believe the iPhone 4 to be the best phone money can currently buy, it is always good to see strong competing devices as this forces Apple to improve their own product in order to compete. Also, I think it will be interesting for me to write about a different phone for a change.

There are a large quantity of operating systems on the market, but personally I think Google's Android platform is the closest competitor to iOS and one Android phone in particular has caught my eye

The Google Nexus S - The best android phone ever?

There are several reasons that I think this phone is great, but unfortunately the price is not one of them. Retailing at £539 at the time of writing on Expansys makes this phone one of few phones on the market to be more expensive than a base 16gb iPhone 4. Bad start admittedly.

This phone goes with one of the major features of most current flagship Android handsets, a large superAMOLED display. These screens are great and tend to look more impressive than the display found on an iPhone 4. Unfortunately the resolution cannot match the iPhone 4 but it is not bad at 960*640 pixels.

An important thing to consider when buying an Android handset is that because there are so many different phones available, some may get updates faster than others. Fortunately the Nexus S ships with Android 2.3 installed and as Google's flagship device, I would expect it to receive updates before almost all the other Android phones. A great positive.

The camera is on a par with the competition with a 5 megapixel sensor, standard fare in modern smartphones and can also record 720p high definition video, which is also pretty standard. It is good to see the back of the days when awful cameras were fitted to smartphones such as the original and 3g iPhones.

The phone has 16gb of built in storage (a nice and slightly unusual feature for an Android phone) and 512mb of RAM which should help with multitasking. The battery is also huge at 1500mah.

It is great to see Google putting their name on a phone in a similar way to how Apple creates the software and hardware for its devices. The fact is, as Google's top handset this phone should enjoy excellent support until a new "Googlephone" is released at least. The huge number of handsets available with Android makes it hard for any phone to stand out inside the Android ecosystem and I think Google may be onto a winning formula by providing their own product with no ties to a handset manufacturer (however it should be noted that this particular phone is based on the Samsung Galaxy S).

In short, if you are looking for a new smartphone, but for some reason do't wish to buy an iPhone, or are looking for a phone with a large screen I would suggest giving the Nexus S a try, especially if you are particularly interested in an Android handset.

If you believe I have missed something out, or wish to share your experiences with this phone, please leave a comment below!

Some Statistics

Posted by nkbish0p at 18:15 5

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As the choice of mobile operating systems has expanded over the past four or so years, the rivalries between the OS manufacturers have grown stronger and this has filtered down to the users of each system, with many users liking to claim that their OS whether it be iOS, Android, Windows or even Symbian is the "best". Of course, the best operating system is objective, depending what you aim to use it for and how well each fits your need, so the point of this article is not to get my viewpoint on this across (though I am planning to write an article on this in the near future) but to answer another important question. Which operating system is the most commonly used?

This topic has been hotly debated, as different statistics can seem to show a different outcome, but for this article I will be focusing on UK USERS ONLY as this is the primary audience for this blog. I will be comparing the percentage of the market that each provider has and also the growth.

It can be seen on the graph that iOS is currently the most popular OS in the United Kingdom, with a market share of over 40%, just ahead of RIM's blackberry which has a share of around 38%. It should however be noted that the market share of iOS is falling steadily, which could be down to the growing popularity of Google's android, which now has around 13% of the market.

From the graph I would predict that the likely dominant mobile OS's for the near future will be iOS and Android. Personally I find it staggering how popular Blackberry actually is, considering the advantages of both Android and iOS over this platform. (For example, iOS has over 400,000 apps, Android over 250,000 whilst Blackberry users have less than 17,000 to choose from).

it must also be noted that in the next few months, Microsoft's windows phone 7 platform will likely make an appearance on the graph as a stand alone OS. In my opinion it is likely that business users will switch from Blackberry to Windows Phone 7 as the blackberry platform seems outdated and suffering from a lack of innovation. (I am currently in the process of writing an article about Windows Phone 7, check back soon for that!)

In conclusion, if you are looking to buy a new phone and have an interest in using your phone to download apps as well as to stay inline with the competition in terms of updates and progression I would strongly advise against buying anything other than an Android or iOS handset, at least until Windows Phone 7 has matured slightly and it becomes obvious where this platform stands. It should be noted that the more users a platform has, the more apps and software will be developed for it; for an example compare Windows and Mac OSX, as windows has far more users, far more developers have developed far more programs and software for it. Although iOS had a huge head start (it was released before Android) giving it it's huge market share it will be interesting to see over the coming months whether Android becomes the primary platform for developers to work with (this will be strongly influenced by worldwide usage, as android has a much stronger user base worldwide than in the UK). I think it is a foregone conclusion that before long, more applications will be available for Android than iOS. What will happen to Blackberry however remains to be seen...

Let me know what you think about your phone and/or operating system in the comments below!