Rubénerd Blog :)

Some good news from the team we thought had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Good thing I would never let any of my own projects end up like this.

After a mysterious unexplained hiatus, we’re coming back. iPhone User News .com will be rebooting around the middle of next week. We’re coming back with daily dollops of news about Apple’s humble portable telephone.

We’ll also be launching a sister site all about that pad thing, in the near future.

Thanks for visiting.

Neal at iPhone User News.

Another quick Optus fail to talk about this morning, this time to do with being disconnected after not paying a bill. Problem is, I did pay it! Budda-boom!

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For the first time in recent memory Twitter has actually gone ahead and released a new feature that for once isn’t merely the destruction of a previous feature: so-called Twitter Lists. And I love them, even if they are mostly useless in their current form.

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I’m not just fed up with suspect political lobby groups this evening, I’m also irritated with internet trolls. Firstly to set the scene, I consult iPhoneUserNews.com for my iPhone news (surprising thought it may seem) for six irrefutable reasons that are so irrefutable as to be practically carved into stone. If stone carving could be scripted and delivered through the Internet Tubes. I guess they could be pneumatic. The tubes, not the stone.

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No.

This is probably an Optus phone company problem and not an issue with the iTelephone, but on the off chance that I actually got a 3G signal here in Mawson Lakes over these last few days the data connection is so unreliable nothing finishes loading before I’m given an error. Case in point, my Twitter clients routinely return a secure connection failed error, and it took me over 45 minutes to download the latest Into Your Head episode over 2G. The irony was 45 minutes was still faster than 3G because the latter just kept timing out.

I’d call Optus using my iTelephone to complain, but the phone connection is so spotty I keep having dropped calls. I would hate to wait on hold with Optus for 6 hours only to have the call drop when a customer disservice representative finally answers.

So here’s my idea, why not spend the money Stephen Conroy wants earmarked for the Great Australian Firewall to fix Australia’s lousy phone networks? Because the other irony is crappy networks are doing a much better job than his proposed filter at blocking content and communications!

I sense a conspiracy brewing.

It’s been another very busy day today, though admittedly not as bad as yesterday. While waiting in a queue to have my teeth pulled and to deal with a banking teller (I forget which one ended up happening) I was using the Backgrounds application for the iTelephone that does exactly what it sounds like it does. Normally I uninstall anything with advertising on it in a heartbeat, but I enjoy Backgrounds too much. If they had a paid version without advertising, I’d buy it.

Now here’s where the silliness starts. While looking for some nice scenery images I came across a page that had a series of night time shots, and below in the advertising slot there appeared a link to a website on sleep. For the first time in many years (at least 5+) I thought an online advertisement looked interesting, so I clicked on it. It took me to a website that was completely designed in Flash.

If the penny hasn’t dropped yet, the iPhone does not have Flash… thank heavens! And yet here’s a company with a website that’s completely Flash driven advertising in a Google Mobile advertisement box that’s intended for an iPhone.

It’s like when I’m asked if I want new carpet or a patio extension when I’m living in a rented house, or when I visit a social anxiety support group website and the advertisements are for party organisers.

It turned out to be another epic saga involving Apple and the denial of an application on the iPhone App Store, then approval, then a hasty revoke. The problem is Apple doesn’t want programming languages and virtual machines for other programming languages running on the iPhone because they claim it would adversely affect the user experience by making the device less secure. Presumably I would think they’re more worried about sidestepping and potentially allowing another competing app store.

After disabling the BASIC interpreter, Apple finally approved a beautifully written and faithful reproduction of a Commodore 64 for sale which I hastily snatched up. I played a few rounds of Jack Attack and was instantly hooked! Today though, Apple has since revoked the app meaning people who didn’t download it yet can’t once again.

While the initial splash screen says BASIC has been disabled, it turns out you can sneakily get to it by enabling the full keyboard at all times, then loading a game and pressing Reset on the Extra keyboard. In Steve Jobs parlance, BOOM, you’re at a Commodore 64 BASIC interpreter!

Presumably the app won’t be allowed back in the store (if ever) until this backdoor way to get to the BASIC interpreter is removed, but it means people like me who were extraordinarily lucky enough to download it before Apple discovered the hidden feature just don’t upgrade if it ever does reappear.

The iPhone User News site has more information about the initial application approval and subsequent workaround and rejection.

One of my tricks when I get second hand computer for myself or when I’m refurbishing for a friend or whatnot is to go to use the Memory Upgrade screen on the Crucial website to check what sort of RAM the hardware can take, what the maximum capacity is and how much the chips would be.

So there I was consulting Crucial.com in Safari on my iTelephone for my new ThinkPad X40 when the screen went completely grey except for the time bar along the top, making it completely unusable. Rotating the screen 90 degrees into landscape mode rotated the time bar but the rest of the screen stayed grey. Returning to the iTelephone home screen then launching Safari made no difference. The only way I could use Safari again was to turn off the phone and start it again!

I might need to employ the help of the iPhoneUserNews iPhone guru to confirm whether or not using the Crucial Memory upgrade screen on their website automatically stuffs up all iPhone browsers, or just regular iPhone 3G browsers, or whether or not I just have a dodgy iPhone.

Rebooting the phone and launching Safari reproduced these results for me. I might contact the Crucial folks once I can confirm other iPhones have problems loading this page and not just mine.

After a gruelling 15 minutes of waiting, my one year old iTelephone 3G’s firmware has been updated to 3.0.1. Firmware sounds like a brand of steel toed work boots.

Neal reports over at iPhoneUserNews.com though that 3.0.1 might not in fact make our iTelephones super duper kryptonite bullet proof at all. Oh bummer.

I absolutely adore my iTelephone for personal and university use, it is such a pleasure to use in it’s own right and compared to every other handset I’ve ever had. I get the feeling though if I were to join the workforce full time tomorrow, I’d probably have to get a Crackberry or something similar for business use because I’d respect my clients enough not to put their contact information and other notes on such a provably insecure device. Here’s hoping Apple gets their act together.