Back at it blogging again, been a busy year. I am a registered Apple Developer so I received the iOS 4 (new iPhone OS for 2010) about 2 weeks ago. Some new features are great, however some are still quirky. Here are a few things that I thought were an improvement:

-Backgrounds on homescreen (not a big “feature” but does add ability to customize)
-Multitasking
-Unified inboxes (great because I have 5 email accounts)
-Faster
-Better battery life (in my experience vs OS 3.1.3 on a 32GB iPhone 3Gs)
-Safari more stable

Here are the things I did not enjoy:

-Multitasking is great, but if you have numerous apps on your iPhone, after using it for a day, one must open the multitasking “dock” and end all apps that were previously opened. Some may not think its annoying, but I do.
-A bug in the Messaging app that doesn’t allow you to back out of a conversation, so one must manual force shut down the app. This only happened to me once.

-That is it so far for the negatives!

Video overview of iOS 4 is coming up in the next day or two. Definitely before Thursday. Feel free to EMAIL me with your questions at peltzt@att.net

I finally got the bug on tape that I experience on my iPhone pretty often. I’ve uploaded it to YouTube. The link is below.

iPhone 3G: Bug or Brick?

Basically this happens:

1. Text Message is received.
2. I attempt to “slide to view” the message.
3. Screen freezes, iPhone becomes unresponsive.
4. Screen turns black.
5. I hold the power button (nothing happens).
6. I hold the home button (nothing happens).
7. iPhone is rendered a useless brick for a few seconds.
8. Then I hold the power and home button for about 5-6 seconds and it finally reboots, but it takes about 30-35 seconds to show the homescreen.

I have experienced this on both 2.0, 2.0.1, and 2.0.2.

Plugging my iPhone into my computer or charger does not fix the problem.
Anyone else experience this?

After reading threads all over CrackBerry.com, I have came to the conclusion that some BlackBerry Bold’s have memory issues, example taken from CrackBerry.com

“OS Version 4.6.0.125 (Platform 4.0.0.134) Mine had 20MB free out of the box.

A few hours later it had 5MB with no new apps, photos or other files added.

I deleted all the unused languages and had 40MB after the restart.

A few hours later I had 15MB.

If there is a memory leak, it can’t be blamed on a 3rd party app because I haven’t added any.

I was really hoping to have more room to play with on this unit.

Just like the title says, I prefer iPhone email over BlackBerry email. I was a three year BlackBerry user prior to my purchase of my 16GB Black iPhone 3G. These are the reasons why I like iPhone email better than the BlackBerry (BIS) email.

1. My iPhone email can display rich text (my BlackBerry could do this also because I was running beta OS 4.5) but still even with OS 4.5, the iPhone beats the BlackBerry in displaying email.

2. Email on the iPhone is simple to organize, all you have to do is tap edit>select email(s)>select folder>done. That how easy it is to organize email on iPhone. I could not organize my email like that on the BlackBerry.

3. I can scroll through my emails faster on my iPhone by scrolling my finger down the iPhone’s Multi-Touch screen. On my BlackBerry I had to use the track-ball, which sometimes could take forever on longer emails.

4. I know this doesn’t happen very often at all, but I like how I don’t have to worry about RIM’s servers going down like they did a few times this year. With my iPhone, my work email is always running 100%.

5. Integrated apps. I like how iPhone integrates Google Maps into emails. So that if lets say “Jill” sends me an email with the address to the restaurant she wants to go to tonight, I can tap the address, it will bring Google Maps up, and then I have the choice of calling the restaurant, mapping a route to the restaurant via GPS, or bookmarking the restaurant for later use.

By request, here is my review of the Fizz Weather App that is available on iTunes.

Initial Thoughts-

My quest to find a good weather app was about 1 week long. First I tried the $14.00 weather app, and that was not all “that”. Then I considered the WeatherBug app, but after reading the reviews, it seems like it was just a “bug”. So then I found the Fizz Weather app. At first I was a little skeptical because the other weather apps were all not too good. But after reading the reviews, I decided to try it out. 

User Interface-

The UI for Fizz Weather is way better than most of the other weather apps. It is very graphic rich and for the most part looks like the native weather app that Apple provides. 

Functions-

Fizz Weather for iPhone has 5 Day forecast, 2 day forecast (it’s more detailed than the 5 Day forecast), Current conditions for your location, Maps (which include Radar in motion, Satellite in motion, Forecast for major US cities, and Google (which I don’t really know what it does). Plus it has the current conditions or the airports around your location. On top of all that it will notify you when you start the app up if you have any weather alerts for your location (such as Server Thunderstorm Warning, Winter Storm Warning, Flood watch….etc..)

My take-

The Fizz Weather app is really reliable and stable. Compared to the other weather apps in the App Store, this one beats them hands-down. If you are considering a weather app for your iPhone, be sure to check out Fizz Weather, it will be hard to find a better one.

After reading a thread on CrackBerry.com about how the BlackBerry Bold’s memory is getting filled up really fast! This is Kevin’s (founder of CrackBerry.com) original post-

“ Hey All,

Ok.. Here’s my deal. Bought a new BlackBerry Bold 9000 from Rogers. Using it for approximately 48 hours. Have yet to install ANYTHING. All I have really done is browse the web and check out the preloaded media samples.
This morning I get a pop-up on the device – your “memory is is low”. Use the memory tool to remove unnecessary languages. 
I did that. Now I have a whopping 9 megs of “File Free” on the device out of about 97 megs of “File Total”. 9 megs doesn’t leave a lot of space for installing/operating apps. Browser cache is cleared too. Booourns. 

So what gives? Anybody else running into this issue? Reasoning? Solution? 

Not too excited at the moment!”

Then more user’s replied with the following-

“I too am finding the memory to be surprisingly low for having 128MB of flash. My database sizes are approximately 2.9 MB total. Also, I have only installed WLM, WeatherEye and Facebook.

If I use the Bold for a short period of time (web browsing mostly), my free memory will drop to around 19MB. It’s gone down as low as about 9MB after several hours of use. I’ve been pulling the battery several times a day because of this.” -drb227

I’ll be keeping up with the thread about this issue.

Saturday afternoon I was at an Air Show, I knew that a thunderstorm was approaching, but I didn’t think about it. Until I started to see a black line of clouds waaay in the distance. BTW, there was around 12,000 people there. I pulled out my iPhone and went to my Fizz Weather App and checked out the local radar loop. Sure enough, there was a strong line of t-storms headed our way very fast. So I told my dad we need to go get cover right now. So we headed over to the nearest cover we could find. So we hid under an Air Force C-130 jumbo jet (The first pic is me standing by the jet’s landing gear before it started to rain). People had no clue about the approaching t-storm, most of everyone got soaked. But thanks to my iPhone we were sparred from the rain . The second pic is an F-16 I took after the storm

I have been following a thread on The iPhone Blog about iPhones with issues with sound. The main issue is that when an email or text message comes in, no alert sound is made to notify the user of a new message. I have experienced this on about 20% of all my texts. Thats not that much, but it gets annoying when you aren’t notified of a new message, and then you pull out your phone to find 4 new emails and 2 new texts from the last 2 hours. If you are experiencing this issue, report it to apple here.

A few weeks (July 30th) ago there was a real scare about iPhone 3G’s backs developing small cracks. Most of the reported incidents were white 16GB iPhone 3Gs. Although a few black iPhone’s developed cracks also. From reading/posting on numerous forums on iPhone’s backs cracking, most people came to agree that it was a large batch of “sour” iPhones. Most threads about this topic are long inactive, so if you are looking into an iPhone 3G, don’t be too concerned about the iPhone 3G cracking issue.