I tried to reset the V1 and re-initiate pairing with the iPhone, but didn’t help at all.

I realized what the problem was, and it feels like an iOS5 bug!

I have contacts, in my favorites list, which have multiple phone numbers. e.g. my wife has 2 entries, one for her office number and one to her mobile number. And I’ve got this setup since pre OS3.0 days. So, this is not a new configuration for me. When I do the voice dial, it will not dial the number I’ve set as the favorite, but the first number listed in the contact view. But, if I manually touch the favorites entry, the phone will dial the correct number. So, the portion which allows bluetooth integrated dialing is broken some where.

The workaround is to split the contact into a few contacts. Each with the unique phone number you want to dial. So, for my wife, I have to create 2 new entries, one for office and one for mobile.

This is a really bizarre problem. Hope a fix appears soon.

So, how to start using it? There are 2 parts to it. Part 1 is to setup your iOS device, and part 2 is how to send an iMessage.

Part 1 – go to settings, messages, then look at addresses. These are what your friends and contacts will use to send iMessage to you, as a form of identification (like a userid). By default, your mobile number will be one of them, and the other is the iTunes or iCloud account you used when your first setup iOS5. You can add or change more contact information. e.g. your work email address. Add all the form of “identification” you want and save it.

Part 2 – just launch messages, and here’s the cool bit. Just add the contact you like to send a text to. The app will then do a check if the recipient is already registered with iMessages. Remember what you did in Part 1? The recipient’s contact information in your phone book will be used to check for iMessage “compatibility”. If yes, your “send” button will turn blue, and the text box will have a faint “iMessage” word, otherwise it will have a faint “text message”, and the “send” button will be green.

It’s that simple!

Now, I’m just a little curious about the warning that popped up once or twice to warn of carrier charges for sms sent to activate iMessage. I wonder how many messages will that consume.

I haven’t tested this yet, but what I believe it’s suppose to do is this; Say you have an iPhone and an iPad. If you’ve purchased  content, Music/App/Book, from the Apple Stores, it will automatically make it available on both devices. That sure takes the hassle out to trying to keep both devices in sync.

Without this, I’ve been maintaining synchronization using iTunes, or just manual re-download. Now it’s all automatic! That’s cool!

The best part, you don’t need to wait for IOS5, all you need is the currently available IOS 4.3!

Did I say this is a War Game?

It’s turned base; you make your moves, then the AI moves. Each of your units get to move and attack (if in range) every turn. There are some advantages you gain from going on to high ground, or travel further by riding in a vehicle.

When you attack, the opponent automatically retaliates, if it survives.

Very addictive! Check it out!

This is the answer a question I get frequently. How can we copy music from an iPhone to a computer. It used to be never, unless you use some specialized tools to do it. Now, it’s very easy, lauch Song Exporter Pro, select the songs you want to share, and connect to Wifi. Then, go to the computer you want to copy the music to, open the browser and point it to the IP address of the iPhone (it will be listed in the app). You’ll be presented with a nice web page that allows you to easily download the songs.

This is a nice handy tool which allows you to transfer your songs easily to your other computers direct from the iPhone.

What Dropbox does is that you identify a particular folder in your computer that you want to be kept in sync between computers. For me, this is my desktop, notebook & netbook. Everytime your computer is on the internet, it will keep all the files sync’d in this folder. So, no matter which machine you are on, you have access to all the files in that folder. Update the file any where, and the rest will get the updates too. To make it even more awesome, you can access these files on your iPhone or Android device.

Dropbox installs a small client on to your computer, and gives you 2GB of free space at the start. With some successful referrals, your free space goes up to 10GB!!

I use it to keep my frequently used files in sync between my computers. I’ve read other usage as to keep iTunes libraries in sync between computers, some others use it to keep emails sync’d between computers, and much more. The possibilities are endless.

So, wait no more!! give it a try and use my referral link here =)

After trying for the whole of a Sunday afternoon, it never went through and I gave it a rest. Over the course of the 4hrs I spent, I ran the jailbreak utility BlackRa1n, it would always get the phone to the iTunes restore screen (the one that showed a USB cable and iTunes logo), and never got past that. Overall, I reloaded the iPhone 3.1.2 firmware over and over, and finally I ran out of time and had to restore the phone back to the original state.

So, first rule of thumb, always run an adhoc backup in iTunes before any potentially disruptive change toe the iPhone. Do note, this is not the automatic backup that runs when you connect your phone to iTunes. Let that automated backup run when it does. But make sure you manually run the backup AGAIN after the automated on. This will create a permanent snapshot of the backup in iTunes. The automated one gets overwritten each time it runs.

With everything restored, iTunes slowly sync’d the apps, music, videos, podcast back. Interestingly, photos are not sync’d, but backed up. Which is good, that you’ll get all your photos back after the restore.

Couple of days later, I thought of giving it a try again. Trying to see what I did wrong. The whole process was suppose to be simple, many people have done it, and it’s just not right that a Tech Savvy guy like myself just can’t get it to go through.

So, I just fiddled around and by chance, I got it to run!!

The instructions are easily available if your search around for the complete steps to use BlackRa1n. What I always got stuck at was the “iTunes” screen on the phone. If the jailbreak worked, it should have automatically showed a picture of “Frodo”. What I did different this time, was by chance.

1. I’m using Windows Vista Home Premium
2. I stopped iTunes, and killed the process “iTunesHelper.exe”
3. connected the iPhone 3GS to the notebook (iTunes should not start up at all)
4. ran BlackRa1n
5. it detected the phone, and forced it to reboot (this is normal)
6. phone comes up in recovery mode (iTunes logo shows up)
7. bam… it’s stuck here again and by chance, I was checking on some security settings on BlackRa1n.exe
8. launched 2nd instance of BlackRa1n. (the first one was still running and… waiting…)
9. lo and behold!! “Frodo” appeared, and the first instance of BlackRa1n was able to pick this up and continue the process of jailbreaking
10. it reboots once more, and returns back to the normal iPhone interface
11. DONE!

I was pleasantly surprised. At this point, the phone is jailbroken, and the next step was to put in the “App Store” of the jailbroken world, Cydia. It’s a neat little package manager, and pretty much what most people will need to do.

To top it off, the jailbreak was done without having to reset the phone to factory default first. All my existing apps, contacts, calendar entries, etc… were still there and working. So that was good, otherwise I would have to reconfigured everything from scratch.

I tested out several apps that was suppose to enable the iPhone as a mobile hotspot. Most of them work similarly, with the main differences to be the user interface, and here are the key features I found

• all of them work in adhoc mode wifi, none provides infrastructure mode networks
• this is usually not an issue, as nearly all computers can work with adhoc mode wifi networks
• however, if you are planning to use an Android phone as a client, it will not work; as Android does not support connection to adhoc mode wifi (unless you root the Android device and hack it)
• most of the apps do not initiate the adhoc mode wifi, in fact it requires the pc/notebook to create the adhoc network first, then the iPhone will join in
• all buy one of these apps behave like that; the exception is MyWi
• MyWi will create and initiate the adhoc network and even broadcast it
• in this way, all devices can find the adhoc network that’s available and join it instead
• I tested out MyWi with the free trial, and I loved the performance; the speed was good
• it even works with my iPod Touch G1 which was able to stream youtube, etc.
• sadly, my Android device will not work, which is the main deal breaker for me

With that, I found a part solution to what I need. It’s only a partial solution because not all my devices can work. However, it’s good for the performance was satisfying.

To restore the phone back to the original state, just fire up iTunes, connect the phone to the PC and hit “restore” in iTunes. It will do everything and should leave no trace of the jailbreak.

Will I encourage users to Jailbreak? Only if there’s a good reason for it, and that being that you are a power user, and there’s a specific functionality you want and need that only can be achieved by Jailbreaking.

What’s new? my favorite part… Contacts Sync. It’s a step in the direction which was default feature my wife’s HTC Hero. Though the iPhone’s sync is not as comprehensive (yet) as what’s in the Hero, it’s a step in the right direction.

So what the contact will do is compare the contacts in iPhone’s contact list and your friends in Facebook. If it has found matches, it will then download their facebook photos to the iPhone contact (there’s an option to prevent overwriting an existing photo), and it will add a “home page” entry in that contact, which links to the facebook page. Touching that entry will launch the facebook app and bring up your friend’s page in-app.

This is pretty cool, except there were a few misses…. here’s what I’m certain of… when either one of the below matches

• firstname & lastname
• email address (if shared with you)
• possible phone number as well (I don’t have enough information to validate)

I did have a mis-match… a  contact I had in my phone was matched up with someone in facebook with a completely different name, and I’m not even friends with the match. The only data in there was the phone number, and I can’t tell if that happened to have been the criteria of match. Anyhow, certainly a bug if you ask me.

So, how do you perform a sync? First a few things to do prior

1. sync your contacts to your PC/Google
2. create a backup copy of your contacts after the sync.. e.g. on Google, go to contacts and export everything
3. backup is crucial, in case some how the facebook sync screws up your precious contacts
4. go forth and make sure you have Facebook 3.1.1 installed

Having done the above, here it goes

1. Launch “Facebook” app on your iPhone
2. go to the app’s main menu by tapping the top left corner
3. touch on the “Friends” icon
   
4. touch “sync” on the top right of the page
   
5. slide “Syncing” to “ON” (notice that “Replace Photos” is “OFF” by default)
   
6. you’ll have to agree to proceed on, tap “I Agree” if you do
   
7. sync begins… take note though, if you have a lot of contacts and they match… expect this to take more then just a few minutes. Try to keep the phone from going to sleep when doing this, or it will slow down
   
8. however, if there’s any interruption, you just need to relaunch the app, and navigate to the sync page; and it should start syncing again from where it left off
   *note* some times I need to relaunch the app a few times before the sync will start on it’s own… haven’t figured out why yet.

I hope future updates can even identify changed contact information and the app can prompt for updates.

have fun!!

If you just want to add your own calendar, you may skip this and go to this post instead.

Now, the steps to add someone else’s calendar is very similar to add your own using the CalDAV method. The only thing that needs to be done prior to the config in the iPhone is that this person must first share the calendar with you.

I’m not going to re-invent the wheel here, so please follow Google’s Instructions on how to share your calendar. I discourage you from making your personal calendar public. To learn more, read another Google’s FAQ entry.

For the calendar to work, so that you can see something on the iPhone, you need to set the permission level to at least “See all event details”. If it’s set to “See only free/busy (hide details)”, you will be able to add the calendar via CalDAV, but nothing will show up in your calendar. If you are allowed to make changes even, then by all means go and set the permission to “Make changes to events”.  The ultimate you-have-it-all permission will be “Make changes AND manage sharing”, which I would think most people would not need.

If you are using Google Apps, and you can’t share beyond “only see free/busy information”, you’ll need to request your Administrator to increase the level of sharing allowed. This Google FAQ entry should help. *NOTE* after the administrator makes the changes, it will take a while before the system is updated and you can increase the level of detail to be shared on your calendar. This worked within 10mins during my testing.

Now, once the sharing is enabled, you can do a quick validation via your Gmail Calendar. See if the other person’s calendar is now showing up in your account as well. If yes, and you are not seeing “free/busy” information only, you are good.

The final step is to add the calendar to your iPhone’s setup. The steps are exactly the same as adding your own calendar via CalDAV (read this post), except in step 3, instead of using your own email address, you use the address of the person who had shared it with you. Follow through the rest of the steps, using your own Gmail login credentials, and you should be set!

At this point, your calendar should now show your own and the new calendar that was shared with you.

An additional tip for you… now that you have multiple entries from different calendars, it will be helpful to be able to visually identify easily which entries belongs to who. Fortunately, there’s a way to do this, but you’ll have to do this in Gmail Calendar’s web interface.

This is a very simple process, first just login to you Gmail Calendar. Next, on the left column of the page, find the calendar that you can see, and click on the little triangle next to it. A box will pop up and it will have several colors for your to choose from. Select the one you like and it’s done. In the iPhone Calendar, all entries belonging to that calendar will now have the color code you just picked.

This post will specifically guide you, step by step, to be able to get your Google based calendar on your iPhone (with OS3.0+). The calendar app on the iPhone will be the default app, nothing additional you’ll need from the app store.

I will create another post to show you how to add other calendars to your iPhone, e.g. your spouse’s or your kid’s calendars.

1. first, you’ll need your email address… which would be something like “myemail@gmail.com”
   or “myemail@mysuperdomain.com” if you are on Google Apps
2. next, you’ll need to compose your own “server string”… it looks something like this
   https://www.google.com:443/calendar/dav/myemail@gmail.com/user
3. pretty much just simply replace the section “myemail@gmail.com” with your Google based email address, be it with “gmail.com” or “whatever.com”
4. If you’ve got email setup on your iPhone already, you can just email the “Server string” to yourself, which you can copy and paste later… or just type it out carefully on the phone
5. next, pick up your iPhone,  go into “Settings” -> “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” -> “Add Account…” -> “Other” -> “Add CalDAV Account”
6. here’s what you put in
   Server : paste or slowly thumb in the “server string” from above (customized with your own email address of course). When you move to the next field, it’s normal for the “server” to only show “www.google.com”, so don’t worry about it.
   User Name : your full email address, e.g. “myemail@whateverdomain.com”
   Password : the password to the account you put in above
   Description : what ever you’d like to call it, doesn’t matter what you put, it’s for your own identification
7. click “next” when done
8. If all went well, you’ll be taken back to the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” screen… if you had a typo in the “Server”, “User Name” or “Password” field.. then you’ll be stuck here. Just fix the typo and try again
9. Validation…. Launch the “Calendar” app
10. check and see if your calendar items are showing up, or if you have multiple calendars and it’s hard to validate you can select to see only one calendar
11. in the “Calendar” app, on the top left, tap the “Calendars” button
12. you’ll be presented with the list of Calendars you have configured, select the one you want to check
13. You should now see only the entries belonging to that calendar

have fun =)