GITweekly

Look I know. It’s been such a long time. How have you been?

Great. Knee not playing up?

Great. Me?

Yeah, I’ve been cheating on you with My Green Australia. Sorry. I like them. A lot. See, here’s a link of us together. Oh yeah, there’s this other thing. iFieldtests. It’s really a love hate thing though.

Sorry – let’s focus.

iFieldtests is a Tumblr page or Tumblog, if you like, of my experiences with the Vodafone network in Australia. True, it’s pretty niche as it only covers the places that I frequent. Makes sense though – if I’m having issues with my coverage in the areas that I live in there’s trouble to be had. And unfortunately there is.

So pop on over and have a peek at the pics I’ve posted. If you’ve had a good experience with Vodafone we’d love to hear it, along with the bad. Don’t hesitate to send us your screen captures (on the iPhone press the home button and the power button at the same time) and we’ll pop them up on the page – include your location and any other relevant details.

So what’s prompted me to create the iFieldtests page?

Well it’s a saga that’s been going on for about six months and began on the 3 mobile network. We began experiencing dropouts and call fails at our home and at several other places that we hang around. After a load of chatter between 3 and us we, stupidly, agreed to move to the Vodafone network to see if the coverage would improve. The answer was yes and no.

Since the swap to Vodafone we’ve seen an improved coverage, for calls, around our home. On the other hand we can’t go down to the family holiday home due to no coverage at the house and at the RSL next door. Due to the nature of my “day job” I have to be contactable at all times – with Vodafone I’m off the air. At least with 3 we roamed.

We’ve also seen that since the change from 3 to Vodafone the data reliability has been awful. Low speeds and frequent timeouts. Again we didn’t experience these issues as much with 3. With 3 I could even stream audio from the internet – now – no hope. As you’ll see, if you find it, compared to the 2008 average 3G data speeds of 759kbps I should be using my iPhone to its full capabilities. I can’t.

So that’s what I’ve been mulling over for the last wee while. Vodafone now tells us that for them to do anything they need to do a network check. They also say that this could take a month. A month! They could tell me that we live 2 streets away from a known black spot. These delays is what causes me to get so angry.

What do I want?

I want out. Out of the contract that I made with 3 – the same contract that sees me pay for 2 mobiles in our household that are so unreliable. Not once have we been offered recompense. Not once have we seen our service truly improve despite us changing carriers for them and changing sims for them.

Just do the right thing Vodafone. We want out.

With my life careering out of control like a chicken riding a skateboard, I’ve tried to wrangle back control without harming said chicken. Enter the iPhone and its menagerie of apps for organising your life.

First I tried the super comprehensive Awesome Note. I envisioned myself creating an epic tome of organisation with maps and pictures, syncing to Google Docs, and shielding all of this highly classified data with pass codes. It didn’t happen. The thought of adding images to a task called “get some milk” just seemed a little absurd and tinged with a little over kill.

Keeping it truly simple. Seriously.

Enter GoTasks.

This free – yes free – app does exactly what it advertises and it does it well. Instead of aiming to be the be all and end all of task management and life organisation, GoTasks simply organises your tasks.

GoTasks lets you do all of the usual:

• Set due dates
• Categorise tasks
• See how many tasks are due just by looking at the iPhone badge
• Sync with Google Tasks – accessing multiple accounts
• Uses HTTPS to sync securely

But overall the killer feature is its elegant simplicity. This app has simply organised my daily work-flow. Its integration with Google has meant that any tasks added by iPhone appear on the iPad and online. Just beautiful.

I say forget the milk. Say no to making awesome notes for yourself and grab the app that dares to keep it simple stupid.

So here’s the thing. An iPhone with 1 Terabyte of storage is sitting in my hot little hands. Seriously. Except the hands being little. They’re more of an average man’s size. Honest. And it’s all due to a sub $4 app called Air Video.

Before you get all up and in my face about the deceivery – let me say this. I get tired of syncing my iPhone to take music off to fit more video on. It drives me bananas. But then I found my true love. Air Video.

This amazing app lets you set up your home PCs and Macs – and we’re talking plural here folks – to convert video files of multiple flavours into an iPhone friendly format. All on the fly. You don’t even have to wait until the file has completed its conversion before you start watching. It just streams beautifully from the remote computer into your iPhone. Aceness.

If you want a little more control over those legally acquired video files you can add them to a queue to be converted prior to playing. Add these files, from the comfort of the iPhone, straight into your iTunes library. They appear under the films tab. All saved for later on so there’s no need to use a program like iPodMe* to do the conversions – The Air Video server is a bit of a one stop shop really.

Here’s the rub though. And there’s always a rub – although this rub is our fault not Air Video’s. You’re supposed to be able to stream via the wonders of the internet to your phone – anywhere. But we haven’t been so successful yet – stupid old wireless router. UPnP capable routers should sort out any issues.

But anyway – for an iPhone with a near endless supply of video enjoyment – go and download Air Video. You can even try the free version – it only limits the amount of files you can see in the file explorer window. It’ll give you a good idea of what to expect from the great Air Video.

So in a word – getyourmitsonthis.

*We really do love iPodMe though. Top little bundle of freeware greatness.

This is probably nothing but old news to the harder core of tech heads out there, but for us newer experimenters the thought of jailbreaking an iPhone is nothing short of frightening.

Voiding warranties or bricking your phone are a little too much to bear thinking about. Enter Comex and their/his/her/its wonderfully easy jailbreaking website.

As explained on TWiT 259 – all that needs to be done is to plug www.jailbreakme.com into your iPhones Safari browser and “Slide to Jailbreak”. This makes it no harder to hack your phone than it is to unlock it. Brian Brushwood of the highly recommended NSFW and Scam School jailbroke his brand spanking new iPhone 4 on air.

After jailbreaking, your iPhone will have access to the wonders of the Cydia app store along with an offer to fix the security vulnerability that has allowed this easy jailbreak to occur in the first place (apparently a glitch relating to the lack of love between the Safari browser and Adobe PDFs).

I will have to say this is all a big “apparently” because we’ve not done the jailbreak ourselves.

Enjoy in the knowledge that GITweekly neither recommends or bears any responsibility for your iPhone’s welfare. If you smell smoke you’ve been warned. Just read up on forums to get the true inside line.