David Berube's Blog

A Better iPhone Will be Here Friday

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:52:31 -0400

If you read my blog or my twitter you'll know that sometimes I'm scared to use my iPhone because that use might kill the battery and I might miss something more important later in the day.

I've bitched and moaned about it since the day I got the new one. Whenever someone asks me how I like it I tell them it would be a great phone if I could use it all day.

Just read that there might be some relief from all of the stress it has caused me.

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) announced a 2.1 software update for iPhones at its event in San Francisco today that “fixes lots of bugs,” Steve Jobs said. The improvements promised with the update, which will be released Friday, include fewer dropped calls, longer battery life, fewer crashes due to application use and a speedier backup on iTunes.

Oh yeah, I NEVER had a problem with the 3G reception before, oh maybe 2-3 weeks ago. Now it doesn't work, at all, anywhere. Not in Pawtucket, not in Providence not in Boston.

So, once they fix the battery problem I still have something to drive me nuts. It's still a good start, lets just see how well it actually fixes it.

I Need Your Help!

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:34:00 -0400

I need a Boxee invitation. If you have one please send me an email: david at mofuse.com

It will be greatly appreciated. I'm building my own HTPC, it's going to be running Ubuntu and I'd like to play around with Boxee.

I originally tried asking my Twitter followers, but once again they showed me that they're good for nothing. I very rarely get @replies to my open tweets. I have about a 100 followers if memory serves me correctly. Maybe I need more?

Follow me on Twitter.

Back to the subject. I'm building a Home Theatre PC for my living room and I need a Boxee invitation. If you got one, email me, I will greatly appreciate it. (Of course I'm going to write a post about me building an Ubuntu HTPC for $200).

Update: Thank you to Andrew Kippen for coming through.

Top Mobile Device Manufacturers Accessing the Mobile Web

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:59:16 -0400

At the end of every month we take a look at all of the data from the MoFuse Network (I personally am constantly looking at it). From that data we create internal reports for our own use.

I just thought I'd share some of this information with you, so I made a nice little pie chart from some of that data. Here you have the breakdown of the top 10 mobile device manufacturers that have accessed the mobile web from the United States in August 2008.

With all of the iPhone hype and those bloated numbers I constantly read, Apple, with 3 mobile devices now, is still 3rd in the US, albeit a close 3rd.

Just to clarify, this chart was created using only data collected from the MoFuse network.

click to expand

That's What I Forgot To Do!

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:54:27 -0400

I had a good, long, thoughtful post about my problems with the iPhone 3g. I took me a long time to write and I was excited about getting it all off of my chest.

And then disaster struck. I accidentally hit the back button on my mouse (why the hell is there a back & forward button on the mouse anyway??) and it was completely lost.

I knew there was an important feature I wanted to integrate into my custom blog software. Automatic saving of the post ever X minutes much like WordPress.

Every Company Should Act More Like Apple

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:07:16 -0400

I am a relatively new Apple customer. It all started in early 2007 when I purchased a white 13.3" MacBook.

It was more of a novelty as I had no prior experience with a Mac. I never really used it, not because of OS X but because my desktop setup was just too good. All that monitor space, no need for a laptop. This is still the case today although I am beggining to bring it into work and use it a little more often.

My Apple purchase continued in late 2007 when I bought the iPhone. Loved it. I had some problems with it though.

Some of my previous posts have talked about my on-going problems with the iPhone. My first one couldn't hold a charge, my second one dropped calls like crazy and my third one I cracked the screen. Each and every time I brought the phone into the Apple store in Providence it was replaced on the spot, no questions asked. Yes, even when I cracked the screen!

Now, back to my MacBook. I bought it in early 2007 and it hasn't gotten much usage, except for when I travel and it is out of warranty with no Apple Care.

I recently decided to use Boot Camp and install Vista on a partition (I know....). Well, the 60GB default harddrive just isn't enough so I bought a much bigger drive from NewEgg.com and it arrived earlier this week.

I pop in my Leopard DVD to install it and what do you know? The DVD drive doesn't work! Well, that sucked. Had this been a desktop I could have easily bought a new drive cheaply and installed it in 5 minutes, not the case here with my MacBook.

I brought it to the Genius bar at the Apple store and they explained to me it would cost around $250, a bit much and at this point I was just going to junk the MacBook and get a new one. I thought better of it and called 1-800-MY-APPLE and asked to speak to a supervisor.

I explained to him (Jason) that I've probably used the DVD drive 10 times since I purchased it and it was working fine the last time I used it, yadda yadda yadda. Sure enough, with almost no questions asked, Jason tells me he'll place an out-of-warranty exception on the DVD drive.

There you have it. Once again Apple's customer support has gone above and beyond for me. A brand new DVD drive was installed in my MacBook about an hour later!

I am going to make a post in the near future about the downsides I see in Apple, such as iPhone 2.0/3G, but customer support is not one of them.

MobileMe Doesn't Work as Advertised...

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:22:20 -0400

So I purchased MobileMe when I purchased the iPhone 3G. I was excited that I could finally get push email, contacts and calendar on my phone without the hassle of Microsoft Exchange.

This was actually the one thing that kept me up at night in anticipation for the new iPhone, it wasn't the 3G, the GPS or the App Store. Nope, just MobileMe. It hasn't lived up to my expectations, not even close.

Email that is received is almost never instantly pushed. I see the email in the box and then 10 minutes (today is more like an hour) later I see it on my iPhone. Not cool.

Calendar push never works without a fight, never.

MobileMe Gallery isn't that great. I've created albums and they don't showup on my iPhone when I try to sync a picture to MobileMe Gallery. Which, by the way, all it does is email the picture and since my iPhone doesn't appear to support different albums you can just use Tumblr for the same thing.

Contacts seems to work fine, although I don't do much changing to them on a daily basis so I can't tell you either way definitively.

I have 2 Vista machines and 1 MacBook. I receive error dialogs all the time on my Vista machines from MobileMe. Either MobileMe is down, your MobileMe login is incorrect, or Another computer is syncing at the same time. 1 hour does not pass without one of these error dialogs popping up requiring me to click OK.

Apple needs to fix these problems and fast. The 30 day (or is it 60?) trial is going to come quick and I suspect if these issues still loom many users will be canceling their account. I am one of those users.

MoFuse Global Mobile Traffic Monitor

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:25:12 -0400

This is inspired by what AdMob has done with their live ad-demand monitoring.

So I created a neat lil app that shows us(MoFuse) live traffic from across the globe hitting MoFuse servers.

This is just a glimpse of it, it's not public, and it's not 100% accurate as to the location but it does a decent job. There might be some privacy concerns if we release it to the public, if viewers could see live traffic to sites not their own. So for now all you're getting is this short screencast of it in action.

This is going on a large flat-panel display mounted on the wall at the MoFuse offices, pretty good eye-candy.

Click here to see the MoFuse Live Global Mobile Traffic Monitor screencast.

iPhone: A Small Window Into a Huge Space is Horrible

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:12:13 -0400

The New York Times published an article yesterday speaking to the fact that just because the iPhone can browse the full-web doesn't mean that's the best possible experience for the mobile visitor.

A quick trip to Web sites like Facebook, Twitter, Zillow or Powerset, all of which have been redesigned to take advantage of the iPhone, makes it clear that bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to exploring cyberspace. By stripping down the Web site interface to the most basic functions, site designers can focus the user’s attention and offer relevant information without distractions.

...

The shift to vertical Web pages is a big step forward, says Donald Norman, an expert in user-oriented design at the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting firm.

“A small window into a huge space is horrible,” he said. “It makes for a great demo, but it’s very frustrating to use.”

Agreed. Viewing a website through a periscope is possible, but not optimal. Having a website designed for the media that will be accessing it IS the best route to take. You're selling your website short by not creating a mobile and an iPhone presence.

Must read article for anyone interested in this space, or for anyone who is still convinced that there is only a need for 1 website ranging from 1" to 20" in width.

Read full story here.

HOW TO: Get Push Gmail on Your iPhone 2.0 With MobileMe

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:05:37 -0400

I'm a Gmail user through and through. We even use Google Apps for Domains over at MoFuse, so it was kind of a downer when I got the new iPhone to realize that Gmail didn't have a push option like Yahoo or MobileMe.

I've been playing around for a little bit now trying to figure out a hack to get all my email pushed instantly to my iPhone and I came up with a workaround. It's actually not true push email from Gmail but rather a way to change the email address when you reply to an email (so it shows you@gmail.com rather than you@me.com)

You will need a MobileMe accounts, a Yahoo account might work but I haven't been successful yet.

Steps:

First thing you need to do is setup your MobileMe account and get it running on your iPhone.
Setup your Gmail to forward incoming messages to your MobileMe email address.
On your iPhone go to Settings->Mail->Your MobileMe Account->Account Info.
Click on SMTP towards the bottom.
Click on Add Server.
Enter in your Gmail (or other) SMTP server information here. Save and it should take you back to the SMTP page.
You will see at the top of the page the header Primary Server and right under it smtp.me.com, click this.
Turn Server to OFF, go back.
Click Account Info in the top left hand corner.
You should see smtp.gmail.com as your Outgoing Mail Server if you do goto step 11.
DONE.

Now when you receive emails to your Gmail account they will get forwarded to your MobileMe account and instantly pushed to your iPhone. When you reply to an email on your iPhone it will come from your Gmail account.

All email you send from your iPhone will also remain threaded in the Gmail web interface.

Screenshots:

smtp.me.com is set to Off

Outgoing Mail Server is set to smtp.gmail.com

All I Wanted to do Was Play Around With my New iPhone

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:55:13 -0400

But I can't, because Apple poorly designed the whole activation and upgrade process.

They should have released iPhone 2.0 software a lot earlier, hence, not on the same day as everyone else trying to use iTunes to activate their new iPhone.

That pretty much doubles the amount of traffic hitting iTunes -- not well thoughout.

So, I stood in line for a few hours this morning at an AT&T store just to get to my office and keep unplugging and plugging my iPhone back into the USB slot and crossing my fingers?

4 Hours and still without a phone. Very, very disappointed with how this is turning out.