Sowing Circle's iPhone Blog

iPhone under the hood: Carrier settings and configuration profiles

The article in the link above found on Mac World’s iPhone Central provides some insight into altering your iPhone’s carrier setting (ie. the ATT_US.ipcc file).

What I was originally interested in was perhaps the capability to re-enable Internet tethering since that feature became available when iPhone OS 3.0 came out and with a simple mod to your iPhone using an alternate ATT_US.ipcc file. But the tethering capability has since been disabled with iPhone OS 3.1. Yet there are iPhone users who are supposably still working on a mod.

The part of the article that caught my attention was the authors example of disabling the phones data services. Meaning turning off all non-Wi-Fi Internet access, both EDGE and 3G. Why might you want to do this? Because, as the author’s example explains – if you are in a foreign country, your carrier typically charges exorbitant rates for data network access (although buying a discount package in advance can help keep these costs down). The author’s idea of customizing your phone’s carrier setting (which can be easily undone) was to make sure you don’t inadvertently accrue any of these charges, so you’d like to turn off all data services for the duration of your trip, but still retain the ability to use your phone for calls and messages. Enabling Airplane Mode won’t do the trick, because that turns off both the phone service and the data networks. Keeping Data Roaming off (in Settings -> General -> Network) should be sufficient, but you are worried that you may inadvertently enable this. What else can you do? You can make a carrier settings change that is guaranteed to block all data network access, even when you are not in a roaming area. And, at the end of your trip, it’s easy to undo.

At last an Amazon application and this one is pretty neat (especially if you are the manager of the church bookstore!). Besides the obvious functions of searching the Amazon website, here is the thing that cinched it for me. From within the Amazon app, you can take a picture of the item you are interested in and they will search for you. It deosn’t have to be the stock number, just a picture of the item. They have live people (domiciled somewhere in the world) that will search their store for you. Now I tested it out by taking a picture of an ISBN code on the back of a book. I just happened to be with my boys in the Barnes & Noble in Bakersfield, CA. They saw some Star Wars stuff. So I thought I would try it out. It only took a minute and I got my info. Here was the process.

I took a picture of the ISBN within the Amazon app

Within a minute this is what I saw on the “Remembers” portion of the app, which was the actual item I was looking at.

When I got home and signed onto Amazon in my normal web browser, I got the info there as well. Obviously, they want me to make a purchase! But this is great, if you see something and want to find it and don’t have the stock number info.

Here’s a free memory scanner app, named Memory Sweep (although it shows up as “Scan” on your app screen), that at this time is free (along with it’s advertising). Here’s what it will do:

1. Show how much memory is being used and how much is available.
2. Show running processes.
3. And most importantly, allows you to free up memory that was used by certain apps, but not returned to available memory. Some well known apps do this, such as the phone, email, Safari browser and others. Notice on the first image below that it shows Safari as running, even though it isn’t, since the memory scanner is running. This may save you a reboot if you have used some graphic intensive apps or games. ALSO! A very popular and similar program entitled “Free Memory” was removed from the App Store at the request of Apple. I guess they don’t want you to know that iPhone isn’t perfect, or they don’t want you to know the processes that are running. Why? So you might want to get this quick, before it disappears.

One of my favorite iPhone app’s thus far is the Google Mobile App. This app allows you to simply speak into your phone’s mic rather than typing in a search term into Google.

To begin simply launch the Google Mobile App speak into your phone, it will then launch Google without having to navigate to google.com.

For example; on a recent road trip to Oregon I wanted to located a specific pizza parlor in Medford. I used the app to speak the name of the pizza parlor and city, then clicked on the google maps link that came up and quickly routed the path from where we were at the time while driving. It was just too easy and saved me time of not having to try and type in the search term on the screen.

Here’s a brief outline of features;

1. Quick access to Google via speaking into the mic on the phone.
2. Search by voice. Speak your queries instead of typing them.
3. You Location is already known. Don’t have to specify your current location when searching for nearby businesses because it knows your geo location already.
4. Google Suggest. Search for suggested queries and businesses that appear as you type.
5. Search history. Quickly search again for queries you recently performed.

Okay this was a real bargain! This leather holster cost me $0.01 + $2.98 shipping. Follow this link to Amazon. There were several retailers selling it, all of them for about $3.00, which is a bargain too. But somehow, Bargain Cell was selling these for a Penny + $2.98 shipping. That’s what Amazon charged my account, and I got it in 2-3 days and can find nothing wrong with it. It has a nice magnetic closure (I had these on my other holsters for the AT&T phones). I don’t like the Velcro ones, ’cause if you are in the meeting you get the nice ripping effect when you open it.

Also, the Morphie Juice Pack Air fit in it, although a bit snugly!

When Dan and I were in the Apple Store in Irvine (buying Dan’s protective case), the store clerk (I don’t know what fancy name Apple gives them) suggested a protective case that also included an additional battery.  Unfortunately, after she told us about them, she looked on the rack and they were sold out.  Today I happened to be in the Mission Viejo Apple Store and they had them in stock.  It looked so good, that I decided to buy one.  ( I had looked on the web and noticed that they were not any cheaper…a cool $79.95).   There’s a nice little picture below of the three colors available.  I got the basic business black.

The unit’s total thickness is .75 inches (~19 mm).  But, what is really nice though is that it is only 1/8 of an inch thicker than the very slim protective case that I  had.   For that 1/8 of an inch, I get just about 2x the battery life.  The 3GS is rated at 300 standby hours, the Morphie Juice Pack Air adds an additional 270 hours. In addition, it is totally encapsulates (other than the face on which I use one of the film protective screens anyway), the phone with a nice hard protective plastic.  Note: there is a model named Morpie Juice Pack (minus the “Air”) that is only partially encapsuating (more on that later).

But it includes a nice feature that I did not see on a couple of other battery expansion cases.

There is a switch on the bottom to designate whether you want the internal battery or the external battery to be operative.  Why would you want to have it use the internal battery first you ask?  That was my question too. But there is a good answer.

In the normal mode, the external battery provides a constant charge to the internal battery.  So if the internal battery is less than full, it will first charge the internal, and then use the external battery as its primary source.  So when the external battery is drained, you still have a full iPhone battery.  So that seems like the best solution, and I think most often it would be.  BUT, Morphie’s documentation notes that the iPhone actually uses a bit of power to charge itself.  So, you will get a little less battery life in the normal mode because a bit of the external battery power will be used in the constant chargin process.

So if you are absolutely going to be stretched for battery power, they suggest you go into “standby mode.”  In this mode, you use the internal battery first and no charge is sent to the iPhone battery until you flip the switch.  So you could run the iPhone battery down 50%, flip the switch to charge it (it shows the same charging info as if it were connected to computer or AC).  When filled up, flip it to “standby mode” again, and so on.

The other model named Morphie Juice Pack (minus the “Air”) is more expensive $99.95,  has a bigger battery, and is a bit thicker (.85 inches).  if all you want to do is use this as a portable charging unit, this might be better, since it just slides in and out easy since it does not have a top end to protect the unit.  But since I want a protective case anyway, I think the “Air” model is more to my taste.

Have you ever wanted a CAPS LOCK on your iPhone. Well it’s there, but turned off by default. Go to Settings | General | Keyboard (see image below). Once you turn it on, you can activate the CAPS LOCK by double-clicking the Shift button. The key will turn blue. Clicking the blue button will return it to normal Shift functionality.

iPhone app: ‘Hey Where Are You’ can locate your friends instantaneously with the help of this new feature in iPhone OS 3.0 called Push Notification. Basically this app is a location service that lets you keep track of where friends, family and colleagues are. You can send alerts with your current location to your followers, or send “Hey, Where Are You?” alerts requesting their location.

The only caveat to using this app is that your friends/ family members must have it installed on their iPhone and activated/turned on to permit others to locate you.

Location Service with Push Notification – HeyWAY iPhone App

After purchasing my iPhone I wanted to see how well it would work on my local wireless network in my home. At first it appeared that my iPhone was able to see my wireless network, accept the pass-phrase and show a decent signal strength. Well that’s where the happniess ends. The iPhone air port indicator in the upper left hand corner did indeed show a strong signal but I could not connect to the Internet.

The solution (as I discovered after working with Dan) was to change my Wi-Fi access point on my wireless router. Basically I changed the wireless security protocol from WEP to WPA.  Apparently there are reports that show its more stable and better throughput when using the WPA over the WEP. Please note that I am also using an older D-link wireless rounter/firewall so your results may vary.

After changing over to WPA be sure to change/update any other device in your home accessing your local network via wireless connection to switch to WPA and of course changing the pass-pharse at the same time.

Also see Apple’s iPod touch and iPhone: Tips when using Wi-Fi

Posted by Jim

The iPhone 3GS has a built in screen capture utility…and it is really easy to use.  Below is a picture of a 3GS to refer to.  To get a screen capture merely:

1. Press and hold the home key (the one at the bottom that the red arrow is pointing to).

2. While holding the home key, press the Sleep key at the top (see the yellow arrow).

The picture should be saved in the photo gallery entitled “Camera Roll.”

Use this to assist in documenting iPhone actions (e.g. this one).