I’ve written before about how to jailbreak your iPhone in 15 minutes, under 10 minutes and even 60 seconds, but every time, a computer was needed to to the work. While I still suggest backing up your iPhone, which will need a computer, jailbreaking it can now be done right from the iPhone’s Mobile Safari web browser.
Jailbreaking your iPhone on IOS4 is easier than ever now. Thanks to some hard work by @comex, I just went to jailbreakme.com on my iphone and tapped the slider. It did all the work, and a minute later, I had Cydia up and running. That’s it.
This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Smingle.com. All opinions are 100% mine.
A little known fact about me is that I was once on a nationally syndicated talk show talking about my positive experiences with an online dating site back in the late 90’s, before online dating was socially accepted as a norm. I joined a dating site again this week and boy have things changed. I’m still very happily married, but I joined Smingle to experience a fresh approach on the online dating market. It’s a different kind of online dating site, with its unique virtual dating experience being just one of the things that made me want to review it. The video below is an introduction to what sets Smingle apart from other online dating sites.
A Unique Online Dating Experience
Although I haven’t been on an online dating site in years, I’ve seen some of the newer features they offer, along with the basics. Smingle has the basics covered, especially the important ones like sending a message, instant messaging, adding your own photos and viewing photos of others. In the time I spent on the site, I found most of the basics to work well and everything was pretty easy to find. All of the basics were also available to any free account. By contrast, some of the advanced features are only available to Elect Select members.
The feature that stood out the most to me was Smingle’s virtual dating platform. According to the European Journal of Social Psychology, “People who go on virtual dates first tend to like each other more when they meet and are two times more likely to go on a second date.” A virtual date is just two people getting together online in a virtual environment to get to know each other before meeting in person. I think it’s a safe way to get to know someone a little better before you take the next step and I like the way Smingle’s virtual dating platform works. Because I’ve only been on the site a few days (that’s my excuse, anyway), I was unable to procure a virtual date with any of the lovely ladies on the site, so I enlisted the help of Smingle President, Bev Lehmann to help me test it out.
If you watched the video at the beginning of this article, you got a peek of how Smingle lets you create a custom avatar. You can also choose from a handful of available settings, both indoors and out. I’m the avatar on the left. I don’t know why I picked blond hair, but it’s otherwise close enough. On the right is Bev. As we chatted, our words came out as speech bubbles, with the most recent on top. During our short date, I tried a few of the action buttons. Available to you are “Flirt”, “Touch Hand”, “Blow Kiss”, “Touch Face”, and “Kiss”. Each action button results in an animated representation of that action on the screen. So when I clicked “Blow Kiss”, my avatar blew a kiss to Bev’s avatar. When she clicked the “Kiss” button, it asked me to allow her to kiss me. Really, this is a super-powered chat application but the avatars and animated actions add a personal touch and make it feel a bit more real than just a flat text chat.
Another feature I found on Smingle that I was previously unaware of in online dating was their Create a Date section. The idea is that you create the ideal date experience and put it out there for others to find. When someone else comes along and that’s their ideal date, too, you connect for the perfect date. I think it’s a great idea and really lays out some expectations to hopefully avoid boring dates.
Video Messages and social media integration were also new to me in the world of online dating, although they’re likely not ground-breaking in the industry. The video is done very well, integrating the video capture right into the browser, rather than expecting you to capture, save, and upload a video.
Room For Improvement
Nothing is perfect. While Smingle has all the major bases covered and hits a couple home runs on the side, the site leaves a little room for improvement. I really only found a couple things important enough to mention, but they are important features to me. The first is the ability to filter members by who is currently online. The virtual dating and chatting features are great, but they’d be so much better if I could find people online more easily. The listing does have a green “Online” identifier below each member photo to indicate that he or she is online, though.
Spammers and scammers are everywhere and membership sites are no exception. I got messages from two girls on the site and both wanted to connect off-site and provided Yahoo.com email addresses to get in touch. Those are almost always a scam and luckily there’s a “report” button, but there may be a better way to weed those people out like phone number verification or something.
Three Months Free
Above, I mentioned Elect Select, which is $19.95 per month. That’s not too bad for an online dating site like this, but the good news is that you can get 3 months FREE. Just sign up for a free account and then upload a picture to your profile. After you’ve done that, an admin will upgrade your account. Most people are going to upload a photo right off, anyway. Is three months enough time to find that someone you’re seeking? Who knows, but after three months free, you should be able to easily decide if it’s worth the $19.95 a month to keep mingling.
Conclusions
Going out and meeting someone can be intimidating and can yield pretty bad results sometimes, but online dating can be kind of cold and impersonal. Smingle’s virtual dating and create a date approaches breathe some life into the online dating experience and make it a little more fun while still keeping some of the risk at an arm’s length. The experience was great, and although there were less women than I’d expect to find in my area, with a little time, I’m sure the features and user-friendly design will bring plenty of people to the site.
This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Nielsen Research. All opinions are 100% mine.
Of course, everyone knows about Nielsen Research, by now. For those who don’t know, Nielsen Research has been around for decades, measuring and reporting on what people watch and buy. Now Nielsen is available for your Nokia smartphone… and you’ll get paid to install it!
Get A $100 Nokia Gift Certificate
Nielsen and Nokia have partnered to build a panel of Smart phone enthusiasts that are using a device on the Symbian platform. What this means is that if you have a Nokia smartphone, you can download the Nielsen application and install it and be a part of a panel of people who help to influence the future of Nokia products. Not only do you get to tell Nokia what you want in a smartphone, but every user that installs the application on their Nokia smart phone will earn a Nokia $100 gift certificate after a year. As a business owner, I know the value of feedback and as a consumer, I provide feedback when I can. I know that smart companies will learn from and use that feedback to help make a better product for me. Everyone wins. I only wish every company rewarded me for my input like I’m seeing happen here.
Sadly, because I don’t have a Nokia phone myself, I’m unable to participate, but if you have a Nokia smartphone, you can participate. In fact, I think you should participate because it’s said to be pretty seamless and unobtrusive. Here’s what they say about how it works:
We use an application to measure the normal activity of your phone. Download the application to your smartphone and use it how you normally do -that’s it! The application is undetectable and will not affect your phone’s performance or battery life.
The only thing I would normally be concerned with is privacy, so I took the time to read through the privacy policy and found that while the application sends back data about when you visit web sites, send emails, etc., it does not store any of the stuff I worry about like the contents of emails and texts, picture massages, etc. That concern dissolved, I’d install this on my phone today, if I could.
I’d love to hear from my readers with Nokia smartphones. Will you be participating in this panel?
So you want to send someone a text, but you don’t want them to know it’s you, eh? Maybe you just want to have a little fun with a friend or you may have other reasons. Whatever the case, it’s pretty simple to do. Just follow the instructions below and you’ll be leaving confused looks on people’s faces in no time.
How To Email A Text Message
First, you have to know their phone number and mobile carrier (AT&T, Verizon, etc.). Armed with a phone number and the list below, you should be able to easily figure out the email address to send a text message to your victim’s phone.
where phonenumber = your 10 digit phone number
(Thanks to tech-recipes.com for the list)
Get A Fake Email Account
The easiest way to do this is to head over to Gmail and create a free account. You want this free account because you’re only going to use it for this and you want to set up the name and address to be whatever you want.
The screen shot above shows my new account as B Obama with an email address of prez-b-obama@gmail.com, but I eventually went with President Obama and notreallyobama@gmail.com. Be creative.
Send A Text Message VIA Email
Now here’s the really easy part. Just compose an email from your new Gmail account. Send it to the address from the first step above. You might even leave the subject blank to make it look more like a text. The result might look like it did on my iPhone in the first image in this post, but be aware that some phones/carriers will display the email address, too, like my Verizon DROID Incredible below:
You may also note that I tried to include an image on that one. My iPhone didn’t show the image or even indicate that there was one. The Verizon phone removed the image (and said as much) as seen above. I’ve had mixed results on other carriers. If you’re unsure, just do a test with another friend who’s on the same carrier.
With one more relatively simple step, you can actually spoof the email address as well. All this means is that you’ll make the email look like it’s coming from a more convincing address. In the past, this used to require some technical savvy and access to a server that would let you do it. Now, it’s as simple as downloading a free email spoofer and installing it. For me, this took about two minutes. Take a look at the image below compared to the one above. The one below shows a text that, to most people, looks like it came right from the White House. Of course, with the email spoofer, you don’t even need the Gmail account, but I like to use both.
Share Your Results
I’m interested in what you’ll all be sending to your friends/co-workers/family with this. Let us know, below, about the fun you had and any reactions you got. And remember… This is meant to be for fun with a couple friends. Ultimately, stuff like this can get tracked back you you if you do something illegal with it. You’ve been warned.
A couple days ago, I ranted on Twitter about how I was unable to even use 3G on my iPhone. Already unhappy with AT&T’s cellular reception, I was pointing my finger at the wrong people. It seems there have been a lot of complaints about the IOS 4.0 upgrade killing 3G and Edge data as well as MMS capabilities on the iPhone 3G S and that’s exactly what happened to me.
Why Does IOS 4 Break iPhone 3G S Data?
While some of my information comes from user speculation, some of it also comes from Apple support. The general consensus is that the IOS 4 software doesn’t support the Access Point Name (APN) from the 3G S 3.1.x backup. One person noted that Apple told them their old APN was corrupt, but it’s more accurate to say that some 3.1.x APNs are simply not compatible with IOS 4.
Apple’s Solution
Apple’s currently suggested solution will be fine for some and unacceptable for others. Essentially, their solution is to eliminate the problem APN in the way that involves the least amount of technical knowledge: a factory reset. The suggestion is to use iTunes to restore the phone as new which will download the factory IOS 4. The problem with this is that you will lose all your data, settings, emails, saved games, etc. On top of that, you’ll have to re-install every single application. This is the easiest way for Apple and AT&T to handle the issue from a support perspective, but it’s not a solution and it just creates a lot of headache for customers.
Apple Forum Community’s Solution
This solution was figured out by some iPhone users who didn’t want to wait for Apple to release a patch. It involves creating a new APN without having to restore the whole iPhone as a new install.
1. Make sure your iphone is connected via wifi
2. Head to http://www.unlockit.co.nz
3. Follow the instructions. It’ll need you to download a file.
The problem with this solution is that it doesn’t really fix the problem. It does get you back online with the 3G network, but does not fix MMS and you can’t connect to the App Store. While it’s a smart work around, it falls just a bit short.
The Best Solution Currently
Like the solutions above, this is just a work-around to resolve the problem for now, but it offers a decent compromise.
1. Backup your iPhone
2. Restore to factory settings
3. Restore to a backup you made BEFORE you upgraded.
The reason I like this solution over the others is that it restores full data access, MMS, Visual Voicemail, etc. Additionally, I recovered most of my email, account settings, bookmarks, text history, etc. I even got my photos back and my changed carrier ID that says “JoeTech” from when I was jailbroken. The thing that makes this not the best solution over all is that I still have to manually re-install each and every one of my Apps. I’ll look at this as a little house-cleaning, but it’s still annoying and time-consuming.
The Real Solution?
Ultimately, the real solution here is for Apple to send out a patch to fix the problem with IOS4 on older iPhones. Will this happen soon? I would hope so, but from what I’ve seen, there’s no official acknowledgment of this issue from Apple. I need my data now, so I’ve opted for the best work-around. If you can wait for your 3G data and do everything over wifi, that might be a better option as you’ll have an official fix and you will not have to re-install every app you’ve collected on your iPhone. If you haven’t upgraded to IOS4 on your 3G or 3G S, just wait until they sort out the bugs.
Before You Upgrade
Moving forward, we know that Apple will have another major software upgrade at some point, so we might as well prepare for it now. Here’s some things to remember before it happens:
- Wait a week or so before upgrading and let us eager beavers find all the problems.
- Back up often. Sadly, my handy old backup was a few weeks old, so my emails, texts, etc were too.
- Download Apps to iTunes, too. Once you’ve downloaded on your phone, grab a copy on iTunes. It won’t cost extra and now you won’t have to remember what all you had installed if this happens again.
- Upload photos and videos to YouTube, Flickr, etc., and copy notes and contacts before attempting these solutions, upgrades, jailbreaks, or anything that can wipe out things you deem important.
Have you tried any of the solutions above? Did it work? Have you noticed any other problems found another solution or have more tips? Share any of this with us in the comments below.
