Yesterday, I posted about how to jailbreak your iPhone running firmware 3.1.3 in 60 seconds. After jailbreaking, I tried playing with ScreenSplitr and saw other apps that let you see your iPhone screen on your computer. The problem is that most require you to be tethered to a computer or have both your iPhone and the computer on a wifi network. I found something much easier for creating videos of your iPhone screen.
After jailbreaking, I installed Backgrounder on my iPhone. It lets you run things in the background, which the iPhone still doesn’t do (until 4.0). What I found was that some video recording programs will still record in the background and others will not. Of those that will, a couple will record everything displayed on your screen. Below is a video I made showing regular video, then my screen, then back to regular video. The whole thing was recorded using a iVideoRecorder ($0.99 in the app store) and Backgrounder. It was not edited at all and was uploaded to YouTube right from the phone.
As you can see, it was pretty simple to share my iPhone screen activity with you without the need for a computer. This is great if you want to, for example, show people how to take and edit iPhone photos on the beach or how well a navigation program works with a live demonstration. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
The problem with a stock iPhone is that it (currently) lacks things like app folder support for apps, carrier unlocking, and some apps that Apple just won’t approve for one reason or another. This is why we jailbreak. It provides more freedom over your device, allowing you to install whatever you want, change the look, etc. It’s just a lot more fun, but until now, you couldn’t jailbreak the iPad or an iPhone running the 3.1.3 firmware. Welcome to Spirit. (note, this will not carrier-unlock your device)
How to Jailbreak
This is by far the easiest jailbreak I’ve done on my iPhone. Run a backup with iTunes before jailbreaking! You simply download Spirit for the PC or Mac, unzip, plug in your iPhone or iPad and run Spirit. You’ll see a small window with a button that reads, simply, “Jailbreak”. Click it and wait a few seconds. When done, it will reboot your device and you’re jailbroken. Here’s a short video showing the process on an iPad:
If you encounter any problems or want more detail, check out this post.
For the past few weeks, I’ve spent some time playing with the Motorola Devour smart phone, built for social media interaction.
While it’s been a lot of fun, it’s time to give the phone back to Verizon. I liked things about it and I found a couple things I disliked. I’ve detailed it all below.
Devour’s Look and Feel
Right out of the box, the Devour set itself apart from most phones I’ve put my hands on. The first thing I noticed about it was its weight. At 5.89 ounces it’s about an ounce more than the iPhone and you can feel it. It’s also a little thicker than other smart phones, but the size and weight weren’t all that jumped out at me. The extruded aluminum design is reminiscent of a space ship you might find in a late 80’s movie. It’s bold and I like it. Both rounded and sharp, it’s in a class all its own, visually.
Equipped with a 3.1-inch HVGA display at 320 x 480 pixels, the Devour offers a crisp display with vibrant colors for a good view of the customized Android platform. Above the screen is the speaker and below it sits the Unlock, Home, and Back buttons. In the bottom left hand corner there’s a tiny touch sensitive navigation pad we’ve seen before on recent smart phones. As you might imagine, it can be tricky to use because it has to be sensitive enough to pick up your finger motion, but not enough for accidental navigation. Luckily, the settings allow for some adjusting of the sensitivity.
The left edge of this phone has the Micro USB connector, but it also has a long panel that slides away to reveal the MicroSD card and battery. While it can be just a bit awkward to put the panel back in place, it’s hard to tell it’s even hiding anything. I thought that was a nice touch in the design. The right edge has the typical volume buttons as well as the voice dialing button and camera shutter button which also activates the 3 MP camera. This leaves the top edge for just the well-placed Power/Lock button, which was just a little too flush for my tastes, and the oddly-centered headphone jack.
Finally, there’s the slide-out keyboard. With keys that are raised just enough and that glow blue and white, the keyboard looks as good as the rest of the phone and just a little space-age. Access to symbols such as @ and / are not placed very intuitively, though, so typing email and web addresses takes some getting used to. Otherwise, the keys are comfortably spaced and typing on it was easy.
Motorola Devour Features
The main feature Motorola and Verizon would have you look at on the Devour is MOTOBLUR. I don’t know if it’s the best thing about the phone, but it is a pretty cool concept. If you are active on Twitter and Facebook, you’ll love how it constantly refreshes your home screen with new updates from these servers as well as current emails. Depending on who your friends and followees are, you’ll want to be careful about leaving your Devour on a desk at work, though. You never know when your buddy’s idea of a joke post updated to Facebook could offend a co-worker. For me, the only down side was that the number of people I follow and have friended makes real-time updating impossible to keep up with unless a filter or group setup is in place. Sadly, either MOTOBLUR is missing such a feature or I failed to notice it. Still, I like MOTOBLUR because even though I miss many updates and see many I don’t care about, I’ve still caught a couple I’d have otherwise missed.
The Devour supports an array of email and instant messaging services as well as some popular features like digital zoom and visual voicemail. You can also check out the full list of Motorola Devour features.
Moto Phone Portal
Here’s something new to me. It’s the Moto Phone Portal. When you first connect the Devour to your computer, it installs its management software, which was so much faster than on other devices and just sits in the tray. Rather than having a bulky application you launch, the portal is a web site, served from your phone.
From the portal, you can view call and SMS logs, view, import, and export contacts with photos, and check out your photos that are on your phone. It even has a built-in editor so you can rotate and crop images. From the portal you can also edit ring tones and alerts and view the status of your battery, signal strength, and memory usage. The Moto Phone Portal was a nice addition to the package.
Conclusions
At $149 with the 2 year contract and online discount, the Devour comes in at $50 less than its direct competition like the ERIS and other HTC models on Verizon. It’s definitely a well-rounded phone with some unique features, but small things like the weight will have to be overlooked for the $50 savings. You might buy this phone to break away from the pack, but the real draw is its ability to keep you connected in social media better than other (and often more expensive) phones.
Yesterday, I received an invitation in the mail to check out another Nokia virtual event, but there weren’t any clues as to what they had in store. I might have correctly guessed I’d get a better look at their C6 smart phone, but I didn’t have to wait long at all to find out.
The media event was scattered with videos like the one above, showing off their new phones and some of the many features offered. Attractive hardware from Nokia is no surprise, but I didn’t expect to be wowed by the C6 as much as I am.
The Nokia C6
The Nokia C6, which is scheduled to hit the market any time in the next couple months, will be running Symbian OS, S60 5.0 and will come packed with a 5 MP digital camera, media player, FM stereo, access to the Ovi store and Ovi music, full QWERTY keyboard, support for all the major email and IM providers, and Facebook integration. One of the features I’m excited about is the additional camera for video calls. The C6 will look great in either of the available colors, black or white and is will be competitively priced at 220 Euro. I can’t wait to get my hands on one for a full review. See for yourself in the promo video above.
The Nokia C3
Priced at 90 Euro, the C3 is for the smart phone buyer who wants to engage with social media but perhaps not quite as avidly as the C6 owner. While the C3 offers the ability to update your status and connect via Ovi Mail and Ovi chat accounts, it doesn’t offer the full-on array of connectivity the C6 boasts. Still, with quick access to your friends’ updates and a full keyboard, staying in touch will be easy. The C3 is also expected out in the next couple months.
The Nokia E5
Just like we saw with the Nokia E75, the E5 offers a great QWERTY keyboard that looks just as easy to navigate for touch typing and a simple array of buttons on the smart phone’s face for getting things done quickly. More business than social, the E5 provides the access to the same full list of email providers as the C6 and includes additional support for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus NotesTraveler business emails. The E5 supports all the major chat providers, includes a 5MP digital camera, and displays Facebook updates right in the phone book. It may be business driven, but it looks pretty cool. This guy will set you back 180 Euro but you have until Q3 to save up.
It seems like every day, I get to learn about some new technology that has the possibility to reshape how I see the world, work with data, or get something done much more easily. As a web developer, I’m very familiar with geofences and have applied them in working applications, but I wanted to introduce the concept to those of you who are unfamiliar with it.
What Is A Geofence?
Wikipedia has this to say about geofences:
A Geofence is a virtual perimeter on a geographic area using a location-based service, so that when the geofencing device enters or exits the area a notification is generated. The notification can contain information about the location of the device and might be sent to a mobile telephone or an email account.
Although I think they’re pretty close, I’d like to add that a geofence is really just the area that is defined for a notification trigger (or other event) and the notification isn’t exactly part of the geofence. As an example, you might have a device in your car that is linked to a service and that service has a geofence (that you defined) around your neighborhood. On your way to work the service detects that you’ve exited the geofence (your neighborhood), and shuts off specific devices in your home through a home automation system. When you re-enter the geofence after work, it sends a text message to your wife that reads, “Honey, I’m (almost) home!” or turns on your laptop.
Practical Uses For Geofences
I know the above example may seem a little Jetsons-like, but the technology is actually here today and already in use.
One real-world example is the annual Iron Dog® snowmobile race in Alaska. It wasn’t long after the race began that the first team entered a checkpoint and like many other people, I received a text message on my phone letting me know about it. Making this happen was software developed by Ontec Technologies, the company that has provided real-time tracking and mapping of each racer for the past few years. In the software, every checkpoint was defined as a geofence and each racer was outfitted with hardware from Applied Satellite Engineering that sent data over the Iridium satellite network to Ontec where it gets mapped and triggers alerts for geofences. In this example, friends, families, and fans were able to know very rapidly as their racer hit each checkpoint.
The article, Searching for Real Estate Made Easy: Geo-Fences Plus Mobile Phones from SoftwareAdvice.com describes, in detail, a scenario in which a young couple on a leisurely stroll is alerted that they’re near a home for sale that they may like. It seems the couple’s tech-savvy realtor entered their search criteria and cell phone number into a system that has geofences around properties and when their phone’s GPS location entered the geofence, it triggered an alert. The story is just a made-up scenario, but the reality of such a service is just over the horizon. We already have the technology in the phones and all it will take is for someone to build an app for the iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile 7 and the web service to pair it with.
The practical uses for geofences are numerous and I’m certain we’ll see them in use more and more. Imagine an alert on your phone when your young child wanders off your property, or a friend is near the coffee house you’re sitting at. A system that turns on a couple lights when I get within 50 yards of my house is entirely possible right now with a little hardware and some programming.
Possible problems
Any really good technology that makes use of your personal location information brings with it concerns about misuse of that information. However, if used with consent and in the proper applications with these concerns in mind, the advantages far outweigh the unlikely possibilities of misuse.
If you could geofences for anything, what would it be?
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