does it ever rain in Seattle?
Rambutan, a hairy fruit with sweet translucent fresh, is a common fruit in Southeast Asia. About a month ago, i was grocery shopping in Uwajimaya and i noticed packets with each containing two Rambutan fruits. It cost $2.38 for two freaking Rambutan! In Southeast Asia, you can probably buy more than a kilo of Rambutan with $2.
For those that still have their iPhones and are having problem with dropped calls, you can enable the Field Test mode by entering this on iPhone’s dial pad:
*3001#12345#*
According to everettwolf at the Apple Discussion forum, once the Field Test mode is engaged, in the cell information area, you should see all the cell towers and their signal strength.
Wirelessinfo.com has more on it.
I have already returned my iPhone due to dropped calls so i am not able to verify if this actually works.
Anyone who’s known me well the last few years will know that i am a huge fan of Apple products. Ever since i bought an Apple Power Mac G4 Cube back in 2000, i have always been following Apple products religiously. I am a diehard atheist and the closest thing to being religious for me is probably being in the “cult” of Apple. Throughout the years, i have spent some significant amount of dough on Apple products:
So it is no different that on the day iPhone was released, i found myself waiting in line, braving the alternate funky rainy/sunny weather for about an hour and a half, before i found myself happily carrying my iPhone out of the Apple Store at the University Village.
After a week of use, i realized that in my house, especially in my living room, my calls were being dropped almost half the time. When i initiated a call, the signal would be either 4 or 5 bars (5 bars is full). In the middle of the call, the signal would drop down to 1 bar while i was sitting in the same location and eventually, my call would be dropped. This would happen to the next few consecutive calls.
Two weekends ago, i contemplated returning my iPhone. Since i did not want the hassle of switching back to T-Mobile, i contacted AT&T and asked if i could remain on their network but without the two-year contract. AT&T told me there was no way they could provide me service without a 2-year contract! I was literally giving them business and and yet, they refused! After talking to an Apple iPhone support personnel on the phone, i brought my iPhone back to the Apple Store with the intention of returning it. After talking to one of the guys at the Genius Bar, i was convinced to try out another iPhone and so that was exactly what i did.
Unfortunately, the new replacement iPhone exhibited the exact same problem. It was useless calling AT&T for support. After explaining my problem to him, the AT&T support technician told me that AT&T does not guarantee reception within a building and even though another phone (SE W810i) using AT&T network in the same location exhibited no such problem, there was nothing he could do. I called Apple support again and i went through a few things to try to get this resolved like re-seating the SIM card by taking it out and putting it back it, reset the phone by holding the Home and Power On/Off button for 8 seconds and also by restoring the iPhone. Nothing worked.
Is the drop call issue due inherently to iPhone’s design, or is it because of a combination of iPhone and AT&T’s network? I do not have a clue. If somehow i am able to use iPhone on T-Mobile’s network, i may be able to come to a more conclusive understanding of the problem. But since iPhone is locked to AT&T’s network, i am not willing to be forced to stay on my AT&T contract for the next two years (i can cancel my AT&T contract within 30 days without paying the $175 cancellation fee) trying to figure out if this problem is fixable by a firmware upgrade.
So i come to this sad but inevitable conclusion that iPhone is not ready for me yet. Even though iPhone is lacking a lot of the features that i normally expect a cellphone to have, i have enjoyed browsing the web with Safari and the seamless integration between Google Map, Safari and Contacts. But first and foremost, iPhone is supposed to be a phone. If i cannot consistently make/receive calls without having them dropped, for me, everything else is secondary. The only reason why i switched to AT&T was because it is the exclusive mobile carrier for iPhone. About an hour ago, i went back to the Apple Store and reluctantly returned my iPhone. Without my iPhone, there is absolutely no reason for me to stick with AT&T, whose claim to fame is “Fewest Dropped Calls” (apparently that does not apply to me), so about 15 minutes ago, i switched myself back to T-Mobile!
Throughout my dealings with Apple support (both the phone support and at the Genius bar), they have been extremely friendly and helpful to me. And even though they were not able to help me resolve the drop calls issue, i have nothing but praise for their excellent customer service.
Update: 2007/09/16
On the day after iPhone was unlocked by the hardworking folks at iPhone Dev, i decided to get myself another 8GB iPhone. I got it unlocked the following evening and have been using it on T-Mobile’s network since that day. I am very happy to say that i have not had a call dropped on me yet 
I have been using my iPhone for more than two weeks, and other than having to swap out my first iPhone at the Apple Store because of dropped calls and other call problems (which may or may not be fixed by my replacement iPhone), i enjoy using it. That said, many basic features that i expect to have in a cellphone are missing in the iPhone. Most, if not all, of the features listed in the table below can be added/improved by upgrading the firmware, so it’s really up to Apple to decide which of them are essential enough to be included in the next firmware upgrade.
I look forward to the day when i can change this 
or 
to this 
.
|
Features |
Version 1.0 |
Comment |
| Phone | ||
| Contacts | ||
| Search function | |
This is a must for power users. How do i search for everyone on my Contacts that works for IBM? |
| Assign contact to group/s | |
Currently, this can only be done in Address Book on a Mac. |
| Ability to clear All/Missed call lists separately | |
Right now, pressing the “Clear” button in “Recents” call list will clear both the “All” and “Missed” call lists. |
| Call forwarding | Right now, turning on call forwarding will forward all calls. Being able to selectively call forward on different situations has been available in almost all my previous cellphones. | |
| Call forward when busy | |
|
| Call forward when no answer | |
|
| Call forward when unavailable | |
|
| Voice-activated dialing | |
|
| Speakerphone | |
Very weak speakerphone. Unusable in a moving vehicle or noisy environment. |
| Personalized ringtones | |
|
| Personalized system sounds | |
|
| Sound recording / Voice notes | |
This basic feature is available in my three previous phones. |
| Copy and Paste text | |
|
| Direction keypad | |
The magnifying glass is nice to play with initially, for about 5 minutes, but it has its bugs and limitations, and it is not a replacement for the direction buttons. |
| Search | |
A Spotlight-like search will be nice. |
| Choice to switch to call when on EDGE network | |
Right now, if you are on the EDGE network, all the voice calls will go to your voicemail. |
| Messaging | ||
| SMS | SMS is designed to be like iChat but unfortunately, the biggest flaw of this design is that it is impossible to resend/forward any text messages, including the ones that failed to go out. | |
| Send to more than one recipient | |
|
| Received Folder | |
See comment on SMS. |
| Sent Folder | |
See comment on SMS. |
| Draft Folder | |
See comment on SMS. |
| Template Folder | |
See comment on SMS. |
| MMS | |
|
| Delete multiple emails | |
It may be fun at first to delete each email by sliding your finger across each one. Try doing that for more than 10 emails. |
| Empty trash | |
Emails in the trash are meant to be emptied with one key press, not one by one. |
| Mark multiple email as read/unread | |
|
| Attach photo as attachment when replying | |
|
| Save email attachments | |
|
| Web Browser | ||
| Flash support | |
It may be the best browser on a mobile device, but without support for Flash, iPhone is not a full-featured browser. |
| AJAX support | |
Not all the categories show up when i tried to blog using wordpress. |
| Javascript support | |
|
| Scroll back/forward multiple pages | |
Right now, Safari can only scroll back/forward one page at a time. |
| Open link to a new page | |
|
| Imaging and Video | ||
| Optical zoom | |
|
| Digital zoom | |
|
| White Balance | |
|
| Video recording | |
Even the most basic camera-equiped cellphone has this capability. |
| Connectivity | ||
| WIFI | ||
| Synchronization (email, contacts, calendar) | |
|
| Bluetooth | ||
| File transfer (to/from Mac/PC) | |
|
| File transfer to another BT enabled phone | |
|
| Send/Receive contact/s to/from another BT enabled phone | |
|
| Synchronization (email, contacts, calendar) | |
A BT-enabled phone and yet i can’t synchronize wirelessly with my Powerbook? |
| GSM dial-up support | |
|
| Multimedia | ||
| Quicktime | |
Amazingly, i can’t even transfer the movie trailers i downloaded from Apple’s movie trailer site to the phone. iTunes won’t accept it. |
| Other formats | |
No other video formats currently supported. |
| Third Party Apps | ||
| Java MIDP 2.0 | |
|
| Salling Clicker | |
This handy OS X-orginated app even works on my Windows-mobile based HP phone. And yet, i can’t install it on my iPhone because Apple says no to third-party apps. |
| Over-the-air download/install of Java apps | |
Click on the picture below for the slideshow:
The ground covers in my backyard are blooming with purple and white flowers.
Continue reading ‘Flowering backyard ground covers’
I am on Orcas Island now, just finished attending a lovely wedding. Since there is no free WIFI network that i can find, i have decided to see how blogging is using my iPhone on AT&T’s EDGE network.
Immediately, i noticed that there is one thing that i cannot do: i cannot upload the pictures i took during the ferry ride to Orcas Island. The “Choose file” button is greyed out. Even if the “Choose file” button is not greyed out, it may not be possible to transfer pictures from the iPhone because the operating system shell is hidden.
Except for a 5-minute stretch which there was no signal during which i attempted to send a few SMS or text messages (more on this later), i was able to surf the web and make two voice calls without any issue.
When i got back to the hotel, i tried to resend the SMS that had failed to deliver during the few minutes on the ferry when there was no signal. Because Apple implemented SMS on the iPhone like iChat, the message that failed to go out earlier was erased when i went to the main SMS menu. There is simply no way to retrieve that message. In all the Sony Ericsson phones that i have owned, any text message that is not delivered goes to the Draft folder, any message that is sent goes to the Sent folder. If i ever want to resend the same message to a different person, all i have to do is to go to the Sent folder, select the message and then select the person/s to send to. All these are not possible in the iPhone.
Also, while iPhone is trying to send a message, there does not appear to be a way to compose or read another message. Normally, this will not a problem. However when iPhone is trying to send a message but is not able to, it will stay around the 90% mark on the progress bar. So until it errors out, you can’t do anything within the SMS menu other than cancelling out message that is being sent. Naturally, cancelling the message means that I will have to retype the whole again.
Back to the issue in which I could not send any text messages. Since my messages did not go through, i tried to call instead. None of the calls went through. I know this has to be a bug because i was able to surf the web and Janet was able to make severals calls using her SE W810i on the same AT&T network. While i was having problems sending SMS and making calls, the reception indicator was showing full signal strength. To fix my problems, I tried powering the phone off by pressing and holding the power button for a few seconds. The screen blanked out with a spinning indicator that won’t go away, meaning, I had to press and hold both th power and the home buttons to reboot the phone.
Blogging this entry took more than an hour. I find that when I am using iPhone in the landscape mode and writing to a text box, the virtual keypad takes up more than 2/3 of the screen real estate, making scrolling up and down extremely difficult. This is especially so when I was attempting to go back and correct some typos. Since iPhone’s virtual keypad does not include any direction buttons, scrolling through a block of text is only possible by putting your finger on where you want the cursor to move to and then hold for about half a second until the magnifying glass shows up. The magnifying glass has some limitations or design issues.
First, it only magnifies to what appears to be fixed percentage. If the text that I am trying to magnify is tiny to begin with, it won’t enlarge the font to what I consider a legible size.
Second, if you try to use the magnifying glass too close to the upper edge of the screen, you won’t be able to see what’s in the magnifying glass because a significant portion of the magnifying glass is hidden beyond the screen. To get around the second issue, I have to scroll the page down so that the area where I want to move the cursor to os no longer near the top display edge. But then if I am already in the landscape mode, I can’t easily acroll the page vertically! All these made blogging this entry rather tedious and time consuming.
A few weeks ago, i started noticing a mouse (there could be more) running around in my backyard. It was a little cute mouse but i didn’t really want to share my living space with a mouse. Chances are good that there are more than one mouse. So i ordered a pair of humane mouse traps with the goal of catching it and releasing it far away from my house. The traps arrived about 1.5 weeks ago but i did not set it up until last Saturday. I really was not expecting to catch any mouse since i had not seen the mouse for a while. In the mouse trap, i placed a cracker spread with peanut butter. I have been checking the trap every day since Saturday and i was just about to give up when i noticed this little grey mouse in the trap!
Update 2007/07/03 23:20:
Released little mickey in a park a few miles from my place. That little furry ball sure can jump!