Since there are rumors still going around of a possible 13" iPad Air, I thought a picture showing a 13" Surface Pro 3 would help give some perspective.
In the photo, from bottom to top, is a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, an iPad Air, an iPad mini, an iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6 and an iPhone 5.
I've had iOS 7 on my device since it was released to developers last June and I really have got to liking the background fetching feature added to it. I have several apps that make use of it and in some cases, allows me to not even use the app.
For instance, I have OneDrive on my devices for the sole purpose of wirelessly uploading all of my photos and videos to OneDrive (I'll save why OneDrive & not Flickr for another post) and syncing to my computer. This lets me move them in to aperture when I am ready. Never have to plug my phone in, nor open OneDrive on my phone. It just does it in the background for me.
My podcast app is always up to date with the latest and greatest podcasts which is nice and in most cases my RSS reader is updated before I open it.
This is probably my favorite feature of iOS 7.
Today I brought home my iPad Air and immediately began the process of setting it up and restoring it to the back up I had performed on my iPad mini in the morning. The restore completed and it began downloading all of the apps from the App Store. This is where things kind of take a turn for the worse.
I needed to leave for work, so I left which put all of my downloads on pause. When I arrived at work, I connected to my iPhone via tethering so that I could access the internet on my iPad. About 30 minutes later my iPhone had died. I couldn't figure out why it had died so quickly, but I plugged it in to charge anyway. I noticed while the phone was charging however that most of my apps had finished downloading. Evidently the iPad considers tethering to be a form of Wifi and decided to resume downloading my apps over cellular. So my phone was drained and shut off as a result.
When I turned my phone back on, it would never acquire a cellular signal. At first I thought it was just an issue with T-Mobile, but the signal did not return after 3 hours. I got home and checked my wife's cell service and discovered that her iPhone did not have any issues. Something was up with mine. So I tried to go in to the Cellular settings, but each time I attempted to the iOS Settings.app would crash. The device would randomly acquire an LTE signal for about 15 seconds, then the OS would hang momentarily and loose the connection. It would then resume "Searching" for an extended period of time (up to 15 minutes) before repeating the whole process again.
I reset the network settings and that did not seem to fix it, and that's when I decided to blow away my phone. I wanted to see if it was a software issue or if my phone had fried its cell chip due to pulling down all of those iPad apps over an extended period of time. I was greeted with a "Please disable Find My iPhone" message when I tried to erase my phone, due to having Find My iPhone enabled. That's when I realized it was not just cellular, but communication in general. Wifi was no longer working nor bluetooth. After calling and speaking with Apple briefly, I put the phone in to DFU mode and was able to circumvent the Find My iPhone requirement. I blew away the phone, restored from my last back up and everything seemed to work fine afterwards.
Moral of the story? Don't let your iPhone die out. Shut it off properly before the battery runs out!
I love how the Apple blogs immediately assume that Apple is going to be selling a new product because another company can now sell that very product at a cheaper cost. If cost was a concern, Apple wouldn't have shipped a $3K Mac Pro.
Dell can supposedly sell a 4K display under $1,000. So naturally that means Apple, a company who sells expensive high-end computers with massive margins, is close to shipping a 4K display themselves; you know, because Apple only sells things when it becomes cheap #sarcasm
Logitech announced their new iPhone game pad that will transform your iPod Touch 5th gen, iPhone 5 and 5S into a game boy styled device. It will only cost you $100. I don't see this being popular enough at that price. Maybe for the ipad touch user base, which is usually teenagers and young kids, but in just don't see it taking off for iPhone users.
The device looks really slick on their website and it has a lot of potential. I would consider one, but I'm afraid at that price range it just isn't worth it. Logitech have said that it will support 300 games when launched, which sounds large but it's actually fairly small. The App Store has 175,000+ games alone. Supporting 300 is nothing. Another disappointing thing is the lack of 5c support. They support the 5th gen iPod touch by using a insert, why not provide a sleeve that allows the 5c to fit in it?
It's a cool device and will hopefully get better and cheaper as new ones are released. Until then, I'll just sit this one out.
Read More