Hijinks Inc.

Category: Apple

  • Jailbreaking 4.1

    I’ve learned a lot in the past week or two, a few things i’m going to share with you.

    First off: I REALLY (really) hate Apple’s elitism in that they don’t allow internal modifications with any of their products

    Second: Finding help for Jailbreaking an iPod 2nd Gen running iOS 4.1 is nearly IMPOSSIBLE! which is why I found the resources for anyone wanting to do the same.

    This will work on iPod touch 2G and iPhone 3G running 4.1 and 4.0

    If your iPod 2G is an MC model (look under settings/general/about/model ) you will be tethered, meaning you will need to be plugged in every time you start your iPod

    Keep in mind this is a little more dangerous than some jailbreaks as it’s still in beta and hasn’t had much testing. My iPod is still running great, although it does seemingly run a bit slower especially on startup. The only other noticeable flaw i’ve found this far is some Cydia applications do not support the 4.1 firmware yet so they do not work yet.

    Redsn0w 0.9.6 Beta 1

    http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/1160213613/redsn0wier

    iOS 4.1 Firmware download

    http://techpp.com/2010/09/09/download-ios-4-1-firmware-update-for-iphone-ipod-touch/

  • Five Things iOS Could Learn from Android

    Previously I featured a list of five things Android could learn from iOS, to be fair and balanced, here’s my list of five things iOS could learn from Android.
    Again, this is a randomly ordered list.

    1. Notifications. iOS has a terrible notification system, they could learn a lot from Android on this one.

    2. Toggles. Quick toggles for turning Wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS on and off without having to opening the settings. How hard is that?

    3. Widgets. For the love of all things pure and holy, please add some widgets! At least to the home screen.

    4. Cloud syncing. Sure a MobileMe account let’s you sync your Calendar/Contacts/etc, but $99 a year is a joke. Go free, or go home.

    5. App store queuing. I buy an app on iOS and it takes me out of the app store and to one of my homescreens, I want to buy another app I have to go back into the app store. Huh?

  • Five Things Android Could Learn from iOS

    These aren’t ordered in any particular manor, just a random list of five things that iOS does better than Android 2.2.

    1. Style. Android is nice looking, but a little utilitarian in places. Whereas iOS is sleek and stylish to the very end.

    2. App badges. Androids task bar notifications are great, but badges are handy for those lower priority apps, not to mention inbox counts.

    3. Centralized settings.  I really like the fact that iOS lets app developers include a settings page inside of Settings.app.

    4. Parental controls. Android seems to be lacking even basic options for parental controls.

    5. Remote wipe. Yes,  they have APIs to enable applications to do this, but let’s see a native app ship with the OS.

  • iPad 3G Data Usage for September

    Despite my iPad crashing and needing to be restored, I managed to use 18.3GBs of data for the month of September. Bringing my total data usage for the year to 84.3GBs, I’m feeling pretty positive about breaking 100GBs total by the end of the year.

    It will be interesting to see if my data usage decreases now that I’m also using the Droid X, which depending on data speeds I will most likely be using to tether to my laptop instead of the iPad.

  • Mobile Browser Shootout

    Everyone is entitled to their own favorite smartphone, but I think we all can agree that some phones just do certain things better. Today, let’s take a quick look at how various mobile browsers fair in the Acid3 test.

    Default browsers for the platforms:

    Android 2.2

    93/100
    No screenshot, because I haven’t rooted my Droid X yet. I know, I know, I fail at life…

    webOS 1.4.2

    92/100

    webOS_1.4.2_acid3.png

    webOS 2.0 (developer beta)

    91/100
    Wait… the performance of the browser actually went down with a new build of the OS?

    webOS_2.0_acid3.png

    iOS (tested 3.1.3 through 4.2)

    100/100

    Third-party browsers:

    Skyfire 2.3 Beta (Android)

    93/100

    Opera Mini 5.1.21126 (Android)

    97/100

    Opera Mini 5.0.019802 (iOS)

    97/100