Recently in iPhone Category

This post is for Xcode users who are experiencing problems when they connect there iPhones with OS 3.1 to Xcode and get an error in Organizer.

For a complete explanation of what is going on please read my earlier post on the same subject for iPhone OS 3.0.1.

Here is the quick and dirty version...

the error you'll see:
you see this in Organizer.

"OS Installed on iPhoneXYZ is
3.1 (7C144)

Xcode Supported iPhone OS Versions
3.0.1 (7A400)
3.0 (7A312g)
2.2.1
2.2
2.1.1
2.1
2.0.2 (5C1)
2.0.1 (5B108)
2.0 (5A347)"

A femtocell (AT&T's is pictured left) is a mini cell tower you connect to your broadband internet to extend the cellular signal of your cell carrier via your broadband connection. The device installs like a typical WiFi router would and increases the cellular coverage in dead or over-subscribed areas where normal cell service is failing or unavailable. The range of a femtocell is small and while your phone sees no difference between a femtocell and the big cell towers atop buildings, femtocells are usually setup to allow only 5 to 10 pre-specified phones to connect at a time and in AT&Ts case can only offer 3G speeds if your Internet connection is fast enough to support it (3.5Mbps).

The recent pilot program to test AT&Ts femtocells in Charlotte, North Carolina raises some interesting question as to how the company is going to deploy and use femtocells to address widespread and well documented service failures in New York, San Fransisco and other major metro areas where the wild success of the iPhone has caused over subscription and saturation of the cell towers. The result of which is 20-30% of iPhone calls result in a dropped or fail connection NYC. Things have gotten so bad on AT&T that my girlfriend went out and got a second Verizon based phone just for work calls, forwarded her iPhone to it and now takes calls on this crappy little LG phone, that is how much her AT&T calls were dropping.

In the Charlotte femtocell pilot program AT&T has set the cost at a onetime (and in my opinion outrageous) $150 hardware fee. With the option of paying an additional $20 monthly to make unlimited calls via the femtocell you install and supply the backhaul internet connection for. If you choose not to add the unlimited femtocell calling plan then all calls (femtocell based or not) use minutes from your std plan just as it would normally.

Over the past month our AT&T 3G cellular coverage here in New York City has been horrendous and getting worse all the time.

1) Dropped calls despite full bars
2) Failed calls despite full bars
3) Spotty 3G coverage despite full bars

Something is not right here... maybe time to roll out that femtocell strategy in earnest AT&T, cause things are getting ugly. So ugly in fact, my girlfriend went out and purchased a cheap LG Verizon phone with a 2 year contract for her business calls since her iPhone reception was becoming too unreliable.


To be fair I would say that I only encounter issues 20% of the time, but I used to have no issues at all.

"Houston, AT&T has a problem"

Relevant links:
* It's time for a new iPhone PR strategy at AT&T
* AT&T reportedly nearing femtocell 'soft launch'

Beginning iPhone 3 Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche has a carefree, irreverent written style rarely seen in books this technical.  And while I often find it hard to read more than the first 75 pages of a technical book, referring to the rest of the chapters only as needed, Beginning iPhone 3 Development was easy to stick with and I can tell how the clear explanations and logical buildup to progressively more difficult concepts would be a easy to finish for anyone needing a real world, under the hood, hands on look at iPhone development.

I won't drone on here, but I will say I did appreciate the Author's choice to assume we are all smart, witty, hard studying students. That said, you will require some C and Objective C background if you plan to achieve anything significant on the iPhone, so don't expect miracles, but it a very good walk through the factory floor for those, like myself, who's Objective C always needs polish, but knows enough to read code and can follow along inquisitively, all the while piecing more of the puzzle together.

Of all the books I have on the iPhone and Objective C, this is the closest any of them have gotten me to feel like I was in an actual course and I most certainly felt that my iPhone Dev learning curve was starting to level out by the time I finished reading it.

Hope that helps the many students, like myself, who look at all the reading choices on iPhone development and wish someone would pop over their shoulder and say, "get that one".


  

I owned a Nokia n770 and a n800 long before the smartphone market went ballistic. Basically, the n770/n800 were tiny, underpowered PC's with an open source Linux OS customized with std nested menus, WiFi and a stylus. 

The n770/n800 had no phone, no keyboard and they were instantly relegated to my personal tech museum once the iPhone came along, they sit on the shelf right next to my Helio (another epic FAIL).  Neither the n770 or the n800 could make traditional calls, though the n800 did sport a webcam and a skype client over WiFi.  Ever try to roam over WiFi?

And while neither of the two Nokia's would hold its own next to an iPhone today, in a pre iPhone / netbook world (circa 2005-2007), they were "cool to have" geek toys, if Nokia only added a phone to them.  But adding a phone would have conflicted with the Nokia n95 and they could not allow anything to muddy the waters of the S60 based flagship Noika, the n95 (again, epic FAIL). 

Enough Nokia history, now we have the n900 and the sad news is, while the n900 now sports a Phone and is the most impressive Nokia ever, it is also just a test mule while Nokia ever increases it's position and exposure to the aging and weak Symbian S60 OS.

Nokia has never invested to much into the Linux platform and as stated by Nokia, the n900 is just another high end, early adopter, geek toy, and not a full out change in OS strategy and direction toward Linux, which IMHO the company desperately needs. I hate to be disappointed with such cool bit of kit, but n900 is just another in a long line of Linux test beds for Nokia, each one only slightly better than the last, as the company halfheartedly weighs its smartphone options, yet again.  So let's keep this in mind as I go further into the details of the n900.

This does not represent a new Nokia OS philosophy.
"This is just a test!"

Well here is it, my first iPhone app! I call it "Hello World" and while It is doesn't do much more than show Apollo 11 and our "World" from lunar orbit, it is my first iPhone app from scratch and it's all mine. The Earth and the Apollo Command Module are animated using the core graphic classes. The result is actually quite hypnotic to watch, with the Earth and Lunar Lander slowly floating by at different rates and vectors.

I must thank Jonathan Lehr at About Objects, Inc. for the great 11 day intensive iPhone development course they hold once every couple of months.

As a technologist, designer and networking geek, I had some C skills coming into the class, but the iPhone Super Bundle, as it is called, really kicked things into high gear. Jonathan covered C, Objective C, the iPhone SDK and all the tricks of using the Xcode IDE and Interface Builder.

so on the flight home from the 11day intensive iPhone development course hosted by About Objects i finally figured out why i could not see my iphone with release 3.0.1 in the Xcode organizer.

the problem:
the iPhone SDK 3.0 does not recognize your development iPhone when
connected to Xcode in the Organizer that has been upgraded to 3.0.1
via your normal iTunes sync process.

Organizer shows you the following error:

"The version of iPhone OS on iPhoneXYZ does not match
any of the versions of iPhone OS supported for development with this
copy of Xcode. Please restore the device to a version of the OS listed
below. If necessary, the latest version of Xcode is available here.

Android running on the iPhone?

Not just yet, but the following video of a bare bones Linux kernel running on an iPhone with a dual boot mode may be the biggest iPhone hacking news since the device was first jail broken. The hack, completed by the iPhone Dev Team, may be the only answer to working around iPhone SDK limitations Apple has imposed on developers thus far.

It is completely feasible that with the proper HW drivers iPhone hardware could run a version of Google's Android phone OS. Not that Google's Android OS has a better interface than the current iPhone 2.2 firmware, but Android's openness allows a greater amount of freedom for developers to write third party applications. To date, Apple has become notorious for banning any developers Application from the Apple App Store, if Apple thinks it may duplicate current functionality or threaten anything Apple has planned. As a result, some of the most clever and ingenious apps written for jail broken iphones never make it into the general public's hands, or are severely crippled when they do.

This is a huge step toward an open platform on the iPhones elegant HW.

Here is iPhone Dev Team's video of the hack for all you geeks.


iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.