My Little Voice

Archive for the ‘iPhone’ Category

I have just purchased the new HTC Desire Android phone.

I am running this alongside my loved iPhone, until the 4G comes out.

First impression is that it is a real contender, very very iPhone like.

I will post a full review shortly, but better than I expected, and that coming from an iPhone freak.

OK I succumbed, I installed Opera Mobile for iPhone, just to see how it runs in comparison to Safari.

I have never been a great Opera fan, but I know of a serious Opera user, one of the development team (I should keep his name off this site in case of retribution :0) and he loves it. But I thought I would give it a go.

It installed very quick and I was up and running easily.

First reaction when I took a look at some sites, not that good really, rendering was out and just felt clunky. However on sites that did look OK it was quick, especially the revisits, cache is very good even on the limited iPhone resources.

When I logged into OpenCRM, again not that impressed, looked a bit odd, but once I was into using it, quick, and I like that one click zoom.

I turned off images to see how it ran and this did seem quite a bit better than Safari, which if you are using a browser to access OpenCRM with non 3G coverage, would make a difference.

Verdict, will I stop using Safari, probably not, but I might be singing along with Opera as an alternative!

Well the iPhone speculation has started and the buzz is (can’t say the info is 100% reliable, more intelligent guessing me thinks), the next iPhone will be 4G enabled (no damm good in the UK then for sometime but with US networks already gearing up (2011 & 2012) we can’t be so far behind [or can we]), have multi tasking, have 32&64gb as standard (could even be a 64gb starting point), battery much improved which may even be removable (nice idea but I will hold off jumping in the air until I see the design, if this has any truth), have better camera, on the screen side (well probably on both sides :0), so will be video chat enabled, with a flash! (Hmmm not sure about that – battery had better be a chunk better don’t you think).

Could be launched for July 2010 (pure speculation, but perhaps Market competition will bring this forward), also real GPS built in, OLED screen, smoother more vibrant, better for video chat, IM enabled with a message light (now we are just inventing stuff :0) …..

Anyway, the speculation has started !

Additional comment : I guess the big thing that I gloss over is the name implying a true 4G product! Obviously this relies on the networks. In the states the most common contenders, Sprint and T-mobile use, or are developing a high speed, 3.5G network which is currently incompatible with the iPhone hardware. Probably a better chance that Apple add the hardware (frequency) capability, than the networks change thier frequency range to accomodate Apple.

Although it’s rumoured that Verizon are looking at signing a deal with iPhone this looks less likely next year. But as the US number one (89 million user -v-AT&T 86 million) expect a great courtship!

AT&T are rumored to have an end point to thier Apple iPhone agreement during summer 2010, that’s going to be a hot spot to watch.

There was always a certain kudos in using an alias when we were online, back in the 90′s but with the advent of social networks everyone has started using their real identity.

I am not sure if this is a good thing or not, obviously using your real name makes life so much easier to communicate and essential for ‘friend and business’ finding services, but does this compromise our real identity, and make it so much easier for identity fraud, not only can they see who I am, but all of the relationships I have.

I read recently one social network user claiming he can keep his identity obscure, but still enable people who want to find him, do so!

Maybe this is going to be the next generation of social interactive apps, who knows, but an interesting thought.

I have changed the way that I update multiple social and business network sites, using ping.fm which is FREE. So, Ping.fm and my iPhone client are good to go.

Well I never thought I would see me seriously considering moving from my iPhone, but this multitasking issue is a bit of a problem.

Having looked at the presentations of the Android driven Hero and the recently released in the US (soon to be released [late 2009] in the UK) Palm Pre, I have to admit their multitasking capabilities make a difference to the user experienced.

I can’t say I like the look of the Phone Hardware Design as much, but the OS implementation of multitasking makes a great deal of sense. Read the rest of this entry »

We are looking at providing a data sync service through the open source application Funambol. (http://funambol.com)

Funambol offers a number of options that would take a long time to implement direct, these come in the shape of existing data connectors for different peoples data applications.

So, rather than writing the data connector for Exchange, Google apps and other on-line services, we can integrate OpenCRM with Funambol and then using the existing data connectors, link and sync.

This includes the ability to sync with the Funambol iPhone native app and adding extra functionality to the Outlook sync tool.

Watch this space and feel free to get in touch if this is of interest to you – grahama [at] add-ons.co.uk

P.S. So that’s sync with a ‘y’ not an ‘i’ (sink he he he :0)

Technote : we have recently upgraded our main mailserver from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.

Previously we used activesync with Exchange and our iPhones, which just worked a dream. One of the features we loved was the ‘true’ HTML email display, it just worked (as you might expect).

Following the Exchange upgrade, these emails were no longer displayed correctly, no graphical display at all. They just look like plain emails with code within.

This looked like an encoding issue at the Exchange end, but no matter how much we investigated, reconfigured or googled, we could not find a solution.

Microsoft released SP1 – and guess what, one of the areas that has been improved is the encoding for mobile devices.

So, if you are having a similar problem, start by upgrading to Exchange SP1, that is most probably the solution.

We are now back with smiley faces as our beloved iPhones display HTML emails again.

We are a company that unashamedly admits that price is one of the reasons why potential clients come knocking on our doors, and that’s great (for both parties), without being a bore, that’s because we are able to leverage Open Source projects to deliver a product that has no client licenses, so you spend your project budget in the areas that have the most impact, for you. But, price alone is not the reason why clients sign up and indeed stay with OpenCRM, in fact price often becomes so less important when offset against Customer Service, and that’s my point really!

A recent survey by Accenture, the New York consulting firm, cited 67% of respondents as claiming their reasons for changing suppliers as ‘poor customer service’, with only 47% of respondents claiming that they changed because of lower costs.

Now that’s a significant number of people who appreciate the levels of service that they did not (and should have) received. Read the rest of this entry »

This is just a quick update, on the off chance that someone else is out there, using the iPhone app for WordPress, and wants to know how you add the ‘more tag’ (thats the icon that inserts the Read More link and is available on the text editor, its the icon that looks like a page split in half), from the iPhone interface?

I have this problem because I frame my blog on a couple of other sites and (quite frankly) who am I kidding if I think people are actually interested in the drivel that I sometimes (some might say all of the time) write, so I wanted a way to reduce the text to a summary, with a link to the full article.

This is what I mean… Read the rest of this entry »