Especially the demos by Chris Crummey showed a lot about the great mobile offerings being available especially for Connections … and yes, one more time to realize that Connections is a central part of the IBM social business strategy. Like it or not - it’s a fact!
Being a huge fan of Zite I absolutely loved the magazine style dashboard Chris showed in the last part of this session!
My iCloud restore experience … it wasn’t planned to test the iCloud that early but well, situations like that mostly happen when you don’t expect them.
I’m not sure what went wrong in the first place but after downloading some music on the iPad and doing a sync with iTunes those new tunes refused to work. Even worse, I had some tunes just playing the next title instead. A total mess - but only on the iPad. Everything was fine on iTunes and the iPhone.
Tried to sync a few times but couldn’t get it fixed. Then I made a big mistake: Instead of just unmarking music sync in iTunes, syncing one time and then marking it again, I removed the playlists on the iPad. Very big mistake. Of course the deletions synchronised to iTunes and now my playlists had been gone. Was able to recreate them from a backupfile that wasn’t too old but still had the problem that the music was messed up on the iPad.
Therefore it was time for a restore. I do iCloud backup and my newest backup was from last night (less than 18 hours old). I had all the new purchased titles already on iTunes and the iPhone so I gave it a shot.
The restore process via iCloud is great, it definately “just works”! No cables just answering a few questions (location services, wlan, Agrrement etc.) and then you tell your device to restore from the last backup.
The settings and all the basic stuff (including the folders and the app bodys) is there immediately. Of course it takes some time to restore all the apps (about 2 hours for me) but that’s no problem. As soon as an app is fully loaded you can use it. The load process goes from the first app/folder on your home screen to the last. So if you have your most important apps in front those will be loaded first and you’re immediately ready to continue working with your device.
While the process is great in general you have to keep some things in mind:
So beside those small hickups this was a nice way to recreate my device. And the music titles in question started to work again. Unfortunately my playlist problems still remained so I had to empty the music on my iPhone too. This time I made it in the right order … but (yes, this was a bad day yesterday!) after enabling music again my PC went down with a bluescreen about 5 minutes before the final sync was finished. Now the iPhone seems to be in a sync-loop and it looks like I have to get a restore there too.
Anyway, I would definately reccommend to use iCloud backup rather than iTunes backup. Just use common sense to ask yourself which stuff should be stored seperately … just in case ;-)
Connection problems with the iPhone 4 solved (at least for me)!
Not sure if this is mostly a german problem but it seems that a number of people in all german mobile networks (O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone) have problems with network access on their iPhones with 3G (UMTS).
It all started with some news that this problem has hit a good number of people with the new iPhone 4S but as for now it seems more that it’s a problem with iPhones using iOS5 (and especially if you have used your SIM-Card before already).
People are reporting that they have bad 3G data coverage and some say that even making phone calls doesn’t work. Not much from Apple on that topic so far but T-Mobile says it’s the SIM-Card and replaces thoses from a particular series with newer ones.
No word from O2 and Vodafone. Unfortunately I am on O2 (using an iPhone 4) and ran into that problem too. Interestingly all worked fine after I upgraded to iOS5 at first … but looking back it seemed that the quality of reception went down a bit each day until my phone became more or less unresponsive two days ago in regards of data connection.
At first I used the published workaround to delete the SIM-PIN, restart the phone and switch to EDGE. That helped indeed to be connected again but wasn’t a satisfying solution at all (despite the reduced speed I don’t feel comfortable running a phone without SIM-PIN!).
So I went to the next O2 store but wasn’t much surprised that they blamed Apple and said they can’t do anything. Telling them about the SIM-Card change T-Mobile is doing they said that doesn’t help but still gave me a new one to replace my old card.
Back home I opened the envelope and was quite surpised as the card looks very different. The picture above shows my old card on the left and the new one (with a much bigger chip) on the right. So it is definately a different series. Called O2 customerservice and they designated my phone number to the new card. One hour later it was active and I started a first test.
While I only have EDGE inside I went out on the terrace but had to disable and enable 3G as well as data once before the phone switched back to 3G. Opened the Facebook app (which had huge problem to load at all before) … and it displayed the data in a second.
The next morning I used my iPad (tethered with my phone) during the whole one hour train trip into Munich without any problems. That trip goes through areas with quite bad 3G reception and it was fine all time. The last days I was more or less without access while riding the train. But it even seemed to be better reception than before with iOS4. No problems here in the office too (were I also experienced severe connection loss the last days).
So it seems that the SIM card change solved the problem for me. In case you have similar problems I definately would reccomend that you should give it a try. Don’t know if it works for everybody … but there’s not much you have to lose but a lot you could gain!
No, I didn’t get the new iPhone 4S … although “Siri” sounds superinteresting. But of course I upgraded my devices (iPhone 4 & iPad2) to iOS 5.
I started with my iPhone minutes after iOS 5 was available (I had updated iTunes to 10.5 the day before) and it turned out to be a mistake. As I should have expected a lot of people tried the same and the whole process of upgrading took over 4 hours (including the infamous 3200 error). So there wasn’t much time to play with the new OS that evening.
As I started to explore iOS 5 in detail the next day the first visual impression was a bit disappointing. As with the 4S the new OS looks almost the same from the outside but if you look inside it’s a huge change. Of course there’s the notification center and all the stuff you can read about everywere … but there’s also a great number of small improvements that some but not all people may find very useful: e.g. the new shortcuts, iTunes WLAN Sync, readerlis, flagging emailst and other stuff.
Next was the iPad and it took much less time then. I ran into the “Can’t turn on iCloud Backup” error but that resolved itself too somewhat later. The iPad has some special improvements too: e.g. Tabbed browsing for Safari.
In regards of iCloud - the iCloud is currently great for Backup. Nice to see in the morning that your stuff was backuped overnight. For apps time will show. There are not too many apps available at this time that fully support iCloud. “Keynote” is one of those I use that is supporting iCloud and it works great.
I find it a bit disappointing that IBM Lotus Traveler (Active Sync based email, calendar and contacts) isn’t supported by iCloud. But I can live with that. On the other hand syncing bookmarks via iCloud Control Center on a Windows PC is cool stuff too.
So after playing around with iOS 5 I am sure I will love it. So many things that improve mobile life and make it easier. The only thing I am not sure that I will like is the new music center on the iPad. It’s totally re-designed and I am not used to it for now.
As I said it’s a new feeling of mobile live and it will put to a test this week: first during a two day conference in Frankfurt and then during the weekend on a poker trip to Dublin. Of course I will let you know how iOS 5 performs in the wild ;-)
Sorry for all my poker fans … still nothing to write about poker at the moment. But if you are interested in Apple products you might like that blog entry too.
People around the world eagerly awaited the Apple keynote and were hoping for the iPhone 5. Many followed the livestreams from Mashable and other sources … but most of them had been disappointed. No iPhone 5 :-(
But was there really a reason for disappointment? Or were there just wrong expectations?
To be true nobody at Apple ever mentioned the iPhone 5. It was all created by the press and myriads of rumors running thru the internet. The public is disappointed and the Apple stock is down … and I can’t understand it!
In my opinion the only reason they didn’t call it “5” is that it’s still the same design as the “4” (and I like this design). But inside everything is new with great processor, graphics, camera and so on. Not to forget the increased data speed and the worldphone-feature (GSM and CDMA). If they called it iPhone 5 everybody would have been hyped about that great new phone. As it is “only” the 4S everybody is now disappointed.
In addition they announced the availability of iOS5 on Oct. 12th, Siri for the new iPhone and some more stuff. So if you really think about it and forget the hype created by sources outside of Apple then … then you might think that keynote wasn’t that bad at all.
Oh yes, I forgot … I am disappointed. Because another media hyped rumor didn’t come true: No Facebook App for the iPad. But that’s a total different story!
I was using an iPhone since January 2011 and I am owning a netbook. But since the iPad was available I was thinking about buying one several times. But I was torn between the question if it really would be useful or just a big iPhone. Finally – during our recent trip to the USA – I decided to find out.
It’s a cool gadget … no question but I am surprised how much it influenced the way I use my computer now. Or better don’t use it anymore! While I did a lot of stuff on my netbook before I now use it only when I have to do something that can’t be done with the iPad. Interestingly 90% of my stuff can be done with the iPad. And no – it’s not just a big iPhone. Same iOS but different use cases. The iPad is definately more a netbook than a smartphone!
During my last trip (which was only a two day trip during the weekend) I traveled only with the iPad and left the netbook at home. I will do the same at my upcoming 5-day trip to Coventry. Of course there is a difference between a weekend and almost one week. So this will be an interesting experiment. Beside several apps (including dropbox for file access) there is one im my portfolio that particularily sticks out … that one is “Zite”.
To quote the website “Zite is a free, personalized iPad magazine that understands what you like and gets smarter every time you use it”. And “getting smarter” ist the key point here. I just started with my Twitter account and form there Zite had built a nice collection of stuff that could be of interest for me. You can start from scratch if youl like (or don’t have Twitter) but this way I got a great starting point. But it doesn’t stop here. Everytime you read an article you can select or de-select keywords if you like as well as rate the article itself. Those information is the learning experience for Zite and helps to deliver stuff even more accurate the next time. Belive it or not: My one-hour long train ride each morning starts to get to short to read all the interesting stuff I get presented. Of course there are many articles I could easily find on my own but there’s also a surprising number of articles that I most probably woudl have missed. So in short – Zite is my own personalized Newspaper.
Without a doubt those two (iPad and Zite) especially in conjunction made a big change in the way I live and work. And for me it was definately a change for the better: Less stuff to travel with, faster access to needed informations and more accurate informations to name the most just the most important points. So getting back to the beginning of this post: Beyond being cool the iPad is one of the most useful gadgets I ever got … you just have to use it for the right things in the right way!
