Archive for July, 2007
The iPhone Battery
If you want your iPhone battery to be the very best it can be, don’t charge it every chance you get.
One habit I had to break out of when I purchased the iPhone was to stop charging it every night, whether or not the battery was depleted. This is an outdated concept with the iPhone because its battery is different than those batteries that were in my other phones. From what I’ve been told about the lithium ion battery, it needs to be exercised like a muscle to get it’s maximum potential. That means you have to let it drain completely and then let it charge completely a few times before you get the most out of your battery. And since I’ve been doing it like this I went from 2 full days of use to almost 3 full days without a recharge.
A funny thing about the battery, there’s so much bad press over it not being user-replaceable that you’d think the battery life stinks. But the truth is that it’s much, much better than any other phone I’ve owned which is nothing short of amazing when you consider how much I do with the iPhone. I play music, I make phone calls, I write email, I surf the web, and I take photos. I generally pick up the phone and fiddle with the interface and software more than I did with my other phones and I’m getting about twice as much life out of the battery.
Send MMS Messages from iPhone
Here’s the hint: send an email with a photo attached to att-phone-number@mms.att.net from your iPhone
I use MMS messaging to send my phone pictures of my son to my parents who live out of state but don’t have regular access to email. I was most disappointed to learn that iPhone doesn’t send MMS messages natively and I wasn’t sure how I was going to make this work. I tried to help my father set up his Cingular 3125 Windows Mobile email account. But I was trying to help him over the phone and Windows Mobile is simply awful and he couldn’t understand what I was asking him to do and I couldn’t tell where he was by icons or descriptions alone. For example, XM settings is the email settings I was looking for but I disregarded this menu item because I thought that it was satellite radio settings. Silly me, what was I thinking?
Anyway, I’ve tested it out with a couple of people this morning and it works. This is definitely a breakthrough moment for me because everyone I’d be sending an MMS to are on AT&T’s network. If VZW, T-Mobile, and Sprint have @mms email address you can use then I don’t see why this wouldn’t apply to them as well.
WDW 2007
So I’ve been at Web Design World the past few days and I’ve handed my card out to a couple of people and realized that I’m rocking a pre-designed template for this completely dead site. Here’s the quick story about why that is.
I had a completely designed and functioning site with blog, portfolio, and service sections. I actually was starting to get a little bit of a following in the comments section too. Then I posted this video and it was Dugg. My old web hosting company pulled my site and demanded I move to their “enterprise-level” hosting plan. So they were asking that I went from $7.95 a month to over $300 a month. I am just one guy and without this video my site hits were in the 10s-a-day level. I took the page down and that didn’t appease them. They would not reactivate my account unless I went to an “enterprise-level” hosting plan.
This wonderful company was aplus.net hosting (no way I’m linking to them here). I would highly urge you to not consider this bunch of clowns when considering your hosting options.
Anyway I jumped over to Dreamhost and I simply haven’t had time to put my new design and portfolio up yet. I’m definitely reinvigorated after seeing some really good stuff here at the conference but I imagine it will be another month or so before I can launch my custom WordPress template and portfolio work. I am a designer, I promise.