Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Antennagate passed, Glassgate has just started. What's up next, Apple?

The antennagate madness seems to be finished now (everybody knows now that Apple's faulty design is causing signal lose, or even call drops), and the next problem, generically named glassgate, has just started. It was believed that it was just the creation of the competitors, but it seems to be quite real now because Apple has taken measures against this problem.

It is not clear how resistant the glass from the back of the device is, as there were reports which said that after the device has been repeatedly taken out and inserted back from and in some cases, scratches occurred on that glass. It seems that dust particles can get stuck when the cases are inserted (between the case and the glass), causing serious scratches on the glass. In fact, these scratches will, eventually, create cracks on the whole glass surface from the back of the iPhone 4.

It seems that Apple is aware of this issue, because they pulled from the Apple Stores from all around the world all cases of this type (at least until this problem is clarified). So, if you don't have a case, you'll get call drops because of the way Apple designed iPhone's antenna. But if you get one (anything else except the bumper), you risk to have the glass from the back of the device even cracked.

I already see Apple telling everybody that their products doesn't have any issues, and users are the only ones responsible for that scratches/cracks (just as they did with Antennagate).

Saturday, November 6, 2010

No Limera1n or GreenPois0n icon on iPhone/iPod/iPad's SpringBoard after Jailbreak? You're just doing it wrong.

For those who didn't know, SpringBoard is the home screen of the iOS, the screen where all of your apps are located. I won't tell very much about Limera1n or GreenPois0n, they are just jailbreaking applications (Limera1n works on Windows and Mac, while GreenPois0n has a version for Linux also). Basically, they are quite the same thing (they're using the same exploit), and they work with any iDevice running 4.0, 4.0.2 or 4.2 firmware.

They are both very easy to use, you just have to download, run, and click "Make it ra1n!", and you'll be told how to put your device in DFU mode in order to start jailbreaking your device. A problem experienced by some of the people who tried jailbreaking their iDevices was that there was no Limera1n/GreenPois0n icon on the SpringBoard after jailbreaking (even though the applications said that jailbreaking succeeded).

The idea is that iTunes (it doesn't matter what version it is, it just needs to recognize your device) must be kept running while jailbreaking. Don't ask me why, I also had that problem, and when I left iTunes running while I used Limera1n, my jailbreak succeeded (when you see that drop rain on your iDevice, it means that jailbreaking succeeded). Probably, there's something in iTunes which allows the device to receive data while in DFU mode.

Who would have thought that there's such an easy fix for this problem?

If you're on Android, just don't use NetTraffic Monitor (from PopSoft) to monitor your traffic. It causes only issues.

NetTraffic Monitor is an app from Android Market which claims to be capable of monitoring your data traffic. It seemed quite weird to me even from the first run, because it requested me super user access (I'm running on a rooted device), even though its only work was to view and count my traffic, and nothing more.

After I installed it, I observed that the internet over 3G/2G networks was no longer working (the device was sending data, but it wasn't able to receive back anything). Actually, I didn't realize that the problems started after I installed NetTraffic Monitor, it took me about 2 days to realize that (during that time, I spoke with my carrier, thinking that they had problems with the network).

The app indicated only about 30 kb during that two days on mobile data networks, and absolutely no traffic on WiFi, even though I probably had about 50 MB on it. So I decided to uninstall it because it was useless (I also realized then that the problems started after its installation), and after the uninstall, guess what? The internet started working normally, and I haven't got any problems since then.

The app is the first one if you search for "Traffic Monitor" in the Market, so just be careful what you install and what you don't.