Battery life tip for iPhone gamers
It’s certainly encouraging to see Apple providing ‘Bug Fix’ firmware updates every few weeks. For me at least 2.0.2 does indeed seem to iron out a few of the strange crashes and laggy keyboard issues. However, one huge ‘bug’ is the rather depressing battery life. There are numerous ways to squeeze every minute of life from the iPhone battery, but by far the best that I have discovered is Airplane Mode.
If you are about to dive in for an hour’s worth of gaming on Galcon, or looking to channel water droplet during train ride home in Enigmo, then Airplane Mode will greatly increase your chances of coming out of the experience having only lost 15-25% of your battery life.
Sure you’ll be out of contact for duration, but your extra focus might just help you on your way to that ever elusive score of 6,000,000 on Pinball RC!
Well that’s my top tip for gamers, what’s yours?
Apple Store after sales service
A couple of years ago my Nokia N93 took some damage to one of the microphones, after a visit to my local Nokia Service Center I patiently waited for my beloved N93 to return to all shiny and new. I waited, I waited some more, phoned the service centre and was told to wait a bit longer. Eventually, after a mere 3 months, my phone was returned to me. Imagine my anger to discover that there was no improvement, the microphone was still obviously broken. After a 20 minute chat with a manager and another 4 days wait the phone was replaced.
After such a bad experience I was not looking forward to my trip to the Apple Store yesterday. With 2 broken iPhones in hand I approached the Genius Bar of the Southampton store.
BBC iPlayer goes one better
A while ago I wrote about the BBC launching iPlayer for the iPhone. Well, they’ve now gone one better. The whole iPlayer site has been redesigned, as detailed in this BBC Internet Blog post. But when you log onto it from an iPhone, you now get an iPhone-optimised site.
As with many other successful iPhone-optimised sites (such as Facebook), it uses a tabbed interface and really focuses on the essentials.
It’s much more navigable – no more pinching and zooming – and a great improvement, as you can see from the screenshots.
Carnival of the Mobilists #136
A warm welcome all, to this week’s Carnival. Make a mug of tea, get your comfy slippers on, and settle in, because we have some treats for you.
Schmap makes existing sites iPhone-friendly
Schmap are releasing a public beta of a new service today to enable your website for the iPhone. Add Schmap’s javascript snippet to your website, and it will additionally display contact and address information formatted in a very iPhone-friendly way. Here’s how it looks on their featured site, Pure Food And Wine.
Touching any of the fields will launch the relevant iPhone application e.g. touch the phone number to call the number. Turning the phone on its side will keep the contact details visible and also show a map.
MMS sending coming to your O2 iPhone
I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this before. A little while ago, Ross McKillop developed O2 MMS, which enabled you to read multimedia messages on your iPhone, without going through O2’s torturous non-iPhone friendly website. It’s a donation-supported service with no jailbreak required, and is listed on Apple’s Web Apps directory.
MobileSafari also auto-completes .com
Here’s a little tip I haven’t seen anywhere else. MobileSafari auto-completes URLs with .com if you don’t specify a domain. For example, type in “yahoo” into the address bar, and hit Go. MobileSafari will add the leading “http://”, and then the trailing “.com”.
Adding the leading http:// reference is well-known, but I haven’t seen (or found during a search) anyone detailing the .com being added. This may be a firmware 2.0+ addition, but I don’t think so.
Note: This tip is guaranteed to save you milliseconds during your day.
Review: Labyrinth LE
Remember when I said that awesome and innovative games were coming? Well, that doesn’t just mean complex, graphics-heavy games, but those that make use of the fusion of capabilities that the iPhone has.
Labyrinth is fine example: it’s a very simple version of the wooden box game that makes great use of the accelerometer. Think Super Monkey Ball with a top-down view. And no monkey.
A provocation and a benchmark
Articles by Marek Pawlowski of MEX are always interesting, and the latest one is no different. In “Moving from mobile capabilities to mobile compulsion“, he looks at what the impact of the iPhone and the App Store really is, and who’s best placed to suceed though understanding user experience.
There is some great insight in the article, but this struck me in particular:
You could transplant the iPhone UI and App Store into an equivalent Nokia or Samsung handset and it wouldn’t succeed without the myriad other elements which comprise Apple’s overall experience.