Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The general idea’s still the same though. You charge the USB TurboCharger 1200 up from any convenient USB source – either a computer’s USB port or one of Proporta’s own 12V or mains-to-USB adapters (incidentally these latter two come with the recommended ‘World Pack’ version of the product, along with a range of international mains pin converters), and then you can dispense this to just about any portable device, be it a Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Apple phone, be it a Nintendo DS Lite or even just something that charges over microUSB or miniUSB.

Proporta TurboCharger 1200

Discharging the USB TurboCharger 1200 is done by hooking things up using the supplied USB lead and one of the connectors. While charging, the three LEDs on this surface animate to indicate power going in – the animation stops when the accessory is fully charged. When dispensing charge, you can press the top surface button to light the three LEDs, giving you a rough idea of how much charge is left in the battery.

Box contents

It’s a system that has worked well for travellers over the last few years, although my main concern here was the relatively low capacity – 1200mAh is about the same as that in a typical smartphone (e.g. the Nokia N86 8MP that I used as my guinea pig device, though there’s an iPhone/iPod connector included and this could equally well have been an iPhone), but the transfer of charge is never 100% efficient and I’d expect the actual charge imparted to max out at about 900mAh, not enough to fully charge the battery of any current smartphone. However, depending on model of phone, it’ll get you to between 60% and 80% of capacity, certainly enough to keep you phoning, texting, browsing and twittering for a while longer.
In my main test, I took the phone down to about one ‘bar’ of battery life and then plugged in the USB TurboCharger 1200. The phone popped up ‘Not charging’. I’ve seen this before – and so have Proporta, for there’s a special (labeled) switch on the side of the TurboCharger 1200 that toggles the output voltage up to 5.5V, a voltage at which Nokia smartphones seem much happier. Charging was now proceeding properly.

The accessory is rated at 700mA output, so, allowing for a little inefficiency, I’d expect to get the phone up to about 75% charge in under two hours. The TurboCharger 1200 ran quite warm for the first hour (there’s the aforementioned inefficiency in action!) and then settled down to trickle charge – in fact, the trickle charging seemed to be going on forever and I stopped it at the two hour mark – by this time, no LEDs showed on the ‘power meter’ and I suspected no actual charging was still happening (despite the phone’s battery meter still animating).
Removing the charger, the test N86 showed six bars out of seven, but this dropped fairly quickly in real life use and (in typical non-linear Nokia battery gauge fashion) I’d estimate that in fact the battery had been charged to about 60%.

Of special note in this iteration of Proporta’s charger, besides the tiny size (it has the same plan dimensions as a standard credit card!) is the way the charge-in lead is hard wired and stowed within the body of the accessory. This saves fiddling around when you’re snatching 30 minutes of charge from a friend’s laptop while mobile, for example. You simply take the charger out of your pocket, snap out the connector and you’re in.

Stowing lead

Each of the Proporta chargers ‘do what they say on the tin’, but it’s absolutely essential to bear in mind the capacities involved and to try to be patient with the laws of physics. This smaller version of the charger will only realistically give you just over half a charge, will take an hour (at least) to deliver it, and will take an hour (or two or three or more, depending on the USB current limitations of the machine you’re using) to charge back up again. Although the size is impressive, these electrical limitations make it less suitable for the true road warrior than its bigger 3400mAh brother (review coming soon) – with such a big capacity (around two full charges of most phones), allowing the TurboCharger to charge itself overnight is understandable and at least you’ll know you’re good to go for a few days.

So, if space is at a premium in your pockets, this will get you out of a scrape, albeit at greater cost than simply having a spare, charged phone battery. Mind you, this will charge anything that runs down, so will also help out when your daughter’s DS runs out of steam. But if you can handle something of twice the volume then you’ll find the TurboCharger 3400 gives you far more capacity and options.

[Review kindly republished with permission from All About Symbian]

Then we had 6 months of utter craziness. With applications appearing in their thousands (literally – though 900 of each thousand was complete rubbish), the prevailing wisdom seemed to be that developers had to price their apps at a dollar or so to stand any chance at all of success – anything more expensive and sales wouldn’t be high enough to make it into the top 25/50 table – which, as we all know, is where the real stars live.

BUT. Sanity does seem to have largely prevailed now that the iPhone App Store has settled down. We still have a thousand new apps each week and 900 of these are still rubbish (if not 990), making it just as hard to find the really good stuff amidst the masses and masses of drivel. Most importantly though, the top applications/games (e.g. Quickoffice, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, Real Racing, to name three off the top of my head) are resisting the temptation to sink to the silly dollar price level, maintaining (more or less) their original pricing. And you know what? I think this is a good thing.

At silly one-dollar pricing, you, the consumer, might get a bargain. But the developer doesn’t get adequately rewarded and thus can’t afford to provide support or updates , in some cases even giving up on further applications. At $10 or $20 per application, you have to dip into your pocket rather further – but the rewards for the developer are much higher. After all, if their application or game is good enough then it will still sell well and the profit from each sale is now ten or twenty fold what it was.

Which means they can afford to live. And, importantly, live to code again. Is $20 too much for an office suite that I might use every day for the next couple of years? Of course not. Is $10 too much for a game that I’m going to play for 30 hours a month for the next year? Again, of course not.

Here’s hoping that sanity continues to prevail.

Over and over again, in reviewing iPhone games for IPAL, I come across user reviews saying ‘Game is buggy, just crashes every time’. Now, no developer worth their salt would release a game that kept crashing. What’s happening is that the iPhone is physically running out of RAM. Starting with perhaps 40MB free, some of the fabulous 3D games need just about all of this and when the RAM runs out, the OS panics and shuts the game down. Result: one unhappy user. On my iPod Touch, with 60MB free most of the time (again, after the OS has loaded its bits and pieces up), I never, repeat never, hit RAM limits, incidentally.

Apple have repeatedly said that the iPhone is not going to be allowed to multitask third party applications. Some have speculated that this is because third party apps might drain the processor power and decrease battery life. This may well be the case, but I say the ban is because Apple knows full well that with RAM being so critical that just one big game can hit the buffers, there’s no way they can let users run such applications in the background. 

In short, there simply isn’t enough RAM to go round. 

I don’t think Apple will change their stance on all this in one fell swoop, at Monday’s WWDC, but they will announce a brand new ‘iPhone 3’, I predict, and my fervent hope is that they’ve added in another 128MB RAM chip, giving iPhone users 170MB or so free after booting, enough that even the very largest games will load with oodles of space to spare. 

In fact, there would be so much spare that Apple could then experiment with letting third party apps multitask, i.e. stay resident in RAM, in the background, so that the biggest bugbear of iPhone gaming, that of having to wait while games get started all over again…. and again….. and again…. is eliminated. They could then release an iPhone OS update in the Fall that activated this allowed behaviour, and bringing the iPhone up to the multitasking level of every other smartphone in the world. 

PS. Incidentally, this isn’t a new problem in the phone world. Nokia struggled for a few years with phones with too little RAM and hit no end of problems in terms of user experience. With the N95 (onwards) they issued far more RAM and all the problems went away.

“Big deal”, owners of other smartphones might think, “my phone has had high-resolution video recording for years”. And they’re right, I used a Nokia N93 to record my summer holiday in 2006 in full VGA resolution with stereo sound. It was sunny and it was glorious. 

But Apple are set to go one better and by doing what they do best – making things easy for users while staying away from the bleeding edge.

Even on the mighty Nokia Nseries, many of which emulate this VGA video recording feat and most of which feature video editing to some degree, uploading videos to the world has been largely a case of ‘wait until you get home and plug it into your PC or Mac’. Partly because of the file sizes involved, it’s true, over 20MB per minute of footage, but also because for two years the only upload service offered was Vox, which almost noone’s ever heard of.

I have no idea why noone at Nokia thought of building or integrating a YouTube uploader, but it still doesn’t exist to this day. With iPhone 3.0, if the analysis is to be trusted, we’re looking at one-tap uploading straight from the phone. It’s so obvious, it’s painful.

Now to the thorny question of resolution. For years the YouTube ‘standard’ upload resolution was QVGA, i.e. 320 by 240. Yes, YouTube has now gone all HD and VGA is recommended, but the fact remains  that an awful lot of QVGA video is still uploaded around the world. Instead of the 20MB/min needed for uploading VGA footage at 30fps, QVGA videos (usually at 15fps) work out to around 5MB/min, a much more manageable figure for real world uploads over 3G or Wi-Fi.

So we have Apple providing one-click YouTube upload, hitting the sweet spot for manageable upload size and hitting a YouTube resolution standard (if not the current one) all at the same time. I realise that I’m video-biased (hey, I make The Phones Show) but even I can see that the potential’s here for another huge hit factor for Apple’s device darling.

Of the 20,000 applications in the store, I can honestly say, hand on heart, that only around two to three hundred are actually any good at all. Add the same number again which are so niche that only a dozen people across the world might want them and you are left with over 19,000 apps which are completely and utterly pointless. Or rubbish. Or both. 

But one app caught my eye today: Nothing.

That’s right, an application which does nothing whatsoever. Here’s the blurb.

How is it that Apple let so much rubbish get through their approval process? How is it fair that a talented developer can put hundreds of man hours into a slick app and have it disappear amongst trash like this? Or amongst 100 different bodily noise simulators? Is there a guy at Apple who sits there and loads up each submission? What must have gone through his mind when he got the submission for ‘Nothing’? “Yep, another valid iPhone application, lots of people will enjoy this….” Gah, I despair.

If I were in charge in Apple’s App Store team, I would enforce a certain minimum quality. Yes, it might end up being partly subjective, and would thus attract some criticism, but wouldn’t the end result, of having 1000 or so apps to choose from rather than 1000 apps to find among 20,000 bits of digital litter, be far, far preferable?

It makes my blood boil.  And I’ve still got the kitchen carpet to shampoo….

And, for the Apple iPhone, they’ve put together three cases and have kindly sent over samples for review on All About iPhone. In no particular order, here’s a look at their Perfora case, their Maya pouch and the all-conquering Alu-Leather Edge case. All three have their merits, as shown below…

The ‘Perfora’ is a horizontally belt-mounted pouch with leather top flap and magnetic closure. The leather and stitching is of good, though not 100% perfect quality and the rear belt clip is well designed to keep the device close to you at all times. In use, it’s easy to get the iPhone out with too hands and still possible to get it out one-handed. The choice of materials is great, with an odd but rather lovely neoprene insert.

Good for protection and good for style, but horizontally mounted belt cases aren’t to everyone’s taste or lifestyle. A personal choice!

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The Maya pouch comes in a wide variety of colours and is a simple, but stylish leather affair with soft, synthetic lining. There’s sadly no belt loop, but you do get a metal lanyard fixing point. I was a little disappointed by the the thickness of the leather used and the resulting minimal protection of the iPhone from knocks.

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Finally, the Alu-Leather Edge case is designed for device use while cased. This was (just) my favourite of the three cases, with the moulded hard plastic bottom holding the iPhone incredibly securely, while the synthetic rear inner protects the back from scratches. Volume and power buttons, audio jack, camera and serial ports are all accessible, without ever having to take the iPhone out of the case. The top flap has Proporta’s trademark aluminium protective insert and the closure is a simple press-fit, a system which seems to work well, though it’s hard to predict what will happen after a few months of use.

The only downside is the mounting arrangements. There’s a lanyard ring, but the belt option is via a screw-in swivel clip (not shown here, it’s too hideous) – when in place, this holds the whole assembly an inch or so off the hip and puts you firmly in ultra-geek territory. A simply belt loop or integral clip would have worked much better.

Still, by simply avoiding the swivel clip arrangement and leaving the dummy screw in place, you get a stylish in-situ case that offers great protection.

Thanks to Proporta for the review samples, go check out their range!

Steve Litchfield

In my year of owning an iPod Touch, this was my first real showstopping problem. But what to do? I’d be very surprised if this was a Touch problem – I’m guessing this is equally applicable to the iPhone as well. Half an hour’s Googling and I came across a reference to a similar problem encountered on a previous iTunes update by some users. I decided to try their solution – and also to try the iTunes/iPod backup system for real.

1. Do another Sync to iTunes, just to be sure that the latest info from my main applications was backed up
     
2. Click on ‘Restore’ in iTunes, to extract the iPhone OS from the device, format it and then restore the OS back onto the mobile.
    
     
3. When the iPhone/iPod restarts, it gets picked up by iTunes and there’s the chance to ‘Restore’ again, this time from the last backup of your data (your PIM and media data, at least). Again, this will be followed by a restart.
    
4. Next, very important, go into the iTunes menus and ‘Authorize computer’ again.
    
    
   Yes, yes, I know this is the same computer and iTunes should know better, but if you miss this step then the next one will fail miserably:
    
   
   Ignore the petulant ‘This computer is already authorised’  message.
    
5. The last stage is to go into the ‘Applications’ tab in iTunes and tick ‘Sync applications’. This is also now a great chance to have a decent clear out of your apps – which have you got installed but really don’t use much? When you’re done ticking, click on ‘Sync’ one last time.
    
    

Hopefully, your iPhone/iPod Touch is now fully restored. Your applications might not be quite where you left them, but at least they’re on and working with iTunes 8.1.

What went wrong? Something catastrophically buggy with Apple’s DRM/authorisation routines. I bet there are some embarrassed programmers at Cupertino. And very, very annoying for users everywhere – I’m sure I can’t be the only one affected by this!

The first time this happened, I reckoned it was a coincidence that so many apps had just been updated and so I sat there for 30 minutes while twenty odd (largish) games updated themselves. A day later, it happened again. Hmmmm…. I let them all update again. Another 30 minutes. A day later and all the suggested updates are back! Grrrr…… I tried the usual power off/power on routine, to no avail. It’s been happening fairly often (but randomly) since. Sometimes I’ll go chasing after the alleged updates and find that they’re all ‘ready and waiting’, other times I delve into App Store and find that ‘All Apps are up to date’. 

It’s clear that something’s broken in the whole App Store mechanism on my device and the chances are that Apple have found this bug themselves in the many months since the last firmware update. Or is it just me? My traditional trawl across Google couldn’t find any obvious incidences of the same issue.

Either way, I’m awaiting Apple’s next (long overdue) firmware update with more than usual anticipation and impatience!