Check this out, people on the street do a review of the new iPhone 5:

To be able to communicate within the #ibmcsc brazil team and with our clients we got prepaid cell phones. LG model “old”. Very old. See historical picture on the right. Typing a message takes forever (you remember T9?), placing a call is really tricky and the menu structure is just confusing.

As iPhone user since day 1 this reminded me of how well Apple did in terms of usability – with a modern smartphone you can look up directions anywhere and right now, it helps with online translations and makes you not think when using it. It’s just more productive, so going back to the 90ies feels really weird.

So why did the CSC program management not invest into cheap Android phones and a data plan for us? Well, somehow I have the feeling they did this on purpose, so we have to ask for directions, have to train our Portuguese and interact more with the locals…. which is great, as I wrote over here.

So let’s not complain, go with the flow and interact in person!

PS: talking about real live - Guilherme from our client has the new LG Optimus 3D, which is not old school and has a 3D camera and a 3D display. AMAZING. It is very impressive to have such a phone in hand and view 3D pictures on the display without any glasses – this is where the future will be!

I can’t wait to have the iPhone 5 in my hands! Apple definitely does it again, simplifying our lifes!

Apple seems to have “lost” another iPhone prototype in a bar… now they want it back – they even produced an advertisement…

Absolutely amazing real-time translation app: World Lens. Just point your phone to some text and it translates for you… in place, right inside the image. Unfortunately only English<->Spanish are available right now, but imagine this with Chinese while being in China. Absolutely fantastic!

Download from the App Store. Developers Homepage. Via daringfireball.

But maybe wiping the phone clean and starting over is the best overall option sometimes.

Hey, it’s a phone! Why should I need to worry about memory management, background tasks and hung processes? Oh, it’s an Android phone, yes, you have to take care of that on your own. Because it is “open”. Uhm.

I personally love my closed iPhone, which just works.

Recommended reading for Android users, via John Gruber.

Getting rich by writing an app for the iPhone and selling it in the appstore sounds very lucrative… however all those free (and most times useless) apps don’t make it easier to be successful. And in my opinion they destroy the business model, as free can’t pay any bills.

For example:

Pano’s not particularly cheap, at $3, but it can create some enormous, impressive panoramas right on your iPhone. (source)

Unfortunately lots of people I talk to think the same – “oh, this app is sooooo expensive, it costs 3 Euros!”. Come on, you paid at least 200 Euros for your iPhone and you pay about 20 Euros per month for a contract… and then you complain about 3 Euros for some useful software?

What bugs me even more is if these people are software developers who write software on their own! They know how much time it takes to write (bug free, nice and shiny) software, earn money by writing software and and still they complain if a developer wants to get 3 Euros for his software?

Wow.

Update 1: it seems iAd does not really solve the issue of the million apps in the appstore. $ 14,- per sale is not worth it.
Update 2: same problem on the iPad – just too many apps and too little showroom.
Update 3: make sure you don’t miss this comic!

(Image copyrighted by theoatmeal.com)

Two non-published Dilberts talking about the “issue” of a lost 4th generation iPhone:

Hilarious!

You can read the full story at  Scott Adams Blog post.

I use one WLAN very frequently that uses WPA2 Enterprise for authentication; this also means that the certificate used for authorization has to be renewed every year. Getting the new certificate is not really that much of an issue, but renewing it was really hard this time….

In OSX 10.5 the certificate has to be imported into Keychain Access, which worked as expected. But for some reason the certificate was not used for authentication, the dialog for WPA2 Enterprise networks always defaulted back to the 1Password certificate. The first in list. Which obviously failed.
It took me a while to figure out where exactly the certificate has to be chosen in the Network Preferences pane – in a dialog that is very well hidden:

The iPhone was even worse – importing the certificate (and creating a new profile with it) was not a big deal. But again, only the first, old, expired certificate was used. Nothing easier then that, just remove the profile. Interestingly the certificate was still there in the “add WLAN” dialog. Removed the newly imported certificate – the old one is still there. Reset network settings – the certificate is still there. WTF?!?!
What finally worked was installing the old, expired certificate and then removing it again, without installing the new one. This removed the profile *and* the certificate from the phone. Then installing and using the new certificate was simple and worked as usual.
My guess is that the two profiles/certificates with the same name somehow confused the iPhone – so the process is to remove the old certificate before adding the new one.

While I hope this blog post helps others when they have to exchange their WPA2 Enterprise Certificate it will definitely help me next year on August 28th when I have renew mine again

With the recent iPhone 3.0 release Apple included a feature called “Find my iPhone“, which allows users of the MobileMe service to locate their iPhone in case it has “switched owners”.
Now Kevin left his beloved phone in a bar and was able to track it down using the new feature… in his blog he describes his experiences and the hunt for the iPhone:

Read the full story….

PS: one feature that I miss would be to be able to remote-lock the phone, so it requires a passcode immediately after the message has been received.