I have an iPhone 3G, which is more than 2 years old. As of now, the hardware is no longer supported by Apple. (Which is why Apple hardware will always be consumer toys: enterprises will not allow themselves to be forced into a rapid upgrade cycle.) The performance may have gotten a bit better than iOS 4.0, but it’s sluggish to the point where I’m embarassed to lend my phone to other people. The hardware is starting to go, with random freezes and a hairline fracture from the recharging port.

I haven’t upgraded to an iPhone 4 because I run Linux at home. iTunes is not available for Linux and iOS devices require iTunes for full functionality. It’s absurd that a fully-functional computer needs to be tethered to a desktop and I believe that Apple only enforces this to support their iTunes business model. Android phones are stand-alone.

I’m not the open source evangelist I used to be, but I still disapprove of Apple’s tight control over the iPhone platform. I would like to protest with my wallet by getting an Android phone.

However, I am addicted to the iPhone’s visual voicemail. I generally hate receiving voicemail: having to call in and step through a voicemail system to listen to it – or, even worse, delete voicemail that I know I don’t need to listen to – is excrutiating and I’ll procrastinate on it for days.

In the United States, Google Voice and competitor YouMail offer visual voicemail Android apps and all sorts of other features. Google’s official position is that they’re “working” on launching Google Voice in Canada, but they refuse to give any kind of timeline. The way Google works, it could suddenly be available any day in the next few years.

I’m hoping my iPhone 3 will last until Google Voice is released in Canada so I can get an Android phone. If not, I’ll have a hard judgement call to make.

The Vancouver Aquarium runs the OceanWise program, which is fairly popular in BC. Their iPhone app includes a find restaurants & markets near me (or an arbitrary address). This seems useful at first glance, but if I have the OceanWise app on my phone, I can make informed sustainable choices at any restaurant. I guess I could prefer OceanWise restaurants because they’ve made a commitment to sustainability, although I’ve noted that OceanWise certified restaurants can still have non-sustainable options on their menus, they just mark the sustainable ones with an OceanWise logo.

SeaChoice is a partnership of environmental NGOs (David Suzuki and the Sierra Club amongst others) that just publishes an advisory list. Their app is nothing but this list, but it’s more user-friendly (and less buggy) than the list portion of the OceanWise app. My favourite part is that you can switch between English and Japanese (called “Sushi” here), because English restaurants never serve anything other than the same six fish.

The SeaChoice list contains pictures and information on why fish are less sustainable unlike Ocean Wise’s curt “don’t eat that shit!”. (I’d love to be able to tell someone not to order the tuna because removing large predators might disrupt the ecosystem.) The
Ocean Wise list has more entries, but I have no idea whether I’m likely to run into “orangespot sardines” on a menu. The OceanWise and SeaChoice apps are both buggy, making me wonder about the capability of Canadian NGOs to develop (or manage contracts for development of) software. Neither of the lists has proper cross-listing between, for example, sardines and herring.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s SeafoodWatch program has an app that is far slicker (although still not without bugs) than either of the BC efforts. It includes a map of user-submitted locations to find specific fish. There are none in Canada right now and there’s no API to do a bulk upload of OceanWise certified locations, but that would be the best solution. Although SeafoodWatch includes Japanese, it bizarrely doesn’t include Spanish.

Via Metafilter, this review of using the iPhone with blindness contains an impressive description of using a “seeing” app (emphasis mine):

The other night, however, a very amazing thing happened. I downloaded an app called Color ID. It uses the iPhone’s camera, and speaks names of colors. It must use a table, because each color has an identifier made up of 6 hexadecimal digits. This puts the total at 16777216 colors, and I believe it. Some of them have very surreal names, such as Atomic Orange, Cosmic, Hippie Green, Opium, and Black-White. These names in combination with what feels like a rise in serotonin levels makes for a very psychedelic experience.

I have never experienced this before in my life. I can see some light and color, but just in blurs, and objects don’t really have a color, just light sources. When I first tried it at three o’clock in the morning, I couldn’t figure out why it just reported black. After realizing that the screen curtain also disables the camera, I turned it off, but it still have very dark colors. Then I remembered that you actually need light to see, and it probably couldn’t see much at night. I thought about light sources, and my interview I did for Get Lamp*. First, I saw one of my beautiful salt lamps in its various shades of orange, another with its pink and rose colors, and the third kind in glowing pink and red.. I felt stunned.

The next day, I went outside. I looked at the sky. I heard colors such as “Horizon”, “Outer Space”, and many shades of blue and gray. I used color queues to find my pumpkin plants, by looking for the green among the brown and stone. I spent ten minutes looking at my pumpkin plants, with their leaves of green and lemon-ginger. I then roamed my yard, and saw a blue flower. I then found the brown shed, and returned to the gray house. My mind felt blown. I watched the sun set, listening to the colors change as the sky darkened.

The app is $1, so I’m not going to bother checking it out, but it sounds like a lot of work could be done in the information design of colour-space (“Cosmic” is probably not a very helpful description). The Google Goggles Android app simulates a higher-level form of seeing and suggests where visual-to-speech apps are headed.

* Get Lamp is a documentary about text adventure games. His iPhone detected a grue.

Since I was looking forward to cleaning the jailbreak out of my iPhone 3G, I eagerly installed iOS 4.0. Like most commercial software, it is a big mistake to use a .0 version of an Apple product: early adopters are really Steve’s beta testers. What I wasn’t counting on is just how completely iOS 4.0.x would fuck up a 3G phone.

The 3G was launched in 2008. Even in the cell phone industry, two years is not that long. The previous revolutionary phone before the iPhone was the Motorola RAZR, launched in 2004 (the iPhone 4 is not revolutionary). Planned obsolesence is an environmentally irresponsible business model that the consumer electronics industry must move away from.

We know that Apple did test iOS 4 on 3Gs, because they disabled multitasking and backgrounds to improve performance (which makes you wonder how much worse it could be?). I understand that Apple is used to charging for computer operating system upgrades, which is one big reason why I have never bought an Apple computer. Perhaps Apple figured that a free OS upgrade is worth what you pay for it?

Versions of OS/X do not have official support lifecycles – Apple just decides to stop supporting old versions. This is part of the reason why Apple products will never be embraced by enterprises: only consumers and small businesses will tolerate having to upgrade on Steve’s whim. Apple is primarily a hardware and media company, so the analogy isn’t perfect, but consider some popular operating system support lifecycles:

• Ubuntu Dapper Drake which was released in 2005 will be supported to 2011
• Microsoft supports products for at least 5 years after their release

Apparently iOS 4.1 will fix the problem, but my next phone will almost certainly be running Google Android (just as soon as Google Voice is released in Canada ).

A few months ago I jailbroke (hacked) my iPhone 3G running iOS 3.1.3 using Redsn0w 0.9.4. Redsn0w is a tethered jailbreak, which means I have to run Windows software on a computer connected to the phone through the data cable. Redsn0w installs the jailbreak into firmware, so it persists through reboots. It took three tries to get it to work: so make sure you back up your data and have a lot of time.

Given that the jailbreak was free, I was expecting an open source ethic for jailbroken apps. I was totally mistaken: the jailbreak app installer, Cydia, has set up a parallel grey-market app store.

Two of the best original reasons to jailbreak an iPhone no longer apply:

• a computer can use it to access the Internet (“tethering”), but Rogers now allows this for all phones
• wifi-only apps like Skype can run over the cell network, but Apple now allows this for all apps

Some of the apps I was looking forward to using but ended up costing money:

QuickReply

The ability to reply to a text message in the notification screen, without dropping you out of whatever app you’re using.

LockInfo

Preview upcoming apppointments and unread messages on your lock screen. There are free alternatives that didn’t work.

Some of the free apps I did enjoy:

Five Icon Dock, Five Rows and Five Columns

These three apps combined increase the apps on your home screen from 20 to 30.

SBSettings

Single-touch access to things like turning the ringer off in software so you don’t have to worry about the button getting bumped in your pocket at a movie theatre.

Poof

Hides unused app icons like Weather and Camera where I have third-party replacements.

I can’t believe that people would pay for an app that may be completely unusable after an operating system upgrade. Many of the jailbreak apps were buggy, including the installer Cydia. My phone in general became buggier, occasionally spontaneously restarting or freezing up. I was quite disappointed in jailbreaking and decided as soon as iOS 4 was released I’d get a clean slate.

Gizmodo has the specs of the next iPhone.

The story, roughly, is that an Apple engineer was out getting drunk for his 27^th and lost it, someone picked it up, and Gizmodo paid $5,000 to get their hands on it and take it apart.

The big news is that it has a front-facing camera (video calls finally arrive) and a higher-rez screen, as well as a stylizing upgrade and some advanced features (maybe including noise cancellation).

My personal GTD system is implemented on Evernote, which has both a web interface and a native iPhone app. Although I always have my iPhone on me (I don’t bother to sync my calendar to the web), I need a desktop interface for doing mass note management, entering long note contents, and cranking through @online notes.

Every note in Evernote goes in one notebook: I have the standard GTD setup although most of my notes are in Next Actions. Every note can have multiple on-the-fly user-defined tags, which I think is vitally important for a GTD system. Evernote can filter the list of notes by tag, but can only do tag intersections (eg: @downtown AND @saturday), not unions (eg: @home OR @downtown) nor other algebra (eg: @home AND NOT @online) – my lists are small enough that that’s not a deal breaker. More annoying is that Evernote can’t do tag hierarchies (eg: all @saturday notes are @weekend), so I end up overtagging. There is no note nesting or linking which I suspect might be useful if I were doing heavier GTD project managment.

I suspect Remember the Milk is better, but I’m not sure it’s $25/year better. I have a design for a better system in my head but I’m happy enough with Evernote not to implement it.

iPhone games are getting good…