Doesn't the "G" stand for Global?

While traveling in southern Brazil I decided to give the 3G iPhone's new GPS a try.

I opened up Maps and asked for my current location. It took a while to load - I even had to wake up the screen once or twice - but the maps finally loaded and the blue dot appeared. It had me located on a street in Los Angeles, over 4,000 miles north west of my actual location. Maybe it should be UPS (USA Positioning System) instead of GPS.

A lot of other things went right, though. The 3G network was always available and as long as we hand fed it the address of our current location it did a remarkable job of providing directions for where ever we needed to go.

Bleeding Edges

Rampant reports of bricked iPhones may be just typical start-up product issues instead of intentional deactivations by Apple.

In fact, it may be less painful for Apple to let people believe the bricking is purposeful rather than admit the software under that capacitive touch screen is not quite perfect yet.

According to an article at wired ...

beautiful as it is, the iPhone isn't finished -- its OS is a hack, rushed out to meet Jobs' demanding product deadlines.

... Erica Sadun, a technical writer and blogger at TUAW.com who contributed to an iPhone unlocking application, said Apple's update wasn't designed to disable hacked devices. Just the opposite: Sadun thinks Apple worked hard not to brick iPhones -- even hacked ones.

"It wasn't intentional at all," she said. "If they wanted to brick hacked iPhones, they could have done a much better job of it."

Sadun said the software update disabled some hacked phones because it was a "troublesome update" -- it even caused problems with iPhones that hadn't been touched. "They messed up," she said.

That makes more sense to me than believing Apple could not be 100% effective at deactivating an iPhone that has been tampered with in any way. Permanent deactivation probably requires nothing more complex than clearing the appropriate bit in the static RAM.

the Blogger Photostream as an iPhone Application

The Blogger Photostream is now an iPhone application. Just bookmark this link in your iPhone's Safari browser and enjoy:
http://chronita.com/m/blogger.php

iPhone Applications

There are new iPhone applications popping up all over.


chronita.com has fielded three so far with the webmaster there indicating there may be almost a dozen more coming up within the next few weeks.

At the time of this post there is Today in History, an animated view of the Solar System and travel advisories from the Overseas Security Advisory Council. (pictured)

http://chronita.com/m/todh.php
http://chronita.com/m/solar.php
http://chronita.com/m/osac.php