Smart phones do have a second life

When I lost my beloved iPhone 4 I was devastated, I replaced it with a new look alike iPhone 4s.

Fast forward 2 years later, the phone started showing its age. First evidence was the lack of voice in FaceTime and then came the day I realized I couldn't plug my earphones to the phone. The last straw was when the power button on the phone broke, imagine not able to lock or power down your phone, it was a night mare for few days.

All the above and the imminent launch of iPhone 6, I had almost made up my mind to wait for the launch and buy the new iPhone. But the new phone looked more Androidsh and to top it off my service provider threatened to hike price if renewed.

All said and done, to get a new phone I would have to pay $400 extra plus the equipment cost over period of 2 years and $180 year on year from there.

That pushed me to look into nexus 5, but after owning nexus 7 I am not a fan of bare bone Android any more.

So, I looked at the last option of repair and resurrect my existing phone, a quick Google search led me to icracked.com, a few phone calls and a day later, all my iPhone problems were fixed and it is working like a champ. The total cost was $65 including the cost of a new battery. Thankfully only 1 part broken and rest of it was just cleaning and removing lint.

IMessaging/Text Messaging problem with IOS 7

Over last few of months 2 things happened with some of my friends in terms of their cell phone handsets.

1. Some of them got fed up with IOS and switched to Android
2. Some of them got fed up with Android and switched to IOS specifically Iphone 5s

So, what is the significance of these 2 events. For those who do not know, Apple supports something called Imessage between IOS devices (Iphone, Ipad or Ipod) and it introduced this with IOS 5 and it is free. For people like me who refuse to sign up for a text plan it was a good deal. Now we have alternatives like whatsapp and all so it is not so big a deal, but not everybody in my contact list are on whatsapp either.

Now back to the events, because of event 1 I was unable to text message my friends any more and it always came up with “Imessage delivery failed”. In event 2 I wasn’t able to send my friends Imessages, no reason it should not work as according to Apple any IOS 5 or higher devices should be able to use Imessage.

I was hoping Dr. Google would provide answers but they said “Sorry, you are on your own”.  I tried deleting phone numbers of these specific friends and re-entering the same but no use either.

On a final try I deleted the contact of the friend who switched to Android completely and recreated the contact again. And the miracle happened, I was able to send text messages to this new Android friend and at the same time was able to send Imessages to friends who had switched to Iphone 5s.

If you were encountering problems like me and if the above solution works in your case too, will you please let me know?

iOS 7 first impressions

Over the weekend I updated my Iphone 4s to iOS 7 and here is my take on it

• I think the colors and hues are done to impress teenage girls. The more neutral look that the previous OS used to have is gone. At the first look I hated it but now its been a few days and I am getting used to it.
• The control center is pretty nice and slickly done, The OS now has a built in app to enable the flash led and use it as a flash light. Finally I could get rid of the ad driven app that I was using to do the same.
• The notes app used to have a selection of fonts and now we have to be satisfied with only default no choices.
• The camera app is re done nicely, it has a ton of live filters built in.
• Safari web browser is also redone, I like that it has the options on screen to make browsing private. I must warn you it will take a few minutes of getting used to as the default mode is full screen.
• The timer, safari apps are aiming for a 3D feel. 
• Finally any icon can be moved anywhere and can be grouped with any other one, for ex: in ios6 I couldn’t move the passbook or Newsstand from the main screen and keep them with other unused apps.
• The introduction of itunes radio is cool but I think it has a long way to catch up with apps like Pandora. At the first launch the radio had trouble finding my Wifi.
• The weather app has onscreen animations like the Android OS
• The maps on Apple still have long long way to go, on 1 instance it couldn’t find a location I was looking for while Google maps had no trouble finding the place on the second instance the app was predicting my arrival time ~20mins later than my GPS and Google maps. The error is not a big deal if it were for a 3-4 hr journey but in my case it was little over an hour long journey. 
• The battery drain is slightly faster with iOS7 than with the previous version, not a big deal and not a big concern.
• The background app killing reminds me of the old Palm OS and Android (instead of holding down on the app till we get a red bar at the end like we did in the previous OS, now just flick them up)
• The i-message interface also reminds me of Android. I hope the i-messaging works better with this OS as I had a lot of trouble using the i-message  in iOS 6 and had switched over to Google voice and whatsapp.
• Sorry no SWYPE keyboard yet.

On the whole the OS seems to be doing a catching up with Android, not too happy about that.