Switched back to iOS with the iPhone 6

Since the next iPhone release is right around the corner, everyone is offering discounts on iPhone 6 and 6 Plus here in Japan. So I decided to grab one of such opportunities and switch back to iOS. The phones we bought were the 16GB iPhone 6 and not the 6 Plus. The phones were had for about 11% of their original value, which turned out to be ¥8,500 per phone. Would have been great if they were free. Still, I can sell them for like ¥50,000  a piece at the current second hand market price.

We got the Gold one for my wife and Space Grey one for myself. On the way back home, we paid a visit to the Daiso store (a popular 100 Yen shopping chain) and bought screen filters and covers. My wife got a hard cover with a fancy Japanese art and I got a TPU case which looks decent for the Space Grey model. Since I plan to sell them before leaving Japan, I did not want to lose the resale value my scratching the skin.

The carrier we switched to was KDDI AU. Docomo’s monthly charges are high and Softbank would not have worked since Y-Mobile, the carrier that I was using previously uses the same network as Softbank, thus the MNP discounts do not apply. As expected, the phones are SIM locked hence I would have to sell them within Japan anyway.

This is not a permanent switch. I expect to switch back to Y-Mobile or Softbank if they offer a nice deal. Since the phones were bought paying full price, I can sell them anytime. Of course I would have to pay the termination fees. As long as I can sell the phone and recover (actually, make a profit), I'm all good.

I wouldn't be selling the Nexus 5's because despite having issues with Lollipop, they are decent phones and more importantly they are unlocked. I hate the camera though. Feels so good to use a fast camera again.

This is also a great opportunity  for me to test iOS 9 in the coming months. In a year or so, I would most probably switch to iOS depending on the quality of Android M and iOS 9. I would definitely be able to experience Android M since I'm not selling the Nexus 5's.

Decided to make the switch from iOS to Android

Background

Even though at first I whole heartily welcomed Apple adding a lot of features to iOS 8, I soon realized how much of a blow that was to the reliability of iOS. Despite Apple releasing many updates to fix the issues, there are many issues that haven't been addressed.

I experience

• app crashes,
• apps being unable to connect to the Internet without turning Wi-Fi off and back on,
• SwiftKey keyboard popping up really slowly or not popping up at all and
• the copy/paste dialog not popping up when tapping on a text box

almost everyday..

Those are only the ones that I can remember. I have never encountered this many problems in iOS before. Unfortunately with the iPhone you cannot downgrade so I'm stuck with these issues until Apple does something about it. However they are late...intolerably late and I cannot wait any longer.

Thus I've decided to take things in to my hands. That means switching camps. I am finally going to switch to Android. I'm not completely sure that this would improve the situation as Android might have larger issues, but with the release of Lollipop or Android 5.0, it appears that Android is finally good enough. That's not to say that there is no learning curve and it probably would be quite steep for my wife but she is willing to adapt.

So switch already!

While switching to Android isn't that difficult, I am after the best possible Android experience in a carrier unlocked phone. That means getting a Google Nexus Phone with Android Lollipop. However, Softbank, my current carrier doesn't offer Nexus devices. Luckily there is one carrier, Y-mobile, that does. So I have to switch carriers to become a Nexus owner.

Lower the YouTube video quality on a mobile data connection

When I bought the iPhone 5S a little more than a year ago, I was quite pleased with the LTE performance. Previously with 3G on the iPhone 3GS and 4S, I could hardly stream YouTube videos without frequent buffering. A 5 minute long video would take more than 15 minutes  to playback due to these pauses. Thus the speed boost enjoyed by LTE was a very welcome upgrade for me.

But the situation didn't completely improve with LTE. Softbank was artificially limiting my streaming capabilities. They used to offer unlimited data with 3G probably because they knew it would total up only a couple of GBs even for heavy users. With LTE, I only could go up to 7.5GB before throttling. It’s actually only 7GB, and the extra 500MB was because I signed up for tethering, which was free of charge in the first two years. While 7.5GB was probably a lot, with the speeds observed with LTE, it was hardly adequate. But the biggest pull back was caused by the next limitation: you could only use 1GB in 3 consecutive days before throttling occurred.

Curse you, Softbank!

The YouTube app itself wasn’t helpful either.

Since the LTE speeds were great, it was “intelligently” playing back at HD Quality, which was 720pon the iPhone 5S. That’s would be hundreds of MB for one LinusTechTips video. You could change the resolution only if you were on Wi-Fi. What kind of retarded decision is that? I guess they don't have caps in the US. :-/

(Click the image to see a higher resolution image)

Needless to say that this was really driving me crazy. Why aren't we allowed to use a lower resolution to save packets? I can understand it if it would adversely affect the streaming performance as people might stupidly select the highest resolution, thinking they knew better. If that's the reason behind it, giving the permission to reduce the resolution would not have affected streaming performance.

Jail-broke my iPhone 5S running iOS 8.1 using Pangu

 

It's been only a couple of months since iOS 8 has been released to the public and we already have a fully functional jail-break! At first, there were a lot of steps that needed to get it to work but Pangu, the tool that's used to jail-break, has been getting updated frequently and now it is as simply as clicking a button. That meant my wait was over; it was time for me to try it out on my iPhone 5S.

 

Note: At the time of jail-breaking my phone, the version of Pangu out for the public was 1.1 but as of this moment, the tool has been updated to version 1.2.1. You should get the most recent version which would have most bugs ironed out.

 

I followed the steps mentioned in this YouTube tutorial posted by EverythingApplePro and it came out fine.

 

Video courtesy EverythingApplePro

 

[Article] Using SwiftKey "app" on the iPhone 5S

Apple doesn't let you replace the default keyboard on iOS devices. That is a big bummer. While the keyboard's auto correction has improved in the last few iterations of the OS, there are still ways to improve the accuracy and typing speed of these virtual keyboards. The issue with stock iOS virtual keyboard is that there is no feedback from the keys. You are just hitting different places of the screen. But I'm sure, with time you can improve on your typing even with the default keyboard - as I have.

When I bought my first touch screen device, the Samsung Omnia i900 running Windows Mobile 6.0, I had trouble typing quickly. Well, I've never been good with the keyboards on my old phones either. Maybe that was because I didn't have a girlfriend to frequently send SMS to. With the Omnia, there was haptic feedback to give you some kind of feedback when typing. But it wasn't good. I felt the keyboard was laggy with it enabled so I always disabled it.

That was when I watched a video on Swype, a new keyboard that worked by swiping on top of the keys, instead of hitting them. You didn't have to swipe perfectly on top of the letters nor had to be very accurate with the order of the letters. It was truly "intelligent". You could insert new words by going them in. Luckily, there was a compatible port for the Omnia. Not an official one though. I installed it and was impressed with it. Very impressed!!!

But I got rid of the Omnia before I came to Japan and switched the iPhone. IPhone 3GS was my first iPhone. Then the iPhone 4S and now the iPhone 5S. So I had been using the stock iPhone keyboard since 2010. But if you could Jailbreak your iPhone, there is a version of Swype (but it's just a mockup and not very functional) on Cydia store.

[Rant] 3DMark on the iPhone 5S

A couple of days ago I get to knew that they have released a version of 3DMark – the popular 3D gaming benchmark on the PC – for iOS.

There are three tests that you can run.

And I ran all of them to see what scores it gave me.

Tackling iOS Auto-Correct

I don’t have a problem with iOS’s auto correct when it comes to English – in fact I’ve gotten used to it so much that I can use it to assist in my typing instead of cursing every other second. I don’t even try to correct the misspellings for certain things that I know – from experience – that iOS would be able to automatically and properly correct eventually.

But when it comes to typing in Singlish – that is, typing in English Roman characters that sounds like Sinhalese – iOS’ auto correct feature gets completely confused. I have to virtually correct word after word manually. I use Singlish when writing SMS.

After the OS update, somehow my dictionary didn’t get synced to the phone from the backup. It had a lot of custom words that I had saved into the dictionary. Well, iOS adds words that I type and don’t correct into the dictionary so I didn’t actually do anything manually. Funny thing is though, some of the words that got saved the last time did not get saved this time.

I searched for a way to edit the custom dictionary, but I found an easier option. You can actually use the “keyboard shortcuts” feature of iOS.

 

Contrary to what the title says, you don’t necessarily have to add shortcuts. You can just add the words and those words will constitute your custom dictionary. Using keyboard shortcuts such as “ty” for “thank you” is purely optional.

Trying out a new browser on my iPhone - Mercury Browser

Safari is a great mobile browser. I didn't want to give anything else a shot because I was in the opinion that they were all crap. That opinion became more assuring when Google released Chrome for the iOS. Chrome is my only choice on the PC, but I hate it on my iPhone. It is slow, the UI isn't that easy to use, it's slow, and did I mention that it's slow? It's definitely slow. Completely the opposite of its desktop counterpart. (Btw, I hate Safari on the desktop.)

But Safari isn't perfect on mobile either. In fact, it has two major problems and one of them is driving me insane.

One is the lack of bookmark sync options. I use Chrome on the desktop and I want to sync the bookmarks between the Safari on iPhone and Chrome on Desktop. No, you cannot do that. At least, there is not straightforward way.

The other issue is much worse. The web pages refresh when you move back to a tab from somewhere else (another tab of another app). It doesn't happen all the time but it happens too often. Either there is a timeout or Safari is clearing out the memory used by a tab that's not in focus when there isn't enough RAM. If latter is the reason, iPhone 5 should exhibit this phenomena less often. I don't know if that is the case because I don't have an iPhone 5.

iOS 6.1.2 released and can be jailbroken using evasi0n 1.4

Apple released iOS 6.1.1 just a week or do ago to fix 3G connectivity related issues specifically on the iPhone 4S, but it did fix the Exchange bug nor the battery drain issue that iOS 6.1 introduced. Instead, 6.1.1 brought back a serious flaw that was present in the old days that allowed anyone to bypass the password lock screen without entering the password. 

The trick is a bit hard to do, and I haven't tried it. But here's how you do it.

Today Apple released iOS 6.1.2 which fixes all these 3 issues. That's all good and all, but what about the state of jail breaking? Does 6.1.2 patch the vulnerability that allowed evasi0n jailbreak to pwn iOS 6.1?

Not so. The evasi0n jailbreak tool has been already upgraded to version 1.4 which allows you to jailbreak 6.1.2. Head to this link if you already don't know the procedure.

Jailbreak iOS 6.1.2 Untethered On iPhone 5, 4S, iPod touch And All Other Devices Using Evasi0n [Tutorial]

Edit:

Some say the password bypass bug is fixed, some say it is not. I hope it is fixed because I don't want Apple to release updates every week which might eventually block evasi0n tool. :/

Send as SMS if you know iMessage is going to fail.

I love iMessage on the iPhone. I get instant delivery notifications, not as a new SMS alert but right besides the message. I can see if the person I sent the message has started replying to the message. An above all, it is free is you are sending messages to iPhones - since your data bill is - well, generally - fixed.

But there is one problem. If I got a message from a contact that uses an iPhone (i.e. the phone associated with that number is set as an "iPhone" instead of generic "mobile") it would always try to send the message as an iMessage. The recipient might not have data connectivity (there are people who buy iPhones without unlimited fixed data plan to save big bucks on their monthly subscription fee) and iMessage might not actually work. There is a timeout period in iMessage, after which the message will be sent as a regular SMS. The timeout period can be too long.

If you know that the recipient doesn't have Internet connectivity, you can simply send the message as a regular message by tapping and holding the message and selecting "Send as SMS".

It's such a small thing, but I didn't know you could do this until recently. Shame on me. But shame on you if you say that didn't know about this after reading this post. ;)

Upgraded to iOS 6.1.1 which fixed 3G connectivity issues (and already jail-broken)

We all knew that iOS 6.1.1 was just around the corner as Apple released a beta version to the developers few days ago. Yesterday, all of a sudden, the final version of iOS 6.1.1 came out - just for the iPhone 4S. I didn't expect it to come out this soon but it seems like there was a major problem with the iPhone 4S. Even Vodafone in the UK told people not to upgrade to 6.1.

Looks like the problem was with 3G connectivity. I too had problems where the webpages would take forever to load and calls taking a long time to connect. But I never suspected the problem was with the OS. I blamed SoftBank for their ever-so-worsening quality of connectivity.

OK, so this sounds like a critical update, but what about jailbreaking? Will it break the evasi0n jailbreak? Will I not be able to jailbreak again? Haha! Apparently there was nothing to worry about. Evasi0n jailbreak tool had been upgraded to version 1.3 which can be used with iOS 6.1.1. How awesome is that?

The iOS 6.1 upgrade afterthoughts

So, it's been a week since I upgraded to iOS 6.1 and I have few things to share. Thus this is the part 2 of the article.

 

Apple can come up with 200 new features, but I had trouble finding even 10 things that I might call a new "feature".

 

Maps

The biggest change that came with the upgrade was the new maps app from Apple. But like most people, I don't use it. In fact, I didn't have to use the maps app the whole week. But if I want to use maps in the future, I will use Google Maps. Basically, I wish I could simply get rid of the Apple Maps app and replace it with the Google Maps app. Apple Maps look prettier though.

Apple maps app

 

 

 

Google maps app

 

 

No YouTube?

 

Just like the old maps app, they also removed the old YouTube app. But they didn’t substitute it with a new app of their own. Instead, now you have to download and use Google’s newly designed “full-featured “ YouTube app, which is more functional anyways. So this is really a non-issue.

 

Best Jailbreak Tweaks for iOS 6.1

Now that Cydia has become almost fully functional after the issues it faced thanks to overloaded servers caused by surge of usage after the evasi0n jailbreak was released, I have managed to get my phone back to where it was. (That was along sentence to start with!) I guess you all are waiting for me to keep my promise. I should reveal my list of best jailbreak tweaks.

1. Zephyr (Repo: BigBoss)

This nifty tool adds gesture based multitasking to your iPhone. You hardly need to use the home button on your iPhone anymore. I wrote about Zephyr few months back. The only caveat is that this is not free.

 

Zephyr in action

 

2. Accelerate (Repo: BigBoss)

Bored of how slow and womanly the animations of stock iOS is? Wanna give it some adrenaline boost? This is the tool for the job. Compared to the apps such as fakeclockup, you can enable speed boost part wise. For example, if you don't want to speed up the busy animation (because it looks stupid), you can keep it at its regular speed.

 

Evasi0n Jailbreak is now available and Cydia is heavily loaded

When I woke up in the morning, the first thing I did was to turn on the PC and see if the evasi0n jailbreak was out. It was, and I straight away downloaded (you can download it from here.) the tool and started the jailbreak process. But right at the beginning, it gave me an error. I was supposed to turn off the password lock just for now and I had done so. But I also had to disable encryption in iTunes backups. I used a password to see what it does. It seems to just encrypt the backup and also include the passwords to accounts in the backup because it is now safe to include them. (I didn't know that the passwords weren't included in the unencrypted backup.)

 

Anyways, once I disabled the password, I relaunched the evasi0n tool and started the jailbreak process. It was almost automatic. Once you press the button to start the jailbreak, it restarted the phone once or twice (I don't know because, like always, I went away and did some morning chores.) and when I came back, it was halted at one point. I was supposed to hit the new icon that was freshly installed to the iPhone, named Jailbreak, to proceed. I did so, and the process continued and it was done. It did one final reboot to put things in order.

 

 

Finally upgraded to iOS 6 (iOS 6.1 in fact)

It's completely unnatural of me to hold on to an old version of any OS, but no thanks to Softbank's arrogance, Apple's stupidity and added security, I was stuck in iOS 5.1.1.

Softbank's arrogance was that the phone is SIM locked. You could unlock the iPhone 4S using GeveySIM Ultra S up to iOS 5.1.1 (that was then, now it supports up to 6.0.1 even without a jailbreak) Remember, I went back to SL last December and I wanted to use this phone with my Mobitel SIM. (But I ended up not unlocking the phone in the end. I could do fine with my dad's iPhone 3GS.) Either way, by the time I visit Sri Lanka again, I would have a new phone - or a proper unlock will be available for the iPhone 4S...hopefully.

Apple's stupidity was that their Apple Maps debacle. You know, they removed Google maps from OS and they added their own freshly designed maps app to iOS 6.0. It came with added functionality such as turn by turn navigation and flyover view, but their rendering was not accurate - not by a few meters, but a few 10's of kilometers and even farther. Most of us, the iPhone users, depend on the Google Maps to travel around Japan. Google Maps are very precise and detailed for Japan. So, NO, I could not possibly make up my mind to upgrade to iOS 6.0 with the maps app being in that disastrous state. (Few months after iOS 6.0 was released, Google released their all new maps app to the AppStore, so now this problem is no more.)

ASPHALT 7 - finally getting into some serious gaming on the iPhone

I have a pretty good gaming rig at home so I never really bothered gaming on the iPhone (that's the only console like device I have still I get a tablet next year). Besides, why play games on a 3.5" screen when I have a 27" screen with million times the horse-power to run AAA grade games with full blown graphics? Not to mention - keyboard and mouse FTW!

Few days ago, I managed to get ASPHALT 7 for free when there was a holiday deal. That's great and all, but I never played the game much back then. I played like one race to see how it felt. It felt bad! Controlling the car using the motion sensors was hard work.

But as life goes on, unexpected things happen. Now I am back in Sri Lanka at my parents' place and I don't have my PC with me. We don't have WIFI either, so I have to use the old desktop PC at home. Even Connectify doesn't work properly; PC freezes after a while.

So I gave another shot at ASPHALT 7. After a few last place finishes, I began to get hold of controlling. But I was still frequently hitting the wall and incoming traffic. There is a race mode called "paint job" where you have to finish the race within a given time but if you scratch the body, you get a penalty. That's the hardest game mode. The motion controls aren't very responsive. However,  once I got used to drifting - hit the brake and turn - handling became much easier. Still, paint job mode is pretty hard.

I drained the battery of the phone 3 or 4 times from 100% playing the game. The phone gets pretty hot when running it. There is some stuttering at times - maybe it needs the iPhone 5 for best experience.

Now I have finished 6 cups. The races are getting difficult with each new cup. I'm currently stuck at Cup 7.  But I skipped it and started playing Cup 8 so that I can find some cash to do some upgrades to the car. (By the time I post this, the results would have changed.)

Either way, most probably I will be able to complete the game before I head back to Japan. The only problem I have at the moment is the battery running out frequently.

Too bad I wish I could post some game-play videos like I do with PC gaming.

Edit:
Since this post, my flight back to Japan got delayed by a week and I managed to finish the game (single player championship) with all gold medals except one race which I could only manage a silver. 

Nitrous JavaScript engine for all apps–Jailbreak tweak

None of the 3rd party browsers on the iPhone are as snappy as Mobile Safari, because Apple is keeping the 3rd party browsers from using their in-house built vastly superior Nitro JavaScript Engine. Google recently released Chrome for iOS but it wasn’t as snappy as the desktop counterpart due to this reason. Mobile Safari was miles ahead of Chrome browser when it came to JavaScript performance.

But now there is a tweak to get Nitro JavaScript Engine working on 3rd party apps as well. Of course, you have to Jailbreak your iDevice first. It is called Nitrous and is available in Cydia’s BigBoss repo at $0.99

The first builds let us choose the apps you want to enable the tweak for individually. There were problems with that implementation. Now the developer simply enables it for all or disables it for all (excluding Safari I hope).

.

The difference is very noticeable. I checked the performance in SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark 0.91.