[Article] iPhone 5S is awesome.

Well, at least compared to my old iPhone it is million times better. I'm sure people with the iPhone 5 won't notice the difference.  Or the hardcore Android guys or Windows Phone guys. I love Windows Phone, but I cannot get one in Japan, so I have no choice.

The biggest improvements I see are in the areas of UI fluidity, app launch speeds, network speed and battery life. Screen is largeer but it is not that noticeable. 

The A7 processor in the iPhone 5S is almost 4 times faster than the iPhone 4S's A5 processor. I'm sure the improved GPU is helping with the fluidity of the UI animations  I thought the animations of iOS 7 were so slow but I don't feel that with the iPhone 5S. I don't play games on the phone so I really cannot comment on the gaming performance. However, I'm sure I will get used to the speed and start feeling that this is no big deal after all. That happened with the iPhone 4S as well.

The biggest difference I see is with network speeds. LTE is way better than 3G - especially 3G on SoftBank because it SUCKED. With LTE, now I can stream YouTube, webpages open super fast and download apps quickly. For example, the Coursera courses page took ages to open on my 4S, but it opens within a couple of seconds on the 5S. On the day that I bought the 5S, I downloaded almost 700MB of apps on the way home from work, on the train. I wonder if that 7.5GB limit won't be sufficient for a month. It's possible that the amazing LTE speeds that I see are because most people are still on 3G and that the network is not congested. Or it could be a feature of LTE. I have not looked into LTE, not even a bit. (I should!) The quality/speed might change in the near future though because of all the people upgrading from their iPhone 4S to iPhone 5S.

Then the battery life - it's way better than I expected. If I leave home with a 100% charge, I can return with a 25-30% charge remaining. On the 4S, maybe because of the terrible 3G speeds, I couldn't get by a day with a full charge. Because of that, I had to charge the phone at work almost every day. It could be because its battery was worn out. But it could also be because LTE is so fast that it can go into idle state quickly. Besides, the iPhone 5S has a much bigger battery that the iPhone 4S. However, if I drain the battery, I won't have a charging cable with me. I wonder if the cheap Chinese rip-offs can at least charge the phone. I don't want to access the content of the phone from the PC.

Other than that, the finger print reader works really quickly. I thought you would get a lot of false positives with it but that is not the case. But I'm still not used to the whole idea of it, and I only remember I can use the finger almost half way through to entering the passcode lock. 

I haven't had time to use the camera yet. Hey, I am not a photo guy. I don't think it will be as good as the PureView camera in the Nokia Lumia 1020, but since they say it is better than the previous generation, which was even better than the 4S's, I'd take that as a "vastly improved camera". Hehe.

[Rant] Got my iPhone 5S - the 16GB Space Grey model that is

Yesterday they asked me to bring the passport if I wanted to use the installment based subscription. Today I took my passport. As soon as the bell indicating the start of the lunch break rang, I was off to SoftBank store on the first floor. I didn't even have my lunch. 

I had to wait like 20 minutes before my turn. Then it was time. It took longer than I expected. The processing is very slow. They had a lot of explaining to do as well. There were few campaigns and some of it was not what I was expecting. 

For example, if they were to waive off the remaining installments, I had to give them my iPhone 4S. That's not going to happen. I am hoping to sell the phone. I wouldn't give them the phone for a mere ¥5,760. 

Then there was the "shitadori" campaign. This means, they take the phone and pay us money for it. I only qualify for ¥10,000 and out of that, I have to pay ¥5,760. The hell! We'll, it is better than the first option because I get something out of the phone. 

Then there was the option to put a new SIM in the phone and get charged for it only if you use it. It's called the Family Discount campaign. No fixed charges (for two years). If you don't use internet, and only call/SMS between SoftBank numbers - which are the majority of our friends - you won't have to pay a dime. At first I thought that would be another way of them to steal our hard earned money. So I said no. 

So she brought the new phone and put it on the table. I checked the time and it was 12:50PM already. And I have to be at the office by 1:00PM. Plus, I haven't had my lunch!! I asked them how long would it take. They said they sure cannot complete it by 1:00 M. I asked them if I could come back later. The girl went and asked some guy and she said OK. Since I had signed many papers already, it wouldn't take that long if we resume the whole procedure from that point. I told them I would come after 5:00PM.

[Rant] Couldn't get the new iPhone yet

My iPhone 4S contact expires this December. I will have to upgrade the phone because if I don't upgrade I would still have to pay the same monthly subscription fee. That's how things work here. 

I have two options. iPhone 5C or 5S. Since the 5C is same as yesteryear's flagship model, if you know me, I wouldn't set my eyes on that old outdated electronics. So iPhone 5S it is. But I cannot update yet, otherwise I will have to pay the potion of the original price of the phone for the remaining months (you don't pay that if you are using the phone for whole 26 months of the contract period). That's about ¥1,920 x 3 moths if I upgrade the phone now. 

But good news is, just like when I upgraded to iPhone 4S from iPhone 5S, they are waiving off the remainder if we upgrade now. This probably is to keep the existing customers with them. With Docomo getting the iPhone 5S from this year, these definitely is a lot of competition. So if they didn't let the existing iPhone 4S users switch, there is a good chance that once their contract expires, they would switch to Docomo. Docomo is the biggest mobile carrier in Japan with the widest coverage. 

The big issue is that they are asking the same ¥1,000 hiked fixed monthly subscription fee as the previously year's iPhone 5 for the iPhone 5S. So even if I upgraded today, I would pay ¥1,000 more than what I pay for my iPhone 4S. However, for upgraders, they are going to charge the same iPhone 4S for the first year. Paying ¥14,000 is better than paying ¥26,000. (Not sure about the exact figures - it could be ¥12,000 vs ¥24,000 if they don't charge for the first two months)

Plus, I can sell my iPhone 4S as well. 

Anyways, I went to the SoftBank shop in the office building during the lunch break on the iPhone 5am launch day. I asked for the Gold model. They said I had to reserve it because only the Space Grey model was available for purchase on that day. I didn't ask whether they didn't have them right from the beginning or whether the stock ran out. So I had to reserve the phone and come back. Sucks! When I asked how long the ETA is, they had no clue. I hope they will get the new stock back in a week or so. Otherwise you will have one pissed off Sri Lankan riding the train from Nakanoshima to Kosugi in the next few days. Sometimes I wonder if I should have bought the black model because you have to cover it up in a case anyways. Now I have to find a case that can show off the new color. At least I can order it early do that I have the case by the time  the phone is my possession.

At least I got a chance to play with the new iPhone 5S at the SoftBank store. It's so fast compared to my iPhone 4S - there's no doubt about it. I just want LTE and at least stable coverage around the places I commute often. And Touch ID worked perfectly as well. I was skeptical about it at first. Not anymore. 

[Article] Decided to stick with the iPhone's Earbuds

My 3 year old Zagg SmartBuds broke couple of months ago. I was going to order a new pair of SmartBuds but I wanted to wait and see what Apple would release with the iPhone 5S.

First, the SmartBuds are pretty expensive once you add the cost of shipping. Then, I hear that a lot of people telling that they broke after few days' use. And, then I'm going to get the new iPhone as soon as it is released. 

The iPhone 5 comes with the new ear pods. They are much better than the crappy ones that ships with the iPhone 4S. But they are definitely not the best. But if they do a good enough job, I don't have to spend money on something that I get for free. 

Currently I have two issues with the iPhone 4S' earbuds. First, it doesn't stay fit in the ears. The shape of it is horrible. It would fall off even when you walk. But after using it for two months, now I can keep it in the ears even when running. It is not as easy as the SmartBuds because with those I don't have to worry about them falling off because they will always hang from the neck if they fall from ears. 

The second issue is that they leak sound to pretty badly. Because of that, I have to turn up the volume when there is a lot of noise in the background and then people nearby will also hear what I'm listening to. I have nothing to hide but it's a nuisance to others. 

These are major issues really, but I guess I can live with those hardships another month or so until the new iPhone is released. I can of course buy ear pods for my iPhone 4S, but I'm cheap! XD The ear pods will fit better in the ears and because of that it won't easily fall, plus, less sound will be leaked to the out. Wish they had rubber buds for better grip and sealing. But Apple doesn't seem to like sealed ones telling that it can damage the ear. That only happens if you turned up the volume to the max. But that can happen every now and then without you knowing. Apple doesn't want to be liable to any damages caused by human carelessness. Who does?

Yay! My iPhone 4S is snappy again.

When I bought my iPhone 4S almost 20 months ago, I straight away felt how fast it was compared to my old iPhone 3GS. But after a while it became slow. In fact, it got so slow that there have been times that I felt like throwing it out the window or dropping it on the floor and crushing it with my feet. I know, it would only make things worse, thus I controlled myself every time the thought occurred to me.

Things got worse with iOS 6 update. It would work well as soon as I restored or updated the OS, but eventually get slow.

When Evasi0n released the Jailbreak for iOS 6.1, I went ahead with the Jailbreak. I didn't feel that the phone got any slower, but the battery went down the hill. After a few months, I gave up the Jailbreak. But disappointingly, I didn't get better performance nor battery life. I only lost the Jailbreak tweaks that I really loved. At this point, I was using iOS 6.1.3, the latest as of this day.

Then WWDC2013 happened. iOS 7 was introduced and I managed to install the developer preview on my phone without paying for a developer account. (Click here to find out how to do it.) But it ran so horribly slow on my phone. Restarting fixed it for a certain degree, but it was slow - much slower than the slowness I talked about at the top of this post. People with iPhone 5's were not feeling the slowness. Sure, the iPhone 5 is twice as fast as mine, but if people didn't feel the slowness, that's either because it is not slow, or because people are numb. I wanted to believe it was the former. So what I did was, I cleared out all the junk from the phone.
・I had all 1000 pics from Photo streams and disconnected it from the phone.
・I removed all the photos there were in the camera roll.
That's all really. I had already removed the unnecessary apps and I only had the apps that I frequently used.

But it didn't get any faster. Not only that, it was crashing few of the apps that I really needed. One of them was the Pocasts app. Commuting without the Podcast app would be a nightmare. So I wanted to go back to iOS 6.

But I made a mistake this time. I could not restore the backup via iTunes, because the last backup was done from iOS 7 and it was incompatible with iOS 6's backup format. Yes, I believe the older backups were still there in the PC and I could have chosen one of them instead. I only remembered that the next day. But I do not regret what happened. I had to start over from the scratch, BUT for some reason, the phone is very snappy now. I think it was the junk that was in the backup that was causing the lag. I had all the SMS history and call history and the settings of apps that I don't use anymore all copied back to the phone. That junk must have been the cause of the slowness. I have been using the phone for 3 days and there isn't the slightest hint of it running slow. Sure, it is not iPhone 5, but I don't feel that it is laggy anymore. I'm pretty sure that it is not my mind playing tricks.

So what I am going to do from here onwards is, I'm going to keep my the call history clean, SMS history clean (only keep the ones that I want to keep, and delete the rest), sync only 50 emails, clean up the camera roll every day when I get back home and not connect to photo streams. Basically, I'm gonna keep the phone as clean as I can. I'm sure it will become an obsession eventually, but at least I will have a fast phone.

My next phone – looks like it’s gonna be another iPhone

Seems like it's going to be yet another iPhone. That's means it's going to be my 3rd iPhone. Hopefully I will be able to get the one that's coming out this year as soon as it comes out. "Hopefully", because it all depends on what SoftBank have to say about upgrading my existing iPhone 4S. The current 2 year contract period - which is actually 26 months - is only going to end at the end of November. And the rumors are that the new iPhone is coming out in July. That's about 4 months before my contract period ends.

Wasn't that the same with 3GS to 4S upgrade?

Something similar happened when I got my iPhone 4S. There was a long way to go until the contract period for my iPhone 3GS was over, but at that time SoftBank launched a campaign to waive off the remaining contract months if I switched to the iPhone 4S straight away. I'm sure they did not do it for us. They possibly wanted to keep the existing customers loyal to SoftBank because KDDI was also getting the iPhone 4S. But it was a win for me. I hope they will come up with a similar campaign this time too.

Why do you need to upgrade your phone this soon?

Some people must be wondering why I wanna upgrade an iPhone 4S, which performs pretty well for most people. Two reasons.

1. You can get the iPhone for free in Japan. At least, the base model is free. So why not get one while we can?
2. Once my 2 year contract ends, SoftBank will renew the contract for another 2 years. If I need to get out of the contract, I have to pay a fine of JPY10,000.

Note:

If I renew the phone before the 2 years, the contract gets renewed for another 2 years. While I don’t have to pay for early termination – because there is no termination – I have to pay back the discount (Remember, the phone is free. That’s the discount.) otherwise we would have got if we used the phone for the complete 2 year period.

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.

 

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. 

Oh bummer! The iPhone 4S USB cable is damaged.

The day before yesterday I found out that the USB cable of my iPhone 4S (which I never unplug from the PC) was damaged near the 30 pin connector end. It must be due to bending, but it wasn't bent as much as the iPhone 3GS cable used to. And it is still working fine. Apple's quality must be going down.

I wonder if they will replace the cable if I take it to the Apple Store. I mean, I have Apple Care+ too. But it is working fine at the moment. But I won't contact them until it stops working. Besides, I have my wife's cable for the time being.

 
Note: I wonder if ZAGG has a replacement cable that is protected by their InvisibleShield, just like the ZAGG SmartBuds that I am using.

Guess I would stick with Apple after all

In the last couple of weeks, we were having trouble with my wife’s iPhone 4S’s earpiece. We did everything we could from out end, but it didn’t heal. It didn’t heal by itself either. So finally we decided to get the Genius Bar involved.

I called the Apple Support center and they came to the conclusion that they may have to replace the handset. There were two options. I could either tell them to pick the phone up free of charge (pretty cool, ha?) or I could head to an Apple Store. If they picked it up, it would take up to a week to get things resolved. I could not take that option. My wife has to go to work. There are a million things that can go wrong in an event of a big incident. So she had to have her phone with her at all times she was out of the house.

So it was decided that we went to an Apple Store. There were two Apple Stores close to our apartment. One in Shibuya and one in Ginza. Both were within an hour of travel time. Shibuya was closer and in addition to that, we were planning to attend the Sri Lankan Festival 2012 which was only a walking distance from the Shibuya station. So without further ado, we decided to pay a visit to the Apple Store in Shibuya.

Pathetic 3G performance of iPhone 4S on SoftBank

My iPhone 4S's 3G browsing performance is very slow and this has been the case with my previous iPhone 3GS as well. I don't know who actually is the culprit; whether it is Softbank's crappy 3G network or Apple's crappy (i.e. form over function) antenna/software design. It is possible that the crappiness of both parties get together to make it as bad as it is.

 

This is what I get with Speedtest on my 4S. It doesn't even break 1Mbps. (I cannot test it on my wife's phone because it doesn't have unlimited internet.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looks pathetic, doesn't it? So much for "almost 4G" like 3G performance. Apple's BS marketing yet again fools the community. 

 

Answer to low resolution photos of Google Contacts is ... iCloud?

Recently I started using SmartSync on the iPhone. It syncs the contact information from Facebook with the contacts on the phone. One of the features of it is ability to sync the photo of the contacts. I tried that, but straight away met with a problem. The contact photos were of very low quality. Even though they have shown a screenshot of it showing a high quality full screen contact photo on the call screen, I was getting the small thumbnail on the top right hand corner.

People say that if you set the contact photo from within the phone, you get the full screen caller photo, and if you use a desktop app, you get the thumbnail. I tried assigning a photo to my Wife from within the phone, and asked her to call me. But I did not get the full screen caller photo. But then I checked the size of the contact photo, and found out that it has become a smaller low quality version.

Bye bye iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4S is my new phone

Last week, I bought an iPhone 4S. I was very excited to see how (well) the 4S performed compared to my old iPhone 3GS. For some reason, my old phone was performing really slow. It did not happen suddenly. It felt as if the phone was getting old by the day. It lost part of its “young age” when I upgraded it to iOS4.0. It wasn't as bad as on the iPhone 3G, but it wasn't as snappier as it used to be with iOS3 (but it wasn’t called iOS back then). It could possibly be that I had gotten used to the performance of 3GS, that I needed something faster to keep the wheel of happiness spinning. At first I might have been amazed by the performance after using a Samsung Omnia and a Sony Ericsson K700 soon afterwards. Anyways, I get fed up when I don't see a regular progression in performance, so I need to upgrade to faster stuff on a regular basis. The 3GS getting slower by the day (if it really was slowing down) was making me insane. The biggest performance hit was with iOS 4.2 iirc. It became as if they disabled half of the RAM, under clocked the CPU to 200MHz and cursed it with “you need to buy the iPhone 4 or you’ll be rotten with an old phone for the next couple of years”. Not to mention, how unlucky I was when I was forced to buy the 3GS when iPhone 4 was right around the corner. (In fact, it came about a month afterwards).