If you have ever been faced with that gut wrenching situation where you have either dropped your beloved device in water or gotten it wet then you will be familiar with the age old solution involving a bowl of rice. While this would normally be the ideal solution as it is found in most peoples cupboards and can be readily bought quickly, is it really helping? In a way, yes, but not as much as you have been led to believe. While it is a good place to start, there is another solution you probably haven’t thought of.

First though, let me give you a recent scenario that I was faced with.

So, I am at work and I get several missed calls from an unknown number, followed by frantic tweets and messages from Facebook that turn out to be from my girlfriend asking me to ring home ASAP. Thinking the worst I immediately stop what I am doing and phone home. On the other end is a distraught and very upset voice trying to hold back the tears as she tells me she has just discovered her iPhone 4s rattling around in the washing machine. Damn, game over, right? Well actually, no. She had been changing the sheets on the bed and hadn’t noticed the iPhone as she wrapped them up and bunged them in the machine. After around 5 minutes she noticed a banging noise coming from inside and suddenly realised what had happened. Thankfully she managed to pry the door open, flooding the kitchen floor (not a priority), and found the phone, still functioning.

I instinctively tell her to dry it off and bury it in rice, which she had already done (I taught her well). I ask if she has turned it off, she tried but a short in the dock connector was causing it to come back to life straight away. This is not good as the longer there is power going through the device the more chance there is of a total short, ideally  the battery should be disconnected which as we all know with Apple devices is not for the feint hearted. Amazingly though, the backlight was still functioning, which in my experience, is usually the first thing to short out. As far as I could make out, the sound was the only thing not working and this was again because of the dock connector, which was assuming that the iPhone was docked which cuts off sound through the speakers and earpiece.

Luckily, it seems, the duvet that it got wrapped in had shielded it from the majority of the water as she managed to get it out of there before it had actually finished filling up.

Ok, so when I got home from work I decided to inspect it a little, not wanting to disturb it too much so as not to let the water spread even further. I decided to try and remove the rear panel which is easier said than done when you don’t have the correct tool (5 point penelope). I managed to get the back off and carefully wiped all the water I could see from the inside of the iPhone. I then placed it back in the rice and sealed the box.

Fearing the worst I contacted a local repair shop for some quotes, to which they replied “between £40 and £130 depending on the extent of the damage”. With both of us finding this a last resort option I told her to calm down and leave it be for a few days.

As I had been at work for a few hours before being able to get home that day I had the time to do a little research, and came across some references to desiccants. These are hygroscopic substances used as a drying agents. In some of the same articles I also discovered that rice does very little as it struggles to draw moisture from the air.

I then set about trying to source some desiccants, and found that I actually come into contact with a form of them every day.

You will recognise these little sachets as those you find in shoe boxes, suitcases, handbags, and most boxed electrical devices. Now, as I work for an electrical retailer I set about collecting as many of these sachets as I could lay my hands on. I was ripping through empty laptop boxes, searching laptop bags and anything else I could think of that was already open.

So, that night I emptied the rice from the box and replaced it with the sachets I had collected and basically covered the device as if building a sand bag wall around it. I then put the sealed box above the boiler. I had read that providing moderate heat would help remove moisture from the air quicker, however providing direct heat like that of a radiator would be harmful, so avoided doing this.

Roll on 3 days later, and after having been hen pecked constantly by the girlfriend, I opened the box to see what the residual damage was. I left the back off for the time being in case I needed to gain access again. It was dead, so I carefully plugged it in to my Macbook as if I was removing the core from a nuclear device, expecting it to go bang the moment I inserted the sync cable. To my relief  it started to charge and a few minutes later it powered on. Amazing! Everything seemed to be working perfectly, even the sound as I unlocked it. I then went through testing the sound, making a call, sending a text and opened a few apps. The look on her face and the relief was worth all I had gone through over the last few days.

Nearly 2 weeks on and still no issues, at all, not one! So if you are unfortunate enough to be faced with a situation like this, you will be better prepared.

Well, while trawling twitter, I came across a tweet linking to a post on macthemes.net that contained an unreleased MobileSubstrate tweak known only as Zeppelin. It had promise I thought, so I downloaded it and fired up iFile to install.

To my amazement it actually worked on my carrier logo, finally! The tweak is basically just a logo picker in the settings app with the ability to enable or disable.

So far there are only a handful of logos to choose from but I have no doubt that more will be added, especially if it hits Cydia.

Here are instructions posted by the developer;

Zeppelin is a MobileSubstrate tweak I made to get easy Carrier Logo switching to iOS. It works on Verizon and other Carriers that don’t naturally have images to replace too (It also works on Carriers that do have files to replace like AT&T).

I’ve tested this on my Verizon iPhone 4, an AT&T iPhone, iPad 3G, iPod 2G.

The experimental iPod build has been tested only on iOS 4 on two iPod 2Gs (legacy). If you have an iDevice (non iPhone) other than that setup please let me know how it works.

I’ve tested it on iOS 4 and iOS 5

Installation:
1. Download the deb
2. SSH the deb file to your iDevice at any location
3. Open iFile on your device and click the file where you SSH’d it.
4. Press install

Alternatively, if you don’t have iFile and if you have a version of MobileTerminal that is iOS4/5 friendly you can type:
Code:

dpkg -i /path/to/deb
Apply Themes/Logos in Settings->Zeppelin.

To install your own logos
1. On your local machine create a folder titled for your theme name.
2. Put images in it titled as follows: silver.png for the silver bar, black.png for the black bar, and etched.png for notification center. Make sure to add @2x to the file name if it is a retina icon.
3. Copy this folder from your computer to /Library/Zeppelin
4. Open Settings->Zeppelin and it should appear in the list
5. PROFIT

Put themes in /Library/Zeppelin after installation. Check the pre-installed ones to see how it is done.

If anyone would like to make an icon for the settings table it is welcome.

Thanks to:
Dustin Howett for making Theos and helping me out with my first tweak
Roshani for Infiniti, Android
TheBaddestiPod for Aperture, Triforce, and Batman
dsg for Pac-man, Superman, Beats
shallowheard for Blue Cloud
Lokheed for Space Invaders (this guy is the man. Buy his theme, Jaku)

Apologies to the above for not requesting permission. I never had planned to release this. If you would like your images removed, PM me.

More credits coming soon

Since iPods now work. I have submitted to ModMyI

Changelog
0.0.2
1. Aligned labels
2. iPod support

You can download the package here

The package has been submitted to ModMyi so should hit Cydia soon.

The guy behind Zeppelin, who goes by the handle jivhg on macthemes, states that he had some help from Dustin Howett, and a few others who’s images he used.

Thanks to @zooropalg for the tip!

Today sees the release of the first plugin called “Lingual”. Developed by the guys over at CodeThemed, Lingual enhances Siri’s ability to translate what you say into another language.

Normally translations are handled by Wolfram Alpha, but with Lingual installed you get the answer directly from Siri, with a great native looking UI too. You simply ask siri “What is (word/sentence/phrase) in (language)” or “Translate (word/sentence/phrase) to (language)”. Lingual boasts the ability to translate to over 30 languages and is completely free from Cydia.

This isn’t good news if it turns out to be more than just a coincidence.

It has also been mentioned that Siri may use FairPlay which we hear DOES have some level of Jb detection.

FairPlay is a digital rights management (DRM) technology created by Apple Inc., based on technology created by the company Veridisc. FairPlay is built into the QuickTime multimedia software and used by the iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV, iTunes, and iTunes Store and the App Store.

Anyone seen any jailbreak detection in Siri? Siri stopped working after a day of running with jailbroken kernel on the iPhone 4S …

— Stefan Esser (@i0n1c) January 19, 2012

** Further information from @i0n1c confirms that after a simple reboot Siri resumed operation as normal. Crisis averted people! **

The main new feature is the ability to now initiate a hangout through the “Messages” section of the app. When you start a conversation you will now see a video icon next to the settings icon top right of the screen, this will bring up a similar screen to the one you got when joining a hangout prior to this update.

In addition to the hangout feature there is also a new UI for the Photos section.

Netflix has a huge library of TV and Film available for you to stream to the following devices;

• iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV
• xBox 360, PS3, Wii, PC, Mac
• Smart enabled TV or BluRay player
• plus more

You can sign-up using your Facebook account or without, but you will need to add a credit or debit card. Try it out for 1 month and then decide to keep your subscription or not, simple as that.

If asked “What mobile phone do you use?” the majority of us will almost certainly have a smartphone of some kind. The one thing that sets most smartphones apart from the average phone is the amazing and sometimes very large touch screen.

If, like me, you treasure your device enough to actually look after it properly you will no doubt have explored reasonably priced ways of covering/insuring it. Whether this be through an insurance company, Apple Care or maybe through your bank.

Well, as a friend of mine found out (the hard way…..three times!) gadget cover provided by banks isn’t quite as good as it sounds. Lets take Barclays bank for example. When opening an account, you quickly realise that it is going to cost you £5 per month for them to watch over your money. After calming down, you may ask them what on gods green you actually get for this? They then go on to reel off a fantastic list of perks including extended warranties, price protection and gadget cover.

So you are probably thinking
, damn that is pretty sweet considering you were paying the £5 anyway, why not take advantage of these perks too! To cover your gadgets all you need to do is phone the helpline to register your precious devices. Once done you are pretty much covered for everything.

Well, much like any cover similar to this, you probably expect some sort of excess, right? Ok so here is the scenario, you have gone to the gym and while laying on the bench press lifting dumbbells you drop them, forgetting you have your iPhone 4 neatly tucked under the bench out of harms……CRUNCH!

Ok so with wrecked iPhone 4 in hand, you break out the backup phone gathering dust in your drawer (AAAAHHHHGGG BUTTONS!!!), phone the helpline, post off your iPhone and play the waiting game as you await word of the status of your poor wounded friend.

Weeks pass until you finally hear back from them. They say they can fix it but it will cost £70 to replace the screen, now this seems unreasonable, and frankly it isn’t good but not having read the small print or asked any questions regarding the excess rates you don’t really have a choice. Considering you can get an iPhone fixed locally for £84 (which for some reason you STILL haven’t researched!) within an hour of walking through the door, having to wait weeks to get your iPhone back is not ideal, but you have sent it now and you agree the excess fee. Hell, if you are feeling confident you can pick up a replacement kit for around £30 on Amazon.

Months later, you are walking down the street, chatting to your friend and catching up with Twitter when KAPPOOWWW!! a wild, flailing arm comes from nowhere and you watch in slow motion as your iPhone flies through the air, landing flat on the screen and then slides a few more feet along the ground before coming to a halt. Your heart sinks and you remember the last time you broke it.

Having still not looked into alternative ways to fix your iPhone, you phone the helpline once again, you know the drill. This time when they phone you, the excess has risen to £100, wait WHAT? Angry but desperate (holiday looming) you agree the fee and wait for your war hero to return to you in the mail.

After a great holiday you return to work, glad that you received your phone back in time for your trip so you could take lots of pics, but work is dull and the boss insists that you move some washing machines around. Remembering your training, you use your upper thigh as leverage to lug this thing off a 3 inch platform, but you forgot the golden rule! Don’t enlist the help of your iPhone, sitting in your pocket, located by your upper thigh. CRACK! This time you have had enough! If you have to pay one more excess fee you will have forked out more than half the money that it cost you to buy it in the first place. So now you make the choice to leave your fallen soldier, well, fallen.

Some months pass, and you FINALLY decide to do a little research, well, you phone the Apple store anyway. They say for £119 they will replace it with a new handset………….

The developer of iBiker, Gurminder Marwaha, was awarded a UK Government grant from the Department of Transport in order to develop his idea and make it a reality. iBiker also serves as a support channel to help national campaigns which encourage responsible, safer and fun motorcycle riding. The app runs as a social enterprise with all cash generated invested back into the app and was created by Redefine Convention using Gurminder’s designs.

With the help of the DfT’s ‘Think Bike” Facebook page and their 35,000 fans, the app name, the design and some features where chosen.

Features

Here is a run down of some of the best features of iBiker.

• Plan, plot and save rides/routes
• Highlight points of interest including cafes, cash points, campsites, petrol stations, meeting points and many more
• Rate routes
• Share all that information with the motorbiking community/friends via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social networking channels
• Check the weather along routes from within the app

Cleverly, the app is based on crowd sourcing and social media using British EuroRAP intelligence provided by the Road Safety Foundation that highlights “the most risky roads and routes in Britain” to bikers in the UK.

Probably one of the best features is the ability to see your route BEFORE you ride it. With the help of the video ride throughs provided by experienced Motorcycle Police with local knowledge, users can see routes around the country and specific collision hotspots, thus enabling them to familiarise themselves with a route before they ride it.

The app also features World Superbike Champion James Toseland on a number of myth busting and bike safety videos.

The app is available globally for iPhone and Android with the current information being far more relevant to UK users, but the developer hopes to have similar information available for other countries in the future.

Here are some screens of the app and some examples of the ride through videos.

Here is an example of one of the ride through videos

Click here to view the embedded video.

iBiker costs just £1.49 which is amazing considering the amount of information it gives to riders. You can download iBiker here for iPhone and find them at the following social links;

Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/Web

In an effort to find a distributable exploit that can work with corona, @Musclenerd, @Planetbeing, @p0sixninja and @pod2g are all working together. That’s right, the iPhone-Dev Team and the Chronic-Dev Team have set aside their differences and combined forces to bring us the most anticipated jailbreak on record.

With the eta set by @pod2g closing in, this can only help towards it.

Lockscreen Weather App displays the current weather and an optional 5 day forecast right on the Lockscreen. Now we know that invasion of the Lockscreen is prohibited by third party apps, so how was this mistaken for anything else?

You can even have a pleasant sound effect running while you check the weather. However, it is important to note that this app must constantly be running all the time, and even displays the play symbol in the status bar as if you were playing a video or song. This will NOT be good for battery life. For me this is not a sacrifice I am willing to make, so I will put this down to taking one for the team and delete it from my homescreen.

As epic as this seems, it is not how this needs to be done so please don’t waste your £0.69/$0.99.

The app offers you 3 apps daily that they claim to have made free until the “bomb explodes” in 24hrs. Having checked the app out myself, the first game I was given for free was Dungeon Hunter 3 by Gameloft. On going to the AppStore (rather than using the in-app link) I found the game to already be free, and according to Gameloft themselves will always be free as part of their new freemium direction. So what happens when the bomb runs out tomorrow night? Absolutely nothing, of course. This game will still be free.

In essence, MagicSolver.com are making users think that they are handpicking paid apps and games from the AppStore and magically making them free for 24hrs only. Incidentally at least one or more of these magic apps has previously cost £1.49 for users to download. This is of course a complete waste of your money, as there are many apps that will alert you to price drops at NO charge.

I have no doubt that developers may occasionally contact MagicSolver.com to promote their apps, however the three apps I was presented with have all been free since last week, just confirming what I have said here.

I have no problem with this company alerting their users to free apps, but making out like they have made them free is just wrong. I can only guess that by hitting the links to these free apps from inside the magic app benefits them in some way, maybe some kind of iTunes affiliate program etc.

As always if you think I am spouting nonsense then that is fine and you are entitled to continue to be duped by companies like this, but if you see my point of view then shouldn’t we be helping those unsuspecting users? Especially those who actually paid for this drivel in the past?

I will as always keep my eyes open for apps taking advantage of people like this and report on them here. Until then, feel free to leave any comments below.

The MyGreatiPhone Team.

The app as always has a great UI and was a pleasure to use. So on the 9th of December, I decided to send one to my other half, not from me, but from my two cats who she loves to bits. It would be a bit of fun that would she would really appreciate, or so I thought.

On the 12th I received a shipping notification to say my card had been shipped and that I would receive it within 5-15 days. We all know that normally this timeframe is just to cover themselves so I expected to receive it within maybe the 5 days depending on how much was spent on postage and what class it was sent by.

Below is what the card I designed looked like;

Well, it is now the 23rd of December and I just got off the phone with Apple, which in itself was a bit of a chore. The first person I spoke to in tech support (no automated option for apps) was a nice woman with a southern US accent, however she had never heard of the cards app, at all, she thought I wanted help with a gift card (really??).

Anyway after 5 minutes on hold a nice woman from the UK after sales team came on the line and agreed to refund my £3.99 in full as I should have received my card on the 16th so it must have been “lost in the post” for whatever reason (funny how my bills still manage to make it to my door). My theory? The font is just too fancy on the envelope and sorting office staff are just giving up on trying to work out where it needs to go.

Now I am faced with the dilemma of do I tell my other half what I attempted to do or just leave it and chalk it up as an Apple fail?

Have you had any experiences with using the cards app? Where they good or bad? Let us know below or use one of the social links at the top of the page.

This is not always an option for most as Apple stores are usually situated in large Cities. So for those in more rural areas that haven’t sourced one yet, it doesn’t look like you will be getting one at all.

Below are product pages for the iPod Touch 8gb Black from a few major UK retailers.

Argos;

Comet;

Currys;

It is pretty much the same story for the other models too. Where I work, we literally have no stock of any iPods whatsoever, and are unable to order any either. This will no doubt be a huge disappointment to last minute buyers and those that were looking forward to getting one.

My suggestion? Find your nearest Apple store, and soon.

Well the Sky+ app takes care of this by allowing you to remotely record any program on the fly. Up to now there had been a major feature missing from the app, the ability to set a series link record allowing you to record every program in a series with just one click.

With today’s update, this feature has now been added.

There are still a few small features I would like to see though, like being able to cancel a recording if for example a conflict occurs. This shouldn’t be too hard to do and will hopefully feature in a future update.

As you already will be aware, Apple today sent live yet another version of iOS 5.0.1 specifically for the iPhone 4s only. This is allegedly supposed to address key battery issues still being experienced by many users.

This build, however, is slightly different. Normally Apple encrypts the ipsw file, meaning that decrypting and redistributing parts of it for whatever reason (extracting siri files for example) is regarded as piracy. This new build has seemingly been left wide open. MuscleNerd elaborates;

Huh…today’s 4S 5.0.1 bump (9A406) has wide open main fs musclenerd.com/4s406.txt

— MuscleNerd (@MuscleNerd) December 15, 2011

@AndrewKeezer it’s the first public 4S ipsw where the main filesystem keys are obtainable (due to non-encrypted ramdisks)

— MuscleNerd (@MuscleNerd) December 15, 2011

(to clarify: wide open for inspection from a Mac/PC…not wide open security wise Can get Siri files and such without piracy)

— MuscleNerd (@MuscleNerd) December 15, 2011

This is an obvious oversight by Apple, obvious and very unlike them.

Porting Siri is not at the top of my list of things I want to see from this as I paid to have Siri, but if it helps with furthering progress on a jailbreak then it can’t be bad.

OTA updates seem to be disabled in beta 1 so this update needs to be performed using iTunes.

As always this release is intended for developers and test devices only. If you are awaiting the untethered jailbreak for 5.0 or 5.0.1 then it is best to stay away from 5.1.

Sadly, from the 1st February 2012, this service will no longer be part of the unlimited wifi attached to most tariffs. You will, however, still be able to use BT Openzone though.

After the 1st, if you wish to continue to use The Cloud wifi service you will need to re-register AND pay one of three monthly fees;

• Cloud Unlimited – £9,95/month
• Cloud Unlimited Single – £6.95/month
• Cloud Unlimited iPod Touch – £3,95/month

It is not yet clear as to why this change is being made but if we here anything we will update this post.

If you use this service a lot then this news will certainly leave a sour taste in your mouth. Feel free to let us know how you feel about this in the comments below.

Thanks to @charlieraf for the tip

Like all authentic jailbreak video demo’s, it goes like this;

1. Show firmware version in Settings.app
2. Open Cydia and let it load
3. Reboot device
4. Open Cydia and let it load again

This shows that this is an authentic untethered jailbreak.

Click here to view the embedded video.

According to pod2g his method does NOT rely on Charlie Millers code signing vulnerability found a few months back. However as this is the first public untethered jailbreak, it will be interesting to see if Apple uses the incremental update functionality to kill this straight away.

@i0n1c @0xcharlie hello. No it does not rely on it. Next step do the same on iOS 5.0.1. Should be quick.

— pod2g (@pod2g) December9, 2011

If you want this jailbreak when it is released you currently need to be on iOS 5.0, but pod2g has said it should be easy to do the same for 5.0.1 and maybe 5.1? No word yet on which devices this jailbreak will cover.

We will update you as and when it is released publicly. This news comes just as comex publicly confirmed on Twitter that he no longer works on jailbreaks, which isn’t that surprising as he recently took an internship at Apple.

Even before the public release of iOS 5.0 it was known that Apple was to make downgrading much more difficult. You can find more info here.

Although using TinyUmbrella and Cydia users have been able to save their SHSH, up to now they have not been able to do anything useful with them, until now.

In a tweet from Musclenerd a couple of hours ago, the hacker announced that a new version of Redsn0w will soon be released:

Upcoming redsn0w release makes both TinyUmbrella and Cydia blob saves useful for 5.0+ (1st verifies, then stitches)

— MuscleNerd (@MuscleNerd) December9, 2011

A tweet after this gives a little more away and hints at the possible ability to downgrade from a 5.0 firmware.

For time being, please just use most recent TU to save 5.0.1 blobs+APTicket…redsn0w will do the rest, should you need to restore.

— MuscleNerd (@MuscleNerd) December9, 2011

We will bring you more information as soon as this new version is released.

A huge thanks to Mobilefun for todays review item. Those who were born around the eighties will remember this very well. This retro case is indeed designed to look like the Nintendo Game Boy, and it does it very well.

The case is a silicon style case, that fits around the edge of the iPhone 4s quite nicely. On the back you have the legendary design detailing the gameplay buttons right down to the speaker vent.

All of the usual features are present, camera cut-out, large opening for dock and speakers and volume rocker easily accessible. The only part that is covered completely is the sleep/wake button.

I do have a few small gripes though. Due to the nature of the surface finish i did find that dust was easily attracted to the case. This is not a huge issue as most other silicon cases are the same.

Now i don’t know if it is just the one i received but on the back where the Game Boy screen sits it is very loose, like an air pocket, so appears saggy as if too big. This could just be present in this particular one but I thought I had to mention it.

This case is going for just £9.95 which is cheap as chips for such an iconic case.

Whether you are after a silicon case or an iPhone 4s Skin Mobilefun has you covered.

Maha is no ordinary Twitter client, it is probably one of the most exciting yet. While it may not be as feature rich as some of the most popular clients, it is not without it’s charm. Those who saw our article on the Windows Phone demo last week will notice that this app bares a striking resemblance to Microsofts UI.

This client is more for those who prefer the minimalist feel. The animations employed by the developers are simply a joy to see. It is very smooth and will have you going back to check your tweets a lot more often.

Maha does however have some pretty sweet features like being able to customise virtually all the aspects of the UI. You can change the background colours, the text, the blocks etc.

To reply/retweet/quote etc you press and hold a tweet, links can be opened in the inline browser and you get a preview for images.

I do however have a few gripes. There are no separators between tweets so it can seem somewhat cluttered at times and hard to differentiate who has posted what especially with certain colour combinations. Lack of push support is becoming a common issue with new clients but hopefully this is in the works. There is currently no support for Twitters own image service and as of yet does not take advantage of iOS 5′s single sign on for Twitter accounts. Other than this handful of minor issues this app is pretty cool to use.

At £1.49/$2.49(?) this app is well worth a look. Go grab your copy here.

A few weeks ago I reported on a brazen company that had taken two of the biggest games for iOS, Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, and ripped content from them both to call it their own. Well I just came across yet another one.

Angry Chickens, once again looks just like Angry Birds, (unsurprisingly) the lite version is top of the free section and the paid (69p) version sits right below Angry Birds themselves. The gameplay may not be the same but the graphics closely resemble those from Angry Birds, right down to the boxes of TNT and the hint popups. It just feels like Angry Birds. Am I being unfair? Take a look for yourself;

I mean even the app icon screams Angry Birds, right??

Looking through all the reviews, it seems that the gameplay itself is pretty poor and most are disappointed with it, especially those that paid for the full version. I would imagine that as before, most buyers just assumed it was part of the Angry Birds franchise thus more willing to part with their money. This kind of shameless plagiarism is starting to get ridiculous. What is Apple thinking?? I think they need to take a serious look at their reviews department and whether these apps are even getting the once over.

What do you think? should this be allowed?

Sadly, with the introduction of iOS 5.1 beta yesterday, it seems that Apple has either disabled or completely removed the ability to achieve this now. Whilst some still work, for example having a shortcut to a contact, the ones that where most appealing like having a direct links to specific settings no longer work. When trying, Safari simply returns an invalid URL error.

Hopefully this is just temporary and is disabled during the beta stages of 5.1, but if it is permanent then the carrot has well and truly been whipped away from in front of us.

Feel free to let us know your experiences with this and whether you have been able to get it to work.

As always the beta release is intended for developers and test devices only. It is also noted that this beta update is NOT available through the OTA update server.

iH8Sn0w has also mentioned this on twitter;

ha! Looks like today’s 5.1 BETA ramdisk are NOT encrypted.

This does NOT mean a jailbreak soon, it is just for informational purposes

We will update you when we find out the exact changes in this release.

Inline previews have been added giving you a glimpse of the web page for each search result, a great new apps page, of course a +1 button is now readily available when you load a web page, a new history tab and some fantastic gesture based commands with sliding animations.

The sliding animations are a great and welcome addition to an already great app.

You also now get a cool new blue progress bar and the +1 button I mentioned before.

And the history tab.

 

I’m sure the new update will come as great news for everyone who uses it as it really does look and feel great.

I recently found a particularly worrying one.

Yesterday as I sat down to eat my evening meal, I gave my iPhone a quick glance and noticed my wifi connection had dropped. I proceeded to my settings app expecting to have to sign in again, but after having to close and relaunch the settings app a few times as it was frozen, I was presented with this;

As hard as I tried I could not get into the wifi settings at all. As you can see that section was totally greyed out and displaying “No Wifi”, in 4 years I have never had this happen. I was literally sat a foot away from my router which was working fine. It took a good few reboots to get wifi back but it DID come back.

Whether this is a new bug introduced with 5.0.1 I don’t know, but as it has never happened before I wouldn’t be surprised. So far it hasn’t happened again since.

Have you experienced any of the bugs detailed here? We would love to hear about it. Leave a comment or drop us a 140 on Twitter @MyGreatiPhone.

Popular jailbreak developer John Heaton (@Gojohnnyboi) has been doing what he does best, digging through iOS, and has found some interesting entries that may point towards a possible iChat-like app.

What is Apple hiding? -.- http://t.co/wA1DOSxG

Seriously, they probably have a pretty-close-to-done iChat app for iOS.

Either that, or they are/were planning on integrating all kinds of cool stuff into the Messages app.

The clue is in the references to “IMService” and “aimservice”. Of course this could be something Apple were planning to introduce, or it could be something they may introduce into iMessage itself, only Apple know the answer to that.

It would make sense to add some sort of compatibility with OSX either by implementing iChat features on iOS or discontinuing iChat in favour of iMessage for Mac. just like FaceTime it could be a universal feature.

What do you think? Would you like to see iMessage for OSX or iChat for iOS? Let us know below.

I personally found the unit very easy to use, and paired with my iPhone 4s flawlessly. The controls are pretty self explanatory when it comes to playing music, to activate Siri you simple press and ho;d the play and previous buttons.

The sound quality, I have to say, was well above my expectations. The amount of bass almost made my ears bleed which is just the way I like it! The ear buds are quite comfortable too, no issues with them falling out of my ears.

Below are some images and a video review.

Click here to view the embedded video.

How in the hell this was approved I have no idea but it needs to be taken down straight away!

Now, at the time of this writing, and after sending a strongly worded support email, it seems that Apple has forced the developer to amend the description for his app as it now displays as the overpriced game that it is.

It beggars belief that Apple can be so lax with matters like this yet they will keep good, honest developers waiting months for approval.

Ok so it is no secret that you can tweet directly from inside of iOS 5. You can send images from the Photos app, send links to YouTube videos, send a location from the Maps app and so on. But what if you just want to tweet @ somebody or just a plain old tweet? You can’t right? Wrong.

I stumbled across this by accident today when I was looking through a contact that had been assigned a Twitter username. Upon clicking the Twitter username a new popup appeared that has “Tweet” and “View Tweets” buttons.

There is one obvious downside, it will not show a blank tweet. To get around this I have set up a new contact so that when it comes up I can just delete the @test and continue writing my tweet. Obviously this is great for mentioning people that are already in your contacts. To add a Twitter username to a contact hit edit and “Add new field”, choose Twitter from the list.

One thing to note though is that your tweet may show “via Address Book and Contacts on iOS” rather than just “iOS”, getting mixed results with this one.

I have since been playing around with possible uses for this with Siri but have come across some pretty nasty bugs so I won’t post any details on those just yet.

Firstly, MyGreatiPhone will not be held responsible for any damage you cause to your iPhone as a result of trying the following.

This only works on the iPhone as you will need to dial a special number. To enable numerical signal bars do the following;

That’s it! You should now be able to tap to change your signal bars whenever you feel like it. We have not explored any other settings inside the field test menu and we suggest that you do the same unless you are sure you know what you are doing.

Have a tip? We would love to here it.

However, after going through the tabs it becomes obvious that this app is nothing more than a flagrant advertising ploy. Some of the tabs look like they could be vaguely accurate but some are just way off. For example, take the standby time tab pictured below.
Now if I can get 70hrs from 36% that would be amazing and exactly what Apple state on the “Tech Spec” section of their website, but in reality the numbers are nowhere near that, so instead of actually making any calculations, this app is merely going off the specs as stated by Apple.

And so we come to the apps main function, advertising. On each tab you can set the level to where you would like to be at, and with the exception of a small increase, every tab advises that “you NEED a Phillips charging solution”, Really? Surely I just need to plug it into a power source to charge the battery, yes?

But what if I WANT to drain some battery? Oh, I can go and watch some Internet videos by pressing the dead link, awesome. Funny how the link that leads to their product page works perfectly.

If you want my advice this app is like a dangling carrot saying “wow look what your battery should be giving you” and is just going to take up space on your homescreen.

I am all for developers trying things out and proving Apple wrong when it comes to hardware restriction claims but some things are better left unreleased. If anyone should bring Siri to the iPhone 4 then it should be Apple which will still leave me with a sour taste in my mouth but at least it will be done properly.

Reasons why porting Siri is a bad idea? For one, it is illegal! Also to get Siri to establish a connection with Apple you either have to brute force a connection or use some sort of proxy server, thus taking the fluidity away from it. As always with things of this nature, the scammers are thriving. Twitter is awash with bogus claims and fake evidence all trying to obtain donations for servers or some other nonsense.

My main point here is don’t give a DIME to these idiots asking for server money as they will most likely go and buy an iPhone 4s for themselves and release nothing but amazing pictures taken with their new device.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments or on twitter @Nazaroth

Now normally battery life isn’t such an issue, but when the iPhone 4s was released there was a large number of users reporting very poor battery life which was tracked down to bugs in the location services. This has since been addressed by Apple but if you still want to be on the safe side then this case could be what you are looking for.

Mili themselves brand this case as one of the slimmest external battery cases available measuring in at 18mm, adding only 9mm to the thickness of your iPhone. Mili also claim that this case can DOUBLE the battery life of your device but we will get to that soon. The case itself is hinged at the top to allow you to simply slide your iPhone in easily and then clip the hinged end back over the edge. I had no issues at all with this and the clasp did not open in my pocket once. Below are some images.

I have to say that the case feels really nice in my hand. It does add some bulk and weight to the iPhone but not enough to make it uncomfortable to use. When you first charge up the case it will charge the iPhone fully before charging itself, you can charge the case separately if you want to though.

One issue I did find is one that is actually detailed in the instructions. Due to there being such a deep recess for the camera, when taking a photo using the flash you get a small but noticeable white blur in the bottom right corner of every picture. The simple fix for this is not to use the flash, so not ideal but a small sacrifice.

The level of charge is indicated by 4 blue LED lights on the bottom right hand side, when charging they will flash on and off. During use you can check the remaining charge left by pressing the button. At first it seemed that the case would always be on and charging as my iPhone sat at 100% fully charged for quite some time but then I noticed it stop and the iPhone battery started to be used.

When you get down to a low charge you can simply activate the case by pressing the button, this will start the charging action. As for Mili’s claim that this case doubles the battery life, well, I hit the button on a fully charged case when the iPhone was at 25% and managed to get a 93% charge, more than adequate for getting you out of a tight spot or preventing the loss of a tethered JB. Well done Mili.

Overall the Mili Power Spring 4 is a great way to extend the battery life of your iPhone. I also get the feeling that during a light impact my iPhone 4s would be pretty safe.

As well as battery cases you can also find iPhone 4s gel cases on MobileFun too.

Firstly a huge thanks to MobileFun for sending todays review item to me. This one is for all you glamour seekers out there who want your iPhone to fit in visually with your lifestyle.

The Case-Mate Bling case is, as the title suggests, total bling! It gives the illusion that the backplate on your iPhone 4/4s is diamond encrusted, and yes it fits the new iPhone 4s.

As with all cases of this type, perfect access is given to all the ports and buttons while still providing a decent amount of protection to your device.

As I said the case adds a fantastic diamond effect to the back of your device, making you stand out in the crowd and will turn plenty of heads. Around the edge covering the aluminium band is clear plastic to emphasise the backplate even more. More images after the break.

All in all this is a great looking case, if you are looking primarily for protection then this case may not be for you but if you just want to accentuate an already great looking device then this is the case for you.

If you are looking for an iPhone 4s hard case then head on over to MobileFun where they have tons of great cases to choose from.

Seriously? This is exactly the kind of thing that is giving jailbreaking a bad name, especially when sites of this magnitude get their facts so wrong. Next they will be saying that Siri is being trained to coerce your bank details from you.

If you want to read the article to see for yourself you can find it here.

I’m sure you will agree this is a tar and feather type labelling of two prominent developers that have contributed many great tweaks over the years, some of which have probably ended up being snaffled and officially implemented by Apple.

This is NOT who we are Forbes, do some proper research in the future.

Discover More With Bing’s Inaugaural iPhone App
The best of Bing desktop search is now available in the uk for the first time on the iPhone

Today, Bing announces its first UK foray into the App Store with an all-in-one search app that lets iPhone users make faster, more informed and localised decisions while on the go.

As well as providing the features that are popular with desktop Bing users, such as the enlightening daily image and insightful information ‘Hotspots’, the new Bing App for iPhone holds social search at its heart, allowing you to share search results with friends and family via text, e-mail and Facebook at a touch.

The new Bing App for iPhone also features a clever Voice search feature that allows you to search without typing via voice recognition technology. Added to this, the App also features Bing Vision, an innovative feature that uses the iPhone’s built-in camera to scan QR codes or use OCR text recognition to search Bing to look for whatever you like, including the name of your favourite book or even game.

The App also provides quick access to Bing’s rich images and allows you to search for localised news, weather, and even use Bing maps to plan your journeys, taking public transport into consideration.

A long time ago I got to have a play with the Bing app and have missed it ever since. The image rendering is far better in searches than Google, the images actually appear as they should rather than being blurred until you view the original.

At first glance I was a little apprehensive as the icon isn’t very striking, but I thought “what the heck” and gave it a chance. The aim of the game is simple – The Warrior Viking Ragnar will send his mighty ThunderSword skyward, it is your job to keep it up there.

As the ThunderSword flies across the sky you will encounter many explosive objects designed to slow you down and inevitably bring you back to earth, thus ending the game. These include;

• Small birds
• Thunder clouds
• Tiki-Gods
• Grizzly bears
• Asteroids
• Rainbows
• Aliens

To help you, there are 3 types of gems that when hit, send you higher – faster. Like I said before, this game is quite addictive but there is one thing that stands out, and that is the epic, save the world style background music! It could be straight out of a Viking movie! It really spurs you on to reach new hights.

With GameCentre integration you can also keep track of your top scores and try to beat your friends.

All in all this is quite a simple looking but highly addictive game and I would recommend it to you all.

Thanks to Rob Shoesmith at Medlmobile for approaching us for this review.

So here we have the original Angry Birds, and below, the rip off.It doesn’t take a genius to see what has happened here. Cut the Birds has somehow made it to number one free app in the UK AppStore, no doubt down to unsuspecting users assuming that it is part of the Angry Birds franchise, and they would be forgiven for thinking that, right?

Well as you can see the idea of the game isn’t copied from Angry Birds, but it is copied from Fruit Ninja by HalfBrick, again copying graphical content like the bombs that end the game. As expected the game is of very poor quality.

However, it gets even worse. After some digging I found that SolverLabs also has a game in the Blackberry App World store called “Fruits and Ninja” and yes, this is a COMPLETE rip off of Fruit Ninja! See the images below;

Fruit Ninja by HalfBrick, and below the junk copy by SolverLabs

This is 100% copyright infringement! Just look at the details, the 3 X’s indicating lives remaining, the fruit and the bombs! This company needs to stop riding the coat tails of established companies and either give it up or get original. Apple also need to do something about this too as it is just casting a bad shadow on some great games.

I urge you all to report these copycats in the AppStore by hitting the “Report a Problem” button.

Supercharged version 2.0 of the updated ringtone application is a much more robust and clean version of the app. Help videos, introduction wizard and More apps sections have been moved under one button which is topped up with an HD iOS5 redesign.

We listened closely to all our fans and app users to come up with SoundCloud integration. You will see how neat the upload and ringtone sharing were implemented thanks to huge SoundCloud music share experience.

Ringtonium 2.0 for iPhone works, looks and feels like a professional tool for creating ringtones. We are hoping all of you will feel the same while using Bamboo’s revamped app.

We will bring you more as soon as the update hits the AppStore tomorrow.

We can all agree that Siri is a groundbreaking feature that has drawn record numbers to upgrade/purchase the iPhone 4s. One of the key abilities Siri is capable of is sending text messages.

This works great, but as Siri is still in beta, it can be a little temperamental and can still get some words wrong. So if you are driving and are using Siri to send a text message, you can’t keep looking at your phone and you want to know that you aren’t sending some incoherent drivel to your loved one or a family member etc, right?

Ok so you could stop and check that Siri has heard you correctly, OR you could simply ask Siri “Read it back to me”. When using headphones to perform this task Siri automatically reads the message back to you so it is great that you can do it normally too.

It works like this;

You: Send a message to Claire

Siri: Ok I can send a text to Claire for you, What would you like it to say?

You: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood

Siri: I updated your message, ready to send it?

You: Read it back to me

Siri: Your message to Claire says “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck ward” would you like to Send, Cancel, Review or Change it?

So you can see on this occasion Siri failed to correctly identify the last word. At the top you can see Siri is reading the message back to me. So had i sent this message, Claire would almost certainly have pulled me up on the error.

Once again Siri has managed to exceed the expectations of at least one fanboy and I am sure you will find this pretty cool too.

VERY preliminary 4S JB: http://t.co/5lgqpLHa http://t.co/2WOJ50zS (Huge missing pieces prevent public release. LOTS of work left)

No mention of wether it will be tethered or untethered and obviously no mention yet as to which exploit it is using. As stated it needs a LOT more work before it is ready for the masses.

The images below are the ones posted by MuscleNerd.

Obviously it will be finished and publicly released when it is ready so please do NOT pester the Dev-Team, it won’t happen any quicker if you do.

**UPDATE**

MuscleNerd just posted a video of his iPad 2 jailbroken on iOS 5.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Until now the answer was no, but it seems this was because Siri was receiving incorrect commands. It has been discovered that if you simply tell Siri to “Restart”, it will!! And your iPhone will respring! If you say “Siri, restart” it will not recognise the command.

This is epic stuff as it shows there could be even less reason to need a jailbreak in the future. We are currently testing other such commands to see if we can coax Siri into performing any other system tasks and will update you if we find any.

Found an interesting command yourself? Let us know and we will add it.

When iOS 5 was in beta, two of the new features announced were Airplay mirroring and Multitouch Gestures for the iPad 2. For some reason these features were limited to the iPad 2 leaving first gen iPad users with a sour taste in their mouths.

Some noted that Gestures could be enabled on the iPad 1 using Xcode, but when iOS 5 went public, the ability to do this was withdrawn completely. These features were also available to those that were jailbroken but many simply aren’t prepared to live with a tethered jailbreak.

Well now thanks to a forum member over at ModMyi and a modified version of Redsn0w, Gestures and Video Mirroring  can once again be enabled on the original iPad. As Airplay Mirroring has not yet been ported to the iPad 1 this is the next best thing. Video Mirroring was introduced to the iPad 2 only on 4.3.x and works in the same way but wired.

Instructions

Step 1: Download the modified version of redsn0w, which can be downloaded here (for Mac), or here (for Windows), unpack and run.

Step 2: Hit the Jailbreak button and put your device into DFU mode as instructed by Redsn0w. I have to note that when I did this the countdowns seemed to cycle much more slowly than they normally do and thus I ended up in recovery mode rather than DFU. I had to basically guess from past use as to when to press the appropriate buttons in sequence. Do let us know if you experience this too. Once in DFU let it do its thing. On the next screen make sure you uncheck “Install Cydia” and instead check “Enable multitask gestures”.

Be patient, it takes a few minutes to apply the hack. Don’t worry, it will seem like you are jailbreaking but you are not.

Step 3: Once complete, go to Settings > General, and the multitasking option should be available for you to activate.

The great thing about this process is that it survives a reboot so once done you will have the new features until you next restore/update.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A lot of effort went into this video so it definitely deserves a like at least.

Most of you will immediately recognise this as the first thing that comes to mind when you think about “the first mobile phone”. These things were HUGE, but they worked. The general idea back then was to make mobile phones smaller. This brings us to the next generation, which most of you will again feel some nostalgia for.

Back in the 90′s Nokia was famous for their smaller mobile phones, I myself owned one of these babies, and those who owned one were considered cool (yes, COOL!).

A few years later Nokia went further by producing even smaller units like the 2 below.

Mobile phones continued to get smaller after the millennium, with some companies even going as far as this one below.

Now obviously this is not a practical size for a mobile phone at all. It was after the year 2000 that we started to see smart phones enter the market. To begin with they were pretty crude combining PDA functions with telephone functions. In 2007 we had the likes of the LG Viewty leading the way which featured a 3″ full capacitive touch screen display and a decent camera. So you can see phones were starting to get bigger again.

In June 2007 at their WWDC event, Apple announced their first offering, the iPhone, which paved the way and set the bar higher than ever. With a 3.5″ multi-touch display, the world went mad for it.

Initially the iPhone met with criticism due to its inability to install 3rd party native applications and some even said it couldn’t be considered as a smartphone, but all this changed with the introduction of the iPhone 3G and the AppStore in July 2008. The smartphone world exploded, with many manufacturers adopting a similar model. Fast forward to 2011 and we have literally hundreds of smartphones, some now sporting up to 4.5″ screens, wait, what happened to making things smaller?

The mobile phones of today are now faster, thinner and lighter than ever, but some of them are huge! In a complete reversal of design the evolution of the smartphone goes a little something like this (not completely to scale but you get the idea)

I think that some of todays smartphones have gone a bit far, I mean if it doesn’t fit comfortably in your hand then what’s the point? What do you think? Is bigger better? Let us know below.

At the time of this writing the “Set up iCloud on this device” function takes you to an error page. The other 2 open the AppStore. Interestingly it looks like Find My Friends will be available to everyone and not just the iPhone 4s. Currently it is not in the AppStore and will not download.

With iOS 5 dropping to the public some time today, iCloud should be fully functional by then. Let us know your first experiences with iCloud.

Over the coming days we will see more and more apps updated to take advantage of iOS 5′s many new features. TweetBot takes advantage of a feature called single sign-on which lets their app fetch Twitter credentials directly from the operating system, which has a new Twitter panel inside the Settings. Thanks to single sign-on, if a Twitter account (or multiple ones) are already configured in iOS 5′s Twitter settings, third-party apps like Tweetbot won’t need to re-authenticate users using the often clunky web view we have all come to know and loathe. They can simply get the account-related information from iOS’ Settings app.

So basically after tomorrow you will have added your Twitter accounts to the Settings.app, then when you install a third party Twitter client that has this feature integrated, you will notice that all of your accounts will already be added to the new app. This is great for those who have many accounts or simply can’t keep track of passwords.

Let us know what you think of Single sign-on and whether it will benefit you.

Image and info courtesy of Macstories

It has taken so long for this update to be released that they almost missed an entire hardware cycle, and had it not been for the late arrival of the iPhone 4S, they WOULD have missed it.

However, while the update has added many retina graphics, there are still some images that are NOT retina ready! I mean come on Microsoft, what is the problem? Images below.