A day after the iOS 4 was released I upgraded my iPhone 3Gs to benefit from all the new features. I was delighted with the new Cellular Data switch – it allowed my iphone to be a real phone and last for days not merely hours, all due to the GPRS/3G not abusing the battery.
Unfortunately one of the “features” in iOS4 turned out to be an even worse battery abuser – the persistent Wi-Fi. While I was at home or in the office – about 20 hours of my average day – the phone was constantly connected to the Wi-Fi and the battery lasted for 15-16 hours tops, with no more than an hour of actual usage!
So far there is no “Persistent Wi-Fi” switch, so I set on finding out what caused this behavior, and here is what you need to do to get it off:
- Disable notifications (yes, no more knowing when someone wrote on your Faceboko wall or mentioned you on twitter)
- Disable any Push e-mail, from the list of e-mails (Exchange, GMail, Yahoo, etc.), not just the Push switch in Settings -> Mail -> Fetch New Data!
If you are using Exchange (or Gmail/Google Apps) you’ll also need to disable your calendar and contacts unfortunately. In other words you have to switch to IMAP/POP e-mails.
This feature, unfortunately, makes you chose between having Push e-mail and notifications or manually turning on and off the Wi-Fi every time you need it, just like those nasty Symbian phones, the iPhone claims to be superior to!
UPDATE: after ten days I have to admit – I was wrong. Probably one of those nasty background-running apps was keeping the Wi-Fi connected at all times. Now I close most of my apps after I’m done with them and battery indeed lasts for 2 days and about 3 hours of use! Cheers!
Customer service: Toyota calling you to kindly ask you to go in for a free repair of a problem that
a) you might not have
b) you don’t really care about
Anti-customer service: M-tel employee yelling at you for demanding your rights, guaranteed by law
Yup, Google’s war-driving! As part as its StreetView project, Google vehicles are also scanning for Wi-Fi signals in order to improve the non-GPS geo-location included in Google’s Maps (nope not on the iPhone). Apparently, those cars didn’t do just a “scan”, they also logged some of the actual data from the Wi-Fi. And now people are shocked, how their privacy is invaded!
They should’ve removed that image on apple.com:
from the Apps for travelling, apps for losing your iPhone prototype page.
Or else I wouldn’t be able to do this:
The App, Gray Powell did not have
According to Forbes (quoting the annual U.S. court system report for 2009) there were 2376 wiretaps in the U.S. set up by law enforcement agencies in the U.S. during 2009.
According to an article in dnevnik, quoting the 2009 report of the Sofia City Court, there were 3662 wiretaps in Sofia alone, and 5449 call records allowances were issued.
The following table summarizes clearly my point:
| United States | Sofia (Bulgaria) | |
| Population | 307 000 000 (July 09)[1] | 1 500 000 (Jan 10)[2] |
| Wiretaps | 2376 | 3662 |
According to my humble math capabilities in Sofia, in 2009, roughly 50% more people were wiretapped than in the entire United States, while Sofia has roughly 20 times less citizens than the United States has.
Cheers Big Brother!
Sources
Have you seen a Steve Jobs keynote? Have you noticed he seems to be wearing the same black polo/turtle neck for years?
I got interested and here’s what came up:
In the 1998 Macworld keynote he seems to be wearing the black turtle neck. Unfortunately the quality of the video is quite low, but I’m sure if you dig deeper you can find a better quality pictures/videos.
Same goes for the 1999 keynote, where even Noah Wyle wears one of these! Noah Wyle played Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley which came out in 1999.
Skipping a few years and you can compare and contrast some pictures of 2005, 2007, 2008, 2010.
The jeans Jobs wears are of different color on some occasions, and so are the sneakers! But the turtle neck looks the same always! So what is that turtle neck made of? Kevlar? Diamond threads? Unobtainium? Or maybe it’s not the threads at all!