ElectroBoom: Violent iPhone Repair

This is NOT how you should try to repair the camera on your iPhone:

iPhone tip: Watch out for "Time to Leave" calendar notifications

This weekend, I was traveling out of state. While away, my phone started alarming at 4:00am. Which is very strange because I hadn't set any alarm for that hour, nor is there any event scheduled for that time.

After a bit of investigation, I discovered that it was because an event later that day (a simple reminder, scheduled for 9:00am) accidentally had its alert time set to "Time to Leave". See the image (right) for an example.

In case you're unaware, the "Time to Leave" alert is a feature meant to let you know when you need to start traveling in order to arrive at the location for the event. For instance, if you have a doctor's appointment, and the doctor's office is 15 minutes away from home, it will alert you 15 minutes before the appointment when you're home. But if you happen to be somewhere else, it will alert you based on the estimated travel time from your actual location (based on a computed route, traffic conditions, etc.)

You can probably figure out what happened. My reminder was scheduled for 9:00am, with a location set to my home. And the alert time was "Time to Leave". So when I was out of state (a 5 hour drive away from home), it dutifully alerted me 5 hours before the reminder's time - at 4:00am.

Let this be a friendly reminder to double-check your alert settings when creating events, especially if they are daily/weekly reminders.

The Verge: An exclusive look at an original iPhone prototype

An exclusive look at an original iPhone prototype
Apple's red iPhone M68 in all its glory
By Tom Warren | @tomwarren | Mar 19, 2019, 9:00am EDT

Apple had developed the iPhone in secret over those two and a half years, and for many inside the company, the device had only been known by the codenames “M68” and “Purple 2.” Apple was focused on surprising everyone with the iPhone, and that meant that many of the engineers working on the original handset didn’t even know what it would eventually look like.

To achieve that level of secrecy, Apple created special prototype development boards that contained nearly all of the iPhone’s parts, spread out across a large circuit board. The Verge has obtained exclusive access to the original iPhone M68 prototype board from 2006 / 2007, thanks to Red M Sixty, a source that asked to remain anonymous. It’s the first time this board has been pictured publicly, and it provides a rare historical look at an important part of computing history, showing how Apple developed the original iPhone.

Awesome bit of history.

The Verge: Your nose isn’t really as big as it looks in selfies

Your nose isn’t really as big as it looks in selfies
By Rachel Becker | @RA_Becks | Mar 1, 2018, 12:33pm EST

Noses in selfies may be smaller than they appear

Your nose isn’t actually as big as it looks in selfies, says facial plastic surgeon Boris Paskhover. So maybe hold off on that nose job — at least, until you’ve seen a decent portrait photo of yourself.

Last year, more than half of plastic surgeons were approached by patients who wanted to look better in selfies, according to a survey by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. But selfies don’t actually reflect what people look like in the flesh, says Paskhover, who works at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. “They take out their phone and they say, ‘Look at this picture, look how big my nose looks,’” he says. “I went out to prove why selfies don’t look like the real person, why they’re distorted.”
...
Most smartphone cameras have wide-angle lenses, says The Verge’s creative director James Bareham, and close-ups with wide-angle lenses cause distortion that makes objects closer to the camera — like, say, a nose — look larger. “It’s kind of one of the basics of photography: don’t shoot portraits on a wide-angle lens because you will look terrible,” Bareham says

Seems pretty obvious now, but I'm sure I'm not the only non-photographer who was unaware of this fact.

I think phone manufacturers should take this into consideration. It's probably not best to use a wide-angle lens for the front ("selfie") camera, the way you do for the normal (back of the phone) camera. On the other hand, if you're holding at arm's length (or less) for taking a selfie or for video-chatting, a portrait lens might not be able to capture you're entire head.

I wonder if the advanced image processing software of a modern smart phone could correct these wide-angle lens effects. Given that there are already software packages for other kinds of lens corrections, this might be a viable option.

Is anyone at Apple or Google reading this? If you are, please take this article as a feature request on my part.

Business Insider: We put the iPhone X's Face ID to the ultimate test with identical twins — and the results surprised us

We put the iPhone X's Face ID to the ultimate test with identical twins — and the results surprised us
Emmanuel Ocbazghi, October 31, 2017

Business Insider got an exclusive look at the iPhone X, and, naturally, we tried to beat its facial-recognition feature by having one twin register his face and the other try to break in.

A very impressive test. The phone was able to tell the registered owner from his identical twin. And, as promised, a hat, scarf and sunglasses did not change a thing.

Click through to watch the video.

Auto-rooting malware for Android

Three new malware strains infect 20k apps, impossible to wipe, only affect Android
By Daniel Eran Dilger
Thursday, November 05, 2015, 02:40 pm PT (05:40 pm ET)

A new adware scourge injecting itself into popular apps such as Facebook and Twitter is also "virtually impossible to uninstall," requiring infected users to replace their phones. Because it only affects users of Google's open-store Android app model, the device replacement requirement may accelerate the trend of users switching to iOS.

"A new trend for adware and an alarming one at that"

Three new families of "auto-rooting adware," detailed by security researchers at Lookout, are "a worrying development in the Android ecosystem" because each can root the device and install itself as a system application, making the contamination virtually impossible to remove as the infection is designed to survive even a "factory data reset" device wipe.

The group found infections among more than 20,000 popular apps, with many contaminated apps appearing to be legitimate, working titles ranging from Candy Crush to Facebook to Snapchat, WhatsApp, The New York Times and even Google Now.

I could use this article as the basis for a gratuitous swipe at Android and laugh at people who protest Apple's rules that force all installations to go through their App Store, but that would just be rude.

Introducing the DJI Osmo

h/t AppleInsider

I'm not very familiar with products already available to those making movies with phones, but this device looks really awesome. I'm sure this kind of steadicam tech has been around for a long time, but this is the first I've seen of it in a (relatively) inexpensive device integrated with a smartphone, and I'm very impressed.

I just replaced Jen's iPhone battery

Jen's iPhone, which is approaching two years old, has lost its ability to hold a charge. The battery would lose 20% of its power per hour, just sitting in standby. So I went on-line to buy a new battery and installed it last night. The process was much simpler than I had expected, although you must be able to manipulate some extremely tiny screws in the process.

The instructions I followed are available here.

I bought a battery and matching toolkit (two small screwdrivers, plastic pry-tool and two tiny Phillips-head screws to replace Apple's annoying pentalobe screws,) from iFixit for $30. It took about 10 minutes (not counting the time to sync and backup the phone) to complete this repair. Far better than sending it to Apple, who would charge $80 and hold on to the phone for a week.

All of our battery problems appear to have gone away, thanks to this relatively simple fix.

Slate: Android vs. iPhone: Why Apple still has the edge over Google';s operating system

Farhad Manjoo, writing for Slate, points out that although Google has developed a great operating system in Android, it usually gets mangled into a steaming pile of trash by cell phone manufacturers and phone companies before you ever get to see it.

... Over the last few months, though, I’ve been testing two of the most expensive, most advanced Android phones on the market, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One. Actually, I’ve been doing more than that. I’ve been using two versions of each of these phones—the standard phone that you get for $199 when you sign a two-year cellular contract, and a second “Google Play edition,” which is a special, full-priced version that features only the essential software you need on a smartphone. (The Play edition HTC one is $599, and the S4 is $649.) I’ve been switching between these four devices, using one or the other as my primary phone at all times.

...

This is one of the most important advantages Apple has over Android devices. When you buy an iPhone, it works exactly as Apple intended; it’s never adulterated by “features” that the company didn’t approve. But when you buy an Android phone, even a really great one, you’re not getting the device that Google’s designers had in mind when they created the OS. You’re not even getting the device that the phone manufacturer—Samsung and HTC, in this case—had in mind. Instead you’re getting a bastardized version, a phone replete with software that has been altered by many players along the way, usually in a clumsy, money-grubbing fashion.

...

There are lots of annoying nuisances like this one, in which Samsung or HTC took Google’s easy-to-use design and monkeyed with it for no good reason. Together, all these little bugs add up to a frustrating experience. In most cases, you can fix the problem; you can replace Samsung or HTC’s apps with Google’s version, you can remove the unnecessary stuff from your home screen, you can opt-out of flashy but terrible gimmicky features (like the totally useless “eye tracking” system in the Galaxy S4). But doing so is too much of a hassle for people who just want a phone that works right out of the box. If that’s what you want, you’ve got two choices. You can pay full price for a Play edition Android device (I’d choose the HTC One over the Galaxy S4, because it’s much more attractive, physically). Or you can buy an iPhone.

Read the complete article here.

iPhone 3GS and whiney pundits

Yesterday, Apple announced the new iPhone 3GS. It looks like a really nice new model - faster processor, more memory, a compass, etc. Apple announced pricing of $200 for the 16GB model and $300 for the 32GB model (and $100 for the older 8GB 3G (no "S") model).

But these prices are for "qualified customers only", meaning they are subsidized prices. You can get them if you are a new AT&T customer or if you are approaching the end of a contract (making you eligible for a new phone at subsidized prices. If you're not "qualified" and don't want to wait for your contract to expire before upgrading, then you have to pay full price (See the fine print at the bottom of this page) which is $400 higher. But in an unusual gesture, AT&T is offering "early upgrade" pricing of only $200 higher for customers who have less than a year left in an existing iPhone contract.

As far as I know, this is standard for the cell phone business. If you want to buy a new phone and you're nowhere near the end of your contract, then you have to pay full price, which is several hundred dollars higher than the subsidized price. That was the case with both of my phones from Verizon and is (as far as I know) the case for all phones from all carriers in the US.

But apparently, many iPhone users are completely clueless about this, or they just enjoy complaining. This afternoon, I ran across this article which was apparently written by someone who has never done business with a cell phone company before. He makes it sound like existing iPhone customers are being punished, because they have to pay more than new customers. (He doesn't make any mention of the fact that existing customers can get the same price if they wait for their contract to lapse.) And the people commenting on the article seem to be taking it as a personal attack by Apple Corporation itself.

To these people: get a life, get a brain, and learn to read contracts before signing them. You're not going to get something for nothing, no matter how loudly you scream "but I want it and I want it for free and I want it now". If you want to act like a 6-year-old child, then my only answer to you is "go to your room until you learn some manners."

If you want to complain about industry-standard pricing practices, fine, but this is hardly isolated to the iPhone. If you don't want a contractual obligation, then you aren't going to be able to get a subsidized price. But given the hatred Apple got in return for selling the first-generation iPhones without a subsidy (for $600), I doubt the whiners would like that either.