If you’ve been getting frustrated with your iPhone’s pokey performance and frequent hangs and crashes after upgrading to 2.0, you’re not alone.  In fact, everyone I know who upgraded their original iPhone to 2.0 has been complaining about these issues!  But I found a fix that brings back the stability and most of the performance - restore your iPhone and set it up as a new phone.  This isn’t perfect (it’s still sluggish opening some apps) but my phone has been solid since I performed this trick.

Warning: Restoring and re-setting up your iPhone will delete all settings, accounts, and content!  This means you will have to reconfigure Wi-Fi networks, mail accounts, etc after doing this!  Now on with the show…

There are three ways to load a new OS on an iPhone or iPod Touch:

1. Upgrade, which loads the OS in place and leaves the settings and content untouched.  This seems to be causing the trouble with stability and performance when going to 2.0.
2. Restore, which blows away the entire OS, content, and settings, and then restores the content and settings from a backup.  This works better in general, but my phone was still crashing right and left.
3. Restore as a new phone, which is a modification on the Restore procedure.  Here, you blow away everything and then don’t restore from the phone backup.  This seems to be much more stable under 2.0, and is what we’re doing below.

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One of the things that surprised me about iPhone 2.0 was the introduction of multiple calendars.  I figured that the device couldn’t handle more than one calendar, since syncing to Exchange meant you lost all other calendars.  But the exact opposite is true:  Everyone who uses Exchange ActiveSync will suddenly see a number of different calendars appear, and this can cause much confusion.

After experimenting with my iPhone, Outlook 2007, and Entourage, I think I’ve figured out how to work with these new mult-colored calendars.  Read on for the dirt!

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I’ve been running OS 2.0 on my (first-generation) iPhone for a week and a half now, and as I mentioned before, Exchange ActiveSync push email, calendaring, and contacts was one of the main things Iwas looking for when I upgraded.  That article on setting up ActiveSync has since become my top blog post by far, pulling in literally thousands of hits per day, so I must not be alone in wanting this functionality.

But it turns out that the green grass of iPhone/Exchange integration has a tint of brown.  Folks have experienced issues getting the service set up, and it guzzles battery juice like a toddler at a lemonade stand.  Read on for my notes and suggestions… Continue Reading »

It’s finally here!  The iPhone now has most of the functions of the BlackBerry - over-the-air push and sync of Exchange email, contacts, and calendars!  Apple let the 2.0 OS out of the bag earlier today, and intrepid souls (and me) have taken the plunge and installed it.

While most people, including me, headed to the (also active) App Store to try out the native games, I quickly turned the other way - towards the new Microsoft Exchange integration.

Read on for my first impressions and instructions on getting it up and running.

By the way, the apps are great!  Sega’s Super Monkey Ball is touchy, but I think I’ll get the hang of it.  And my 4 year old loves Jirbo Match!  Too bad the Red Sox weren’t playing or my test of MLB At Bat would have been much more exciting!

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“Unlimited” is the new black for mobile phone operators (at least until the iPhone Black is released in two weeks), but what are the implications for consumers?  After a surprise overage of $150 last month, I found out!  It seems that I’ve been burning up the airwaves with calls lately, and my rollover pool dried up.  Now I owed them the dough fair and square.

So I called AT&T and asked for a reprieve.  Surprisingly, the friendly (!) rep offered to remove the charges (!) and change my plan.  I could pay $10 or $30 more for a larger pool to chat in or $50 more for “unlimited calling.”  So I asked for details.

Turns out “Unlimited” actually feels kind of limiting, and I’m not alone in my reaction…

1. (On AT&T) only voice calls are unlimited for $99
2. The iPhone data plan (which is actually really nice and cheap) is $20 extra
3. Text messaging is still embarrassingly expensive and limited
4. This is the real kicker - additional family lines are not available with unlimited calling, so I would have to pay $30 or more extra to keep my wife’s line active, even though she used 8 minutes of talk time last month.

So no thanks, AT&T.  I don’t want to upgrade my calling plan to unlimited and pay $80 more per month.

It seems that there is another iPhone gremlin, this time in the interaction between the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store (as seen on the iPhone and iPod Touch) that can cause your purchases to vaporize.  This only seems to apply to folks who have unchecked “automatically sync” and have not previously clicked “Transfer Purchases From…” in iTunes.

Here’s the situation:  You are tired of iTunes syncing whenever you drop your phone into the dock, so you uncheck “automatically sync” in the iPhone Summary page.  While at your local Starbucks, you decide to download the latest from KT Tunstall.  Yup, it downloaded, and you can listen to it.  Later, you place your phone back in the dock and go about your business.  But, surprise surprise, Katie’s song is now gone from your world!  Somewhere, somehow, the iPhone deleted it! Continue Reading »

I’m working on a new feature article for Storage Magazine focused on selecting an enterprise email archiving product.  This is something I’ve done quite a bit of work around, so I decided to redirect it into a “bride magazine” type “ten things to look for” item.  If you too know about the field of email archiving products, how about weighing in with a comment or email with your opinion?

Without further ado:

The ten technical things some email archiving products do and others do not do*

1. Capture all messages - Can the archiving system really guarantee that every message is captured?  Really?  Even if a user does the old “double-delete” and gets rid of every copy on the system before the “archive sweep” happens?
2. Search and e-discovery - It’s amazing to me that some archiving systems have really terrible search capabilities.  But more important is whether they can handle real e-discovery requests from the legal department.
3. Record user metadata - Capturing what users do with a message (read, file, ignore, forward) is a tough nut to crack, and it might just be impossible with some archiving technologies!
4. Archive stuff other than email - Some are general archives that can take just about any content, while others are purpose-built for email.  I am hemming and hawing on whether this is critical in an email archiving product, and which is preferrable…
5. Security and chain of custody - How secure is the archive content?  If the answer is “kinda” then your legal department is not going to be happy!
6. Ingest an existing mail store or PST file - It’s great when an archiving system can capture every email once it’s installed, but it’s a whole other matter to be able to pull in pre-existing content.  But beware!  You have to flag this stuff as possibly incomplete and perhaps even unreliable!
7. Integrate with mail clients - What does the end user see?  Is it an unfamiliar web link or a reassuring Outlook window?  What about Outlook Web Access users?  Or the 8,000 other email clients?
8. Allow off-line access - Can a user access the archive when they’re on a plane?  Can they see it on the train?  Would they, could they in the park?  Will you, will you when your data center goes dark?
9. Integrate with third-party tools - How well will the archive really serve legal if it can’t export messages to their favorite search tool?  Note - some can even talk directly with these products!
10. Integrate with mobile users - Ok, I am on an iPhone in the enterprise crusade, but I’ll admit that lots of folks use BlackBerries and Windows Mobile (and Symbian) too.  How can they access the archive?

I’ve worked with most of the products out there, and know who can and can’t do these things.  But not all are important to everyone, so I just can’t say “this product is best.”  But I’m very interested in your opinion.  What key technical differentiators would you suggest?

* Not the actual article title!

Ever since I upped my iPhone to version 1.1.3, I’ve been puzzled by the allocation of a couple hundred megabytes of capacity to “Other”.  Look at the picture here - notice that it has 243.9 MB of “Other”?  Some of that is my custom ringtones (self-created thanks to AtomicParsley!), but not much.  The rest magically appeared when I updated the phone from 1.1.2 to 1.1.3.  The other iPhone in my family has the same mysterious space gobbler, but the number is slightly different.

So what is taking up this space?  Other people have noticed the issue as well, and no one’s figured out just why it happened.  Some have suggested it might be email, webclips, notes, etc, but this doesn’t explain why it jumped after the upgrade.

My theory is that it is a backup of the operating system.  Since the download was 165 MB, it seems to me that Apple might be keeping a spare copy of the whole thing on the phone as a backup (or something).  Perhaps it was supposed to be deleted after the upgrade and wasn’t? Or perhaps it’s something like TiVo’s “amusing” OS image card trick?

One of the (few) surprises from this month’s MacWorld was that the Google Maps application integrates location data not just from cell tower triangulation (using Google’s “My Location” technology) but also Wi-Fi visibility information, thanks to Skyhook. This combination of technologies piqued my interest, and it turns out that I was in a unique position to see just how these two data sources are integrated into the iPhone’s Google Maps application.

Although Mac Rumors reports that the Skyhook Wi-Fi data trumps the Google cell tower data, the reality is much more complicated, and thankfully more reliable, too! See, I used to live in Massachusetts (where Skyhook has data) and now live in Ohio (where they don’t). So I was able to test the priority of the location data used in the iPhone in a simple way - I compared different good data/bad data scenarios to determine just how Apple is deciding what your location is.

The short answer is, they’ve done a great job programming this and are falling back gracefully when fed bad data. When you tap the location button on an iPhone, you’ll almost always get at least a reasonable location from it, except where Skyhook has bad data and you’ve got no cell service, which is rare enough to be useful.

But if you are using an iPod Touch or iPhone with no cell service, your location data can be woefully incorrect, and even easily spoofed! Although Google Maps location is (probably) not a life and death piece of data, we can be pretty happy with what we’ve been given. But I can think of a whole lotta pranking that could happen once this tech gets more widespread use!

More details after the jump…

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