If your iPhone contract has run out (or about to) then you can ask O2 to ‘unlock’ your iPhone. Once unlocked you can get a PAC code and transfer your existing number to T-Mobile.

Advantages

• The £10 a month unlimited internet and texts for life is a great deal for anyone, like me, who doesn’t make many voice calls.
• Since its pay as you go when you travel abroad you are no longer faced with a horrendous bill on your return. You can get one of their £5 roaming bundles easily by text whilst you are away.
• Topping up is a delight, they send a message when you are running low you can send a free text back with the last 4 digits of your previously registered credit card  the amount and three security digits, and away you go.
• The itemised billing is excellent, totally itemised bills to the last K of data transferred and instantly available on the web.
• 3G Coverage so far is awesome!

Disadvantages

• If your phone breaks and Apple replace it then according to the local Apple store it will be locked. Will O2 unlock a phone if you have no contract? When I asked at Apple they just said speak to O2 and yes O2 say speak to Apple. Maybe this issue will clear up as more iPhones get legally unlocked and Orange etc come to the market.
• At the moment  if I put the iPhone in Airplane mode the iPhone asks to be unlocked again by iTunes (to do this you have to remove the SIM, take it out of flight mode, reinsert SIM and then iTunes will unlock it).
• You get the silly Content Lock screen (in picture) if you access blogs
• The iPhone seems to eat the battery in 3G mode. I guess with O2 it never found a 3G mast!

Conclusion
Its great to have an always on internet, even in the depths of cafes and lecture theatres, so I’m sticking with T-Mobile until either I buy a Nexus or the latest toy from Apple.

I recently had O2 unlock my iPhone prior to me transferring my number to T-mobile. I wanted to test T-Mobiles unlimited internet and texts for a tenner a month.

All went well until….
I’ve now discovered that putting the iPhone into flight mode  locks me out of the iPhone totally, insisting that it has to be connected to iTunes to be unlocked as the SIM card has been changed

To make it worse plugging it into iTunes  says the iPhone is ‘damaged’ and needs to be taken to an Apple store

I’ve now discovered a work around. To get access to the iPhone menu’s, Remove the SIM card. You can then access the General menu and take it out of Flight mode. Replace the SIM and unlock with iTunes if you have remembered to bring a laptop with iTunes on it.

Oh, and iTunes is total bloatware – installing it on my little Eee with its 4GB drive consumed 500MB of space. Windows XP pro by comparison fits in 3GB.

Another annoyance is, away from home,  I cannot do a full iPhone sync. As on any other computer I use it will lose all the music, contacts and applications if I sync.

Now if only I could order that Nexus…..

A newish UK based service is Ipadio which enables you to record messages from your phone (it has a free iPhone app as well) direct to an embeddable file or a downloadable mp3 . It works well although I cocked up the membership by registering on the iPhone and on the iMac

I received a welcome email from Giles Bryan a director at Nemisys who obviously run Ipadio. Interestingly each item created is called a Phlog which is the name of a cool blogging photo blogging service created by Alan Bradburne that I used to use.

Here is a tiny interview with Sally of sallyinnorfolk fame,

Be interesting to see how it gets on. I wonder if Fred was an early stage investor….

Many thanks to athinkingman for his twitter:-

athinkingman – The ipadio iPhone app rocks! http://www.ipadio.com about 5 hours ago from web

[gmap]

XP Pro on the Eee

I finally managed to get my bargain 4GB Asus701 Eee to run with XP professional and for there to be still about 1GB of spare space after installing all my must have programmes for travelling and suffering the SP3 upgrade.

Various points of hard earned wisdom are:-

Use nLite to shrink your XP but be careful what you take out and leave in. I used substanially these notes from i64X

However, make sure you leave the Internet explorer box ticked at the compatability screen and to untick the window sound drivers in the Drivers option. (The windows default drivers seem to screw up the installation of the Asus sound stuff).

Asos Eee in Paramo Taiga fleece

Programmes I’ve installed so far are:-

• Skype for contacting Sally on!
• Firefox with Extensions – Adblock Plus, Delicious, Foxmarks, Scribefire (for blogging),
• avast antivrus
• Foxit reader
• GPicSync for geotagging my camera pictures.
• GPS Trackmaker for downloading my Garmin traces.
• Flickr uploader
• Garmin Mapsource
• Filezilla ftp client for maintaing and setting up blogs for folks I meet.

So of the 3.71GB available I now have 722MB left (although I’m pretty certain Garmin will be getting deleted as its very bloatware like at 200MB).

Now to check out the battery life etc and to find WiFi connections.

And for you Linux geeks out there, I did so try to get GPSBabel running on the Asus Xandros OS but totally failed, although I did manage to get the full Linux desktop installed for a time.

All the above has probably taken about 3 solid days in time although the final nLite creation and installation was about 2 hours! Cold boot time is about 1minute.

Some of you may say what about the iPhone? My answers are:-
Its terribly fragile and as Euan knows not very water resistant!
You can only use its internal GPS / Camera.
Mine is still locked = hideous O2 roaming charges

So the trusty unlocked Treo680 will get another outing!

Today was repair Sally‘s bed day Necessitated by her 6ft+ lad falling on her foot board when playing hide and seek and cruelly snapping it in two.

Good excuse for me to try out my new Erbauer ERB800RL all purpose saw – worked fine although I think it may be to flimsy for the more severe pruning jobs that friends ask me to do!

After which Sally gave me a first rate Indian Head massage and then I installed the new Google Latitude (alas not fully functional for us second rate citizens in the UK) programme whilst Sally had a paying client for a Swedish massage.

We headed off to Kings Lynn for a short walk and tea with Sally’s friend who did the Inca trail a couple of years ago.

Here’s the walk using the very neat Everytrail application on the iPhone:-

Lynn stroll

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

After reading the history of Twitter over at @Dom‘s blog  140 characters and how it was conceived “We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park.
It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us
stop eating and start talking.”

Thought I would check out my Twitter stats on TweetStats since I joined in November 2006.

Interesting I’ve never gone above 209 tweets per month. Even though I can use it on the iPhone. My most used iPhone app. is gpstwit with 112 tweets. Least used is Twinkle at 43.

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After reading the excellent post “Overnight success takes a long time” by Paul Buchheit on the history of gmail it stirred my memory into why I use gmail. The answer is this prominent  button:

Before gmail came along. Spam was a real problem for me, as you can see from the last  10 MINUTES worth hitting the gmail spam filter.

and its totally relentless, a 10 minute snapshot any time day or night is the same!

So full marks to Google for letting me use gmail on all my email accounts and also to be able to access them by IMAP and POP so I can read them on my iPhone and Thunderbird.

Oh and I’m sure FriendFeed will eventually be a huge success! Follow me there as geofones.

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Today’s walk was a 17 or so mile circular tour from Cambridge along the tow path to Baits Bite lock and then across to Horningsea. We then ventured across Quy Fen to Anglesey Abbey to see the Himalayan Siver Birch trees resplendent with their jet washed bark We returned alongside the lovely mill stream to Quy had a pint & cuppa at the Quy Mill Hotel before going under the A14 to return home via Teversham and Cherry Hinton.

I was experimenting with the new iPhone GPS application called Trail, this worked very well even with the iPhone stuffed in the breast pocket of my jacket! Once completed you can email the gpx file or send it directly to Everytrail.

Problems are battery life – my estimate is 4 hours – although apparently you can trick it into shutting the screen down by having the music playing

The second problem is that you can lose significant bits of trail by the software automatically connecting broken tracks together. See the purple trail I’ve added in the image.

Definitely worth having the capability as my Garmin Etrex batteries ran out during the walk! Trail also allows you to view your Everytrail tracks. Overall pretty neat and impressive that it works with the iPhone in my pocket. Thanks Euan for the tip

Here is the completed trail with photographs :-

Cambridge to Anglesey abbey circular walk

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

Oh dear my 3G IPhone is starting to crack up:-

3G IPhone Crack

The crack is about 12mm (1/2″ long) starting from the 3.5mm headphone connector.

I have an appointment to see a Genius in the Cambridge Apple store in a short while….

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Update: Apple replaced the phone FOC – Excellent service from the Cambridge UK store

Tomorrow is the big day for trialling my new external iPhone battery pack, that I recently purchased with the gift voucher that Euan gave me for loaning him my old iPhone

iPhone with external battery pack

I will be at Be2Camp 2008 during the day and then, hopefully, meeting up with Annie Mole at the Photography.Book.Now London Meet-up in the evening plus the rail journey both ways. An impossible challenge for the standard iPhone, especially with all the calls and emails going on about the office and house sales

The story so far is that the pack makes the iPhone increase in weight from 134gm to 246gm and in size from 115 X 60 X 10mm to 130 X 65 X 26mm.

The pack is rated at 2200mAH the internal battery appears to be 1400mAH

Worst problem so far is that the external battery total blocks the camera! So, to take pictures I will have to remove it from the pack. The pack doesn’t seem to charge the iPhone on its own, charging only takes place when the unit is plugged in.

Lets hope the phone doesn’t get into its toasting mode, where the internal battery is depleted in 30mins or so, with the pack in place it will probably burn an hole in my trousers!

Update:

The unit worked well, once I had discovered the small button next to the LED I survived a whole 12 hours of intensive surfing, twittering, picture taking (alas no music as I had lost the earpods) in London and still had some power left once home. It can work as a iPhone mini base station charger so you can still use the iPhone as normal then just plug in to recharge or use it in the battery pack. Seemingly a good buy! so far

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