This past weekend, I had an overnight trip to the US with a friend and wanted to be able to use my iPad/iPhone while away from my Rogers 6gb dataplan. The data roaming options from Rogers (all Canadian carriers actually) are far too overpriced for casual use like a quick trip to Seattle, so I wanted to test out the 3G capabilities of my iPad, which I recently upgraded to the 64gb 3G model.
First thing I needed to do was acquire a microsim card for it. I had heard that AT&T doesn’t give them out and wouldn’t even sell them to non-customers. So I headed to an Apple Store and sure enough, they gave me one with no fuss and for free.
I then popped it into the iPad and proceeded to set it up. Another friend had recently bought a 3G iPad while travelling in the US and told me that he was able to activate the AT&T microsim using a Canadian credit card although it did only work with his American Express. I didn’t even try to use another type of card and proceeded to create an account with my AMEX. Unfortunately, and expectedly, AT&T’s signup form wouldn’t accept a Canadian address in the billing information section. I forced my billing info into the two address lines and used the zipcode/city/state of the Apple Store I was sitting outside of for the service area.
This whole part of the process is painful and seemingly unnecessary – I should be able to simply buy a $25 AT&T card and redeem it for access…why does it matter my service area?
I finally got the account setup and my credit card charged for the 2gb/$25 plan that was good for 30 days. I did a quick test with wifi off and was good to go on the iPad.
I had read online that the iPad data plan used a different APN for accessing data. A quick lookup in the Settings screen confirmed that it was using the APN of ‘broadband’.
Before leaving for Seattle, I had visited the unlockit.co.nz website to create a custom APN profile for the iPad APN and emailed it to myself. To do this you simply visit the site (you need to visit it with your iPhone for it to work), select ‘Custom APN’ and enter ‘broadband’ (no quotes) and leave the Carrier & other fields blank. You can create the profile right then (this would require that you’re already in the US and are on wifi) or you can email the profile to yourself. This is the preferred method as some people had issues applying the profile directly from the site (I didn’t). You may also want to create profiles for any other carriers you’ll be using on your travels at this time – you never know when a site like this could disappear.
I then took the microsim out of the iPad and put it into my software unlocked (via Ultrasn0w) iPhone 4. I then loaded up the APN profile from my email (you just tap on the attachment and hit the install button). You may need to reboot or simply switch into and back out of airplane mode to be able to connect. Then magically, I was connected to AT&T on my iPhone 4 with 2gbs of data. I had no voice or SMS but I didn’t care…I use Google Voice for US based SMS already.
I was able to use FaceTime as well, even though I didn’t technically have a voice line, I was assigned a voice number which showed up on the caller id to my friend that I called via FaceTime. Using the My3G app, I was also able to FaceTime over 3G while driving down the highway.
Once we got to our hotel, we discovered the the wifi was no longer free so I opted to use the MyWi app to share out my data to our iPads. At one point we were both using our iPads while having a FaceTime chat with a friend, all over my 3G data on my iPhone.
Keep in mind that the AT&T data plan for the iPad is a reoccurring charge that you have to cancel if you don’t want to be billed monthly for the service. You can do this from the iPad itself, over wifi, from back in Canada. I’ve got about a gig left after this weekend’s usage that doesn’t expire for a month.
As I mentioned earlier, the whole point of the iPad (and you could also say unlocked iPhones too) being carrier agnostic is so that you can use it while traveling…it shouldn’t be this many hoops to simply give a carrier your money to use their service. As far as I can tell, no carriers in North America have provisions for travelers from outside their country to use their data…of course they all want you to roam and pay through the nose for data from your home carrier. Consumers are smarter than that.
The other day, while spending a couple hours in line to get the new iPhone 4, my friend Mike showed me something pretty impressive on his iPhone: his entire house via remote web cameras. Using a $5 iPhone app called iCam and some cheap webcams scattered around his house, he was able to setup a great remote security system that we could view over wifi or 3G.
We happened to be waiting to get our iPhones at a Rogers video store that carried videogame gear….turns out the Xbox 360 camera that comes with the In The Movies game kit (I got it on clearance for $24 but have been spotted cheaper) works perfectly on a Mac…in my case, my new Mac Mini Server that I picked up a little while back.
So I bought the camera and the app and as soon as I got home, I set it up…well, I may have played with the new iPhone a little bit first.
To make it all work, you need to download some software for your computer (Mac or PC). It’s a free download from the makers of the iPhone app:
It’s pretty straightforward to setup, just ensure that a camera of some kind (built in iSights work fine) before running the software and ideally, the computer will be on all the time. In my case, my Mini is a file/web server so it’s on all the time.
You choose your video/audio sources, create a username and password that is unique to you. You can give your camera a name and set the motion sensitivity settings…you can leave these at the defaults to start. The rest of the shots are screenshots taken from my iPhone. The great thing about this app is that you can easily configure it remotely on an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. The computer based software can also be accessed from any java capable browser, but that’s not a cool as from your phone.
Once you’ve downloaded and installed the iPhone/iPad app, you simply enter the username/password from your Mac/PC setup and it should just find it and start up the camera – no firewall or proxy settings necessary. By default, it launches with four windows (as it supports up to four cameras) so just tap on the window that has your camera source in it and it should go full screen.
Tap the screen and you’ll be able to adjust a number of settings, including the motion sensitivity and push notifications. If you have pets or lots of outdoor light in the room that you have the camera setup in, you’ll need to adjust this. The motion button will light up green when it detects motion.
I love the notifications that pop up on my iPhone. I simply swipe to unlock my phone, and it takes me straight into the webcam view without doing anything else.
If you choose to record motion events, you’ll be able to view them remotely as well:
The motion events are basically stills capturing the motion and you can play them back like a timelapse movie directly off your iPhone remotely.
All in all, it’s a pretty simple, yet effective security camera system for about $30 for the camera and app…and you may already have a camera so it’s only a $5 investment.
A new iPad application, called Flipboard, was released last night amid much fanfare from a number of prominent folks on Twitter (Robert Scoble is who introduced it to me).
After finally getting it downloaded and setup, which took awhile due to heavy demand right out of the gate, I have to say, it lives up to the hype.
It lets you add your Twitter and Facebook feeds, along with a number of selectable content categories (you can’t add your own RSS feeds, at least not yet) and it presents all that content as a completely personalized magazine to you. The screenshots in this post are from my own Facebook content, presented in Flipboard.
Server overload and few other glitches aside, it’s pretty slick and can only get better as they expand the content offerings.
Check out this video explaining more about it:
After playing with it for awhile, I agree it’s a pretty compelling way to view your social world. I love that the magazine is different everytime you open it…although I do wish there was an offline cache version as it seems to choke if you don’t have a net connection.
Yesterday, at the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple unveiled the latest version of the iPhone:
You should watch the design video if you haven’t already seen it…it’s quite the update that I of course am looking forward to getting.
Unfortunately, as of this writing, we still don’t know when the new model will be available for Canadians.
It comes out in the US (and a few other countries) on June 24 with 18 more countries by the end of July and to everyone by the end of September. Most people are expecting this means Canada will get it in July…but there hasn’t been anything specific that says or implies this.(Canada will get it in July – thanks Allen!) All the Canadian carriers have updated their websites with few details other than ‘coming soon’ or promises of more information in the ‘coming weeks’.
Considering this is the third model available in Canada, third year in a row, which is now supported and sold by at least 3 major cellular carriers, I’m left wondering if it’s going to be an upgrade nightmare like it has been in the past.
I know Apple controls the marketing and distribution very tightly so my belief is that the carriers really don’t know (or can’t say) anything until the last moment. AT&T has already begun notifying it’s customers via a text message that lets them know how much it will cost to upgrade to the newest model.
This is smart. It lets each customer know exactly, in advance, if they are eligible to upgrade and how much it will cost – including any additional fees. This isn’t a randomly received text that looks like a marketing pitch, the customer can request a confirmation via SMS by dialing a number and they’ll get a response immediately.
I just hope the Canadian carriers are paying attention and don’t let us down a third time.
My 3GS upgrade process was very frustrating thanks to conflicting account information (Rogers’ system said I was eligible for an upgrade when I called in but the dealer computer system said I wasn’t when I tried to pick up the device) that took many hours of wasted time to resolve followed by a similar process when my wife wanted to upgrade – both situations required intervention at a higher level with help from Rogers social media team whom I engaged via Twitter to get resolution. They were very helpful but it shouldn’t have had to get to that point…and I know I’m not the only one as many friends encountered the same situation and had to spend time wading through the system.
I’m also left wondering what will happen to the data plans in Canada. AT&T has been changing around their offerings (lowering the included allotment for minimal decrease in price). Will the Canadian providers do the same now that we could start chewing through those 6gb plans now that our phones can record bandwidth chomping HD video with a one click button to uploads to YouTube?
I guess we’ll see in the ‘coming weeks’.
Update (June 15, 2010): Looks like something I was hoping for (2nd last paragraph) has happened…Today, Apple updated the Canadian Online iPhone Store (and presumably other countries) to indicate that they will be selling fully unlocked iPhones if you order them from Apple directly:
Of course, these unlocked phones will come at a premium but for those that are contract adverse, travel internationally frequently or just want freedom to move between carriers this is very welcome news. No longer will the cat and mouse game for unlockers matter to people that buy their iPhones this way.
As I mentioned previously, I’ve been playing with the extremely hard to find iPad Camera Connection Kit and photos taken with my various cameras.
It’s a simple set of two dock connecting devices, one for SD cards and the other for USB, not unlike a USB SD card reader I have (in the middle):
When you first connect one of the adapters to the iPad, it automatically launches the Photos app and displays a new tab called ‘Camera’ and begins to load image thumbnail previews:
You’ll also notice that it there is also a ‘Places’ tab – I didn’t have this tab before connecting the camera kit and it plots all the geotagged photos on the iPad on a map:
Once the previews are loaded, you can select which photos to import or import all of them:
Once the import is done, you can then choose to keep or delete the photos:
The photos are now available in your camera roll in the ‘All imported’ album with the most recently imported batch in a ‘last import’ album. Any videos in your imports will also now be playable, as long as they are in the correct codec/format that the iPad can understand. I found that videos shot with my cameras varied but the files, while not playable, would be playable when I synced the iPad back to a computer, on the computer.
A side benefit of the video support, especially when travelling, is that you can load up a huge SD card with iPad playable movies and just import the ones you want. Once you watch them, delete and load more. It saves the steps of loading them into iTunes (assuming you made/ripped them yourself – DRM’d/rented movies won’t work this way) and having to allocate space for them during syncing. This also means you may not really need that 64GB iPad since you can literally just save a gig or two for movies and add/remove as necessary. This would have been handy during my trip to Hawaii but I didn’t have the camera kit yet.
From here, you can simply view and email your photos like normal. That’s pretty much all there is to it. But I’d like to be able to apply some post processing to some of the photos and have found that CameraBag for iPad is the most interesting app currently out. I first wrote about CameraBag for iPhone two years ago and have been very impressed with the new version for the iPad.
Once CameraBag is launched, you can select your camera roll to import photos via the top left icon:
Using the options on the bottom right, you can process the original photo in any of the preset modes:
as well, you can mix and match the borders and crops as you’d like or choose ‘Vary’ for a random effect combination:
The settings popup lets you choose the size of the saved image as well as modify the list of filter options:
I’m pretty happy with the results of this super portable combination:
If you’re into photography and have an iPad, you’ll definitely want to pick up a camera kit…it even supports RAW files. Too bad it doesn’t work with the current iPhone 3GS – it would be pretty awesome to be able to upload straight off the camera to the internet via just the iPhone.
Maybe the next OS update (or hardware revision expected to be announced next week) will allow this.
game kit (I got it on clearance for $24 but have been spotted cheaper) works perfectly on a Mac…in my case, my new Mac Mini Server that I picked up a little while back. 
