Today, Wired.com posted an article about the iPhone surpassing all other cameras to take the top spot on my favorite photo sharing website, Flickr. This isn’t surprising to me…I have over a thousand photos taken with the iPhone on there alone.
Even cooler than that though was the fact they used one of my photos, with attribution, of the iPhone in the article:
and on the homepage of Wired.com:
The geek in me is happy today…even if the photographer in me wishes they used a better photo ;)
Just a quick review of this handy gadget I picked up for my iPhone. Battery power is always an issue for iPhone users that use their phones alot. I had looked at things like the Mophie Juice Pack and the InCase Power Slider but found these to be too bulky. I rarely need to double my battery life, usually just give it another 20-40% to last all day and into the night.
That’s when I stumbled across the Griffin PowerJolt Reserve ($45 @ Future Shop) which seemed to be the perfect thing. It’s a small little battery pack that ‘lives’ on a dock that you leave in your car which also has a pass-thru USB port in case you want to actually charge your iPhone while driving too which is a nice touch. Even cooler is the dock actually uses inductive charging to top up the battery pack – it literally just sits on the dock – no cables or pins to line up and it magnetically stays put while charging it up.
It charges while you drive and then when you get to that night time outing after a day of work, you just grab the battery pack and take it with you. If you run low on juice, plug it in…no bulky case to weigh you down.
I actually mentioned this item when I was on Couch Beers with Jordan…I had actually just bought it minutes before being on the show and hadn’t even opened the package or tried it yet so this is the follow up review.
The battery pack has a single button on it which lights up the five leds on it to let you know how much juice is left in the battery pack. On my iPhone 3GS it seemed to charge it up at a rate of about 1% per minute – while still using it. I’ve used it a couple of times now when my iPhone is down to about 20% and a fully charged battery pack will easily get me beyond 50% in no time while I’m still using the device.
It has a kind of strange shape when not in the dock but easily goes into your pocket while charging it up without too much trouble.
Another added bonus of this pack being small and not a full sized case – you can easily share it with your iPhone toting friends. I was out for drinks with a bunch of folks and we were all running low on juice and we just passed the pack around each grabbing a few minutes of charge each….not a full charge but certainly enough to finish out the night or to make it through the bus ride home.
Griffin also makes a wall plug version, called the PowerBlock Reserve
as well as a Powerduo Reserve
which includes both the car charger dock and the wall plug dock. Had I seen the Duo first, I would have probably bought that instead.
I’m pretty happy with this item and I don’t have to worry about charging my iPhone on the go after a long day of use. I bought mine at Future Shop but it seems you can find these anywhere that sells iPhone stuff – I’ve seen them at the Apple Store, Walmart, Best Buy, etc.
George Hotz is at it again…this time he’s brought the purplera1n down on the iPhone hacking community with his super simple jailbreak tool that is now out for Mac and PC users running the 3.0 firmware.
Running this app with a connected iPhone (3G, 3GS, 2G) will jailbreak it and after a reboot, drop an app called ‘Freeze’ on your iPhone. Run this app, wait for it to finish and then reboot again and you’ll have Cydia installed. Run Cydia and then follow the instructions at iClarified.com to install Ultrasn0w on your iPhone and then reboot again. You should now have an unlocked, and jailbroken iPhone 3GS.
Modmyi.com has a Mac tutorial already up for the new Purplera1n.
As with all these types of things, use caution and expect things to go sideways. Worse case is you do a restore via iTunes in most cases….but proceed with caution and at your own risk.
