www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECOctgAyMr8

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What you do is select the year that you want to listen to and the app serves up the top 100 songs according to Billboard that year. It plays them in a Pandora type shuffle to where you can only skip to the next song. You can click a button and see all the songs from that year but you cannot select a specific song to play.

The other downside to the app is that it puts up an ad for the main Bing iPhone app every 3 or so songs where you have to manually click next to continue with the music. I downloaded the app that they were advertising but the ads still come up.

They are advertising that this app is going to be $1.99 but is free right now. I would hope that they would remove the ads in you actually pay for the app. I guess we will just need to see.

Currently I am groovin’ like it’s 1993. Hip Hop Hooray! Ho. Hay. Ho.

Here’s a link to the app in the iTunes App Store – Top 100s by Year by Bing

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After closing Safari I opened the Kindle app and it said that it was syncing and in less then 30 seconds my book appeared. I opened it and the whole thing was there. I though that it would need to download for a while but it was actually pretty quick. The whole experience was pretty cool!

This has opened up a whole new world for me as having the book “in my pocket” will give it a much better chance of getting read. Good work Amazon!

- Posted from my iPhone, please excuse any typos!

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I have seen a drastic increase in 3G availability and signal strength since the update. At my house I would usually have only one bar for 3G or full bars for Edge. Now I have four solid bars of 3G everywhere in my house.

The other significant differences that I have seen are that my contacts, SMS, and camera all load up a whole lot quicker (the camera could still be quicker though in my opinion).

My wife had been having trouble with her 3G in that it would not want to check here Gmail account. She would sometimes have to reboot it to get it to work. I updated her phone this morning and she has not had the problem since.

I think Apple may have gotten the 3G to the point of stability that my 2G phone was when I first got it (I got it about 2 1/2 months after they came out). When I got it the updates that Apple pushed out were feature updates as opposed to bug fixes.

I hope it is smooth sailing from here on out .

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Anyway, the guys that developed the iPhone video recorded recently updated it to run on the 2.0+ firmware so I took the plunge and used QuickPWN to jailbreak my 3G iPhone. It was pretty simple to do and I was able to find the video camera app on Cydia and install it. The only hitch I encountered was that my unlock code that I had purchased does not work on this latest version of the video camera app. I have a support email into them for a new code so I can take video past their 30 second trial block.

One of the feature of the video camera app is the ability to upload your videos directly to YouTube from your iPhone. I shot the below video on my 2G iPhone a while back:

While it’s not the best resolution and is only recorded at 15fps it is still pretty cool. Also YouTube does it’s un-magic my re-encoding it to the Flash format which is not all that great. When I download the original mp4 files down to my computer and view them there they actually look pretty good. I really hope that either the iPhone Video Recorder team or Apple come out with a video app that can do at least 24fps as that would really be nice.

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I, as so many others, have had some pretty major issues with reception my iPhone. This became so much more evident while I was in the Bay area last week. I already new that 3G coverage in and around the San Mateo area was not good but my experience at SFO was terrible.

At SFO I was grabbing a bite to eat while waiting for my flight and had placed my phone on the table. I sat there and watched it for about 2-3 minutes as it continuously looped from Edge to 3G to data roaming to No Service. All of this with me touching it only to revive the screen from sleeping. Seeing this caused me to understand why people are so frustrated. The words “Class Action Lawsuit” quickly sprang to my mind in thinkng about how widespread this issue may be.

Although I was having those crazy issues with my phone a chalked it up to a California funky infrastruture and quickly forgot about it since I was heading home to Austin. Historically my reception in Austin has been great, that is until yesterday.

Yesterday I am having lunch and have full 3G bars but cannot get a web page to load to save my life. I reboot the phone and same thing – full bars and no web pages will load. I hung my head in defeat and went back to work.

All of this leads up to the 2.0.2 update last night and thus my mad dash to install it.

From the get go I can see that things are more responsive and zippier. I did have the app crash issue but I have had that with the last 2 updates. To fix it all I need to do is download and install a new app and then all of them work (it us still a bug but that is a quick work around).

This morning it seems that the phone does not switch between Edge and 3G as quickly and will not sit there on 1 bar if 3G for ever. I am definitley getting more Edge coverage where 3G is weak. It seems that the phone is holding on and keeping a good signal longer. The AT&T network seems to be more stable here in Austin so this update seems like it is good for us. I have seen other folks report that things are worse for them so it seems that it just depends where you are located (like always).

All in all I still live my iPhone and it is the best phone I have ever had. I know these issues are just from this technology being so new. I remember my first dial-up and DSL services. They were terrible as well when they first came out but they stablized over time. I expect this to as well (Although I do remember a Class Action Lawsuit against AOL for over selling there service which caused people not to be able to get online :-p ).

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Now these are sanctioned apps downloaded from the app store that I I am talking about (not jailbroken apps, my phone is not jailbroken). Evey app would take me back to the screen. At first I thought that it might be because I was playing my iPod while trying to run apps but after I got it fixed I can listen to music and blog at the same time.

The way that I was able to fix it (for some of the apps) was that I deleted my WordPress app and then reinstalled it. That caused the majority but not all of the apps to start working again. Evernote is still crashing to the desktop.

I think the possible cause could be the fact that before I got on the plane I synced my phone and the shut my MacBook down with my iPhone still plugged in. It is pretty lame if that is the cause but that is the only thing out of the ordinary that I have done.

Well I am off to DC. Hopefully I can play a game or two on the way there.

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At the time of writing this I am at the Starbucks in Round Rock at HWY 79 and Red Bud which is near Old Settlers Park. 3G here is a single bar but if I go outside I get full bars (the cell site is down the street). I work near the Arboretum (Braker and 183) and I get 3-4 bars inside of our office building. Traveling between these two locations on Mopac and I35 has the reception vary from 1-2 bars to full bars. I have not seen any dead spots that cause my phone to revert to Edge.

In mentioning I35 I wanted to note that while driving through San Antonio and up to Austin on I35 I had 3G coverage all the way. I listened to Pandora uninterupted the entire time (which was awesome). I have not been down to south Austin so I cannot atest to how coverage is “down there” .

In comparison coverage is much better in the Austin area then it was in the Milbrae/San Mateo area in California. I was really surprised at the fact that I rarely had full bars and that my phone would switch to Edge regularly.

I hope my little rundown of coverage is helpful to anyone that is considering a 3G iPhone in the Austin area.

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The first was that I took the Mac Mini out of my son’s room and put it in my office which is downstairs. He had been playing too many video games and although they were educational we noticed that he was not that interested in regular toys as much. A four year old that wants to play video games and not with toys can be tough to handle.

With the Mac Mini downstairs my wire then had a computer to do small tasks with without going upstairs (the kids can be easier to handle downstairs. I asked her whether she felt that we still need the Wind and she said no.

All of that lead up to us being on vacation last week and my birthday happen to be on that Monday. I mentioned to her whether she would mind if I got it and she said sure. I waited for 2 hours last Saturday night and scored a black 8GB model.

I have to say that I really like it. The GPS came in really handy on our vacation and the 3G was fast where you could get it (3G coverage is terrible in Northern California compared to the Austin area). The other thing I like about it is the plastic back instead of the aluminum one of the first generation. I had a rubber case on my first generation one because it was so slippery. With this one I don’t have a case and do not plan to get one.

All in all I am glad that I got it. I have already sold my 1st generation iPhone and my wife has already put in her order (with me) for a 3G. We are thinking of giving her phone (unactivated) to my son as a gaming console since he has taken a liking to a couple of games that I have loaded on my phone from the App Store. We will see about that .

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Everything went well for the most part except for the fact that my mail application would not work. If I clicked the mail icon it would half-load the mail app and then crash to the desktop. I tried restoring – twice – without the issue being resolved. I did multiple searches on Mac Rumor, Gizmodo, and the Apple Support forums and nobody was having this issue so I knew it was an isolated issue.

I did come across some other folks who could not receive incoming calls (but could make them out) and it was suggested to them to re-download the update and re-restore from there. I tried this and am happy to say that it worked – my mail app does what it is supposed to and now I can check multiple emails at one time to either delete or move them to a fold.

Other things that I have noticed is that the keyboard seems more zippy and passwords now have their characters changed to dots after a few seconds to mask them much in the way that a standard Mac or PC does. Safari does seem quicker as well.

But that’s not the best part – Official 3rd Party Apps Rock!

I have already downloaded 6 of them ranging from AOL radio (KROQ from So Cal streams quite nicely) and I am eager to check out the blogging app by Six Apart.

I was really sweating it there for a while especially since I am packing up to leave on vacation this afternoon and the thought of no email access was freaking me out. I thought I may have to go buy a 3G iPhone just to have it (that is not exactly the end of the world).

Anyway, the iPhone 2.0 firmware rocks and it is enough to keep me tied over until the 32GB version of the iPhone comes out.

Technorati Tags: iPhone 3G,2.0 Firmware,Apple

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