Google Phone Coming To Verizon

Google’s Android operating system for mobile phones will be available on the Verizon Wireless network under an agreement the companies announced Tuesday.

Verizon states that Android-based handsets will becoming in the next few weeks. Android is Google’s operating system for mobile phones.  The new Android-based devices will come loaded with mobile apps developed by Google, Verizon, and third parties.

Even if this competes with the tremendously popular iPhone, we believe as long as there are innovative devices coming out, it will force companies to improve for the sake of consumers.

The telecom industry was stale for so long. Remember when the Motorola RAZR came out? It looked slick at first, but there weren’t many features. They also kept coming out with many different versions with little varied features confusing the market. Apple’s iPhone was a game changer and forced telecom to make better phones and provide richer services.

Dropbox Online Storage and iPhone App

Dropbox is an easy to use online file storage that syncs your files across all your computers. I installed it recently and must say it is very intuitive, easy, and fast! You simply go to their website, create and account, and then install on your computer (both Windows and Mac compatible). You can then select your drop box folder to by synced. Files or folders that are in your Dropbox folder are then synchronized online. The performance is great. When you make a change, Dropbox sends the “delta” only to the server thus making the change very quickly. You can also access your files through the website.

The free version begins with 2 Gig of storage space with an additional 1 Gig by referring friends. There is also premium paid version which offers much more.

Dropbox recently released an iPhone application to make it even easier to access your files anywhere in the world. This new iPhone app will let you get access to all your Dropbox documents, PDF’s, pictures, videos and much more. Dropbox also introduced offline viewing in the iPhone app, with “Favorites.” If you add a file to your ‘Favorites’, they’ll be accessible at any time. To do so, just hit the star at the bottom of any file, and it’ll be added. Otherwise, your files stay in the cloud. This is great for people who complain that the iPhone does not offer local file storage. Dropbox offers this and more with automatic sync with their cloud!

Dropbox can also let you share files and folders to anyone in the cloud. The iPhone app also lets you upload pictures and video (with iPhone 3GS).

In just a few days, Dropbox reached over 2 million users. Impressive.

When is Google’s rumored GDrive coming? Google???

Google Push Email and Calender Sync

Dammit.  I just spent $2.99 on an app to give me push Gmail on my iPhone and then Google goes and adds that capability through Google Sync.  Damn you Google, for making what used to cost money free.  Details at the Google Mobile blog.  Thanks to TechCrunch for alerting me.

If you have GSync already set up on your iPhone, all you have to do is go to the Exchange entry and activate the Mail option.  Simple!

Warning – the Google mobile blog servers are apparently mobbed right now, cause performance is slow slow slow.

UPDATE: In the 20 minutes since I activated this service, I’ve noticed three things.

• You don’t get a popup alert on your screen when new emails come in.  This could be a good or bad thing, depending on your point of view.  You will get  a buzz indicating new mail (if your iPhone is set up for that).
• There is a definite lag between receipt of email and Google pushing it to your iPhone.  It’s not huge but it can be a couple minutes.  I’m curious as to if this is due to the newness of the service or if it’s normal lag due to using Exchange.  It’s no different than what sometimes happens with the Blackberry, so unless you’re OCD about your email you probably won’t notice it.
• My Yahoo push email has apparently never worked properly and for whatever reason I do not get my Yahoo mails pushed to my iPhone.  I only noticed this because of how Google’s push works.  Luckily I don’t care about my Yahoo accounts, since they serve as repositories of spam and junk emails for various signup lists.  Plus all my porn user names and passwords.

iPhone Visual Voicemail Notification Fix

One of the most frustrating and surprisingly under reported issues is with AT&T and iPhone Visual Voicemail notifications. When you receive a voicemail on your iPhone, an alert appears and you can play your voicemail as if its a song. There is now a solution!

Since the iPhone 3GS was released, some customers experienced lack of alerts for voicemail (me being one of them). I recently found a fix for it while I was researching tethering for 3GS. Apparently, tethering your iPhone may cause this issue.

So here’s the fix. Navigate to Settings → General → Network → Cellular Data Network and within the Visual Voicemail section add “acds.voicemail” into the APN field. Your visual voicemail will now work once again.

CAUTION: This fix does break the tethering. You can’t have voicemail notifications and Internet tethering work at the same time.

Via Apple Blog

Because I’m sometimes a total idiot, I decided to upgrade my jailbroken iPhone 3G to OS 3.1 last night, despite all warnings from the Dev Team to NOT do this until they’d had a chance to check out the 3.1 firmware.  Because I have an almost child-like faith in the ability of the interwebs to find a workaround to jailbreak the iPhone, I figured I’d be out of sorts for no longer than a month or two before I got back to my jailbroken goodness.  And who knows, I may still be saved from my own stupidity.  However as of this point, my iPhone is officially borked.

So here’s the background.  Following the lead of our fearless leader Quang, I jailbroke my phone using the easy-as-cake redsn0w tool about two months ago.  And life was good, though not super-wonderful.  The main point of my jailbreak was to get access to deep customization and themes, plus a couple of apps that Apple refused to allow in the Apps Store (GVMobile and the uTorrent monitoring app).  I really didn’t need background apps or tethering, so a lot of the real benefit of jailbreaking was lost on me.  Still, I’d grown pretty accustomed to being able to change the look and feel of my device on a whim.  And I got kind of obsessive about monitoring the free memory of my iPhone.

When OS3.1 came out, a lot of the features it contained (Genius mixes and apps organization specifically) were things I wanted to play with so I figured I’d upgrade, try it out, and return to jailbroken freedom in due time.  Well the upgrade went fine (btw, jailbroken iPhones will sync just fine with iTunes 9), but now my iPhone does not display all the apps I’ve installed on it.  I believe that this is due to my use of a jailbroken app called Categories, which allows you to create folders into which to place your apps.  I think that the linkage between Springboard and Categories (which hides the app once it’s been placed in a folder) still exists and that the iPhone thinks the apps are installed but that Springboard has them set to hide because that’s what Categories told it to do.  I only noticed this issue this morning so I’ve tried a hard reboot to see if that would fix the problem.  No dice.  I’ll have to wait until I get home to do a full restore, and then if that doesn’t work I’m going to try to remove all my apps and re-add them to the iPhone and see if that does the trick.  If not, then I’m well and truly hosed and I might have to return to factory defaults as a last resort.

So word of advice – don’t upgrade your jailbroken iPhone until the Dev Team gives the all clear!

Google Voice Now Fowards SMS To Email

One of the most popular feature requested from Google Voice was the obvious forward inbound text messages to email. You can now receive incoming text messages to your email. Furthermore, you can even reply from email as well. Users previously could respond to the Google Voice text message on their phone but email forwarding was previously not an option.

Now, once we can have Gmail push to our iPhones then I can cancel the ridiculously priced text messaging plan from AT&T.

Via TechCrunch

Twitscoop iPhone App

Have you ever wondered what people are talking about in the cyberspace cloud in real time? Well, now you can with the iPhone App Twitscoop.

Twitscoop allows visualization of real time trends and discussions on Twitter straight from your iPhone. The tag cloud grows and shrinks in real-time depending on the popularity of the topic.  The app has a trend algorithm that pulls buzz words, breaking news, and content such as pictures, links, and videos.

Strangely, the key feature lacking in Twitscoop is the lack of ability to tweet from within the app. It is such an obvious feature that they should include it in future updates.

Twitscoop is available for $0.99 on the iTunes App Store.