All Articles in Tips and How-To

[This is an official Smartphone Experts Round Robin post! Every day you reply here, you're automatically entered for a chance to win an iPhone 3G, Case-Mate Naked Case, and Motorola H9 Bluetooth Headset! Full contest rules here!]

Our video preview is done, our final review is posted, but you had Palm Treo Pro questions and so we’ll try to provide some answers… After the break…

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Well I’m sure by now you have heard the latest Smarthphone Experts Roundtable Podcast! (If you haven’t had a chance to listen you better get on it, great podcast!)

You may have heard our very own fearless leader, Dieter, chime in on one thing that he hates about iPhone 3G, the fact that you can not turn on Wi-Fi while the radio is off (in Airplane Mode). Or so Dieter thought. You can indeed turn Wi-Fi on while the radio is off! And doing so is a snap!

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Like most iPhone users out there, I’m always excited about firmware upgrades because you EXPECT things to be BETTER afterward, right? I just so happened to be up late, writing, on the night that the 2.2 firmware update hit, and wasted no time in downloading it to my precious iPhone 3G. Once completed, everything was fine and much improved!  Or…   was it?

It wasn’t long until I realized that my iPhone was heating up excessively and I couldn’t keep it close enough to a charger. If my phone was topped off when I went to bed, and left unplugged, it was dead by morning. How could this be? Even a reset didn’t help. There had to be some app running in the background that was chewing up my battery faster than Pac-man on a steroid/speed cocktail. Are YOU having the same problem since the 2.2 update? If so, read on. This tip may apply to you!

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Disclaimer: This guide is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Neither TiPb nor the author take any responsibility for any problems/issues/bricking/etc. that may occur while using this or any software to modify your iPhone. Please be aware of what you are doing. If you’re not sure, don’t do it.

Note to New Macbook Owners – if you have a late 2008 model aluminum MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air and have not previously Pwned your iPhone (under firmware 2.1 or earlier), the issues we blogged about previously mean you will have to use a different computer to Jailbreak 2.2.1. Sorry folks. If you have already Pwned under 2.1 or previous, then you can simply put your iPhone into recovery mode and restore with the freshly created IPSW. (If you don’t understand what all that means, keep reading, or go to our Jailbreak Central Forum for help)

This applies if you have a locked iPhone 3G and you wish to update to 2.2.1 but preserve the iPhone’s current baseband software. Preserving the baseband will ensure that you can still use “yellowsn0w” the iPhone 3G unlock application. To upgrade your phone to 2.2.1 and preserve the state of the baseband you need to create a custom .ipsw with PwnageTool. This custom .ipsw will not contain the baseband update but of course will still give you any new stuff from 2.2.1

*You must be on firmware 2.2 or below in order to preserve your baseband. If you are already on 2.2.1 prior to Jailbreaking you will not be able to unlock your phone.

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Ok, I will admit I have never heard of Emoji (“Picture Characters”) until it was announced that iPhone firmware 2.2 would support them. As it turns out, however, the only iPhones that were blessed with this feature were on Japan’s SoftBank network. Until now that is…

Important Note: If you are not familiar with editing code we here at TiPb do not recommended that you try this.

No matter what carrier you are with, you can now apply a hack that was found on Gizmodo that will enable Emoji emoticons. Keep in mind any iPhone will be able to display the icons hacked or not, while “other” phones out there need to support Emoji in order to display them.

You need to edit the file /User/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preferences.plist on the device -> whether you use a jailbreak to achieve this or merely some iTunes backup editor is up to you. Add the following boolean key as ‘true’: KeyboardEmojiEverywhere. Then merely go to the Keyboards section of the Settings app, hit Japanese, and turn on Emoji. Will work for any text field/view in the OS, including on websites, AND including the titles of items on SpringBoard (e.g. if you save a bookmark to the home screen).

The easiest way to do this would be to Jailbreak and run your iPhone as a SFTP server for editing the config file. Again TiPb does not recommend you try this if you are not familiar with editing code.

[Via Gizmodo]

[This is an official Smartphone Experts Round Robin post! Every day you reply here, you're automatically entered for a chance to win an iPhone 3G, Case-Mate Naked Case, and Motorola H9 Bluetooth Headset! Full contest rules here!]

You had Google Android G1 questions, we’ll try to provide answers. Unfortunately, we already shipped the Android G1 off to TreoCentral’s Jennifer and we’re moving on to the Palm Treo Pro, so we won’t be able to answer anything we didn’t already find out last week, but for the most part, we’ll try our best to give you an iPhone look at Google handset.

See our answers, after the jump!

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I noticed 3 messages stuck in my Gmail outbox post-OS 2.2 upgrade. Just sitting there. Mocking me. “Sending” but never getting “sent”. Following a comment by Matt, I re-typed my password and voila, the intertubes they were cleared.

Not sure if this will work for everyone, either by itself or with a reset, but give it a try and let us know.

UPDATE: scottb helps out earnie in the comments with a Google link for unlocking display Captcha to overcome an invalid sender address problem. Our readers rock!

Any other trouble-shooting tips? Keep ‘em coming!

Now that 2.2 is upon us, you can get your TiPb fix in yet another way: grab our Podcast over the air!

It’s simple. Just turn on WiFi (necessary because all of our podcasts are over 10 megs), head into iTunes on your iPhone, and search for “Phone different.” It’ll pop up right quick (and includes the feed for our iPhone Live! Podcast to boot!). Then head in, tap download, and away you go!

(Speaking of the Phone Different Podcast, we have this week’s in the bin. It should be edited up and ready for you to grab tomorrow)

If the iPhone is your first smartphone, then you won’t fully appreciate the lack of a means to send contacts or files via Bluetooth or IR (infra-red). What if you want to send your Google map to a friend to show him or her the way? What about sending a website link of your winning team to your buddy to rub it in? The iPhone is lacking in some of the more conventional methods of sending data to someone else, but the built-in screenshot capability can do wonders! Read on for more!

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The iPhone is a great phone and an awesome entertainment device, but it’s also a great tool for a variety of things, including an excellent travel companion. Ana Ortiz at LaunchSquad dropped me a line and suggested I check out Best Western’s site, which also happens to be iPhone-friendly as a web app. Best Western, partnering with Usablenet, brings their site to the iPhone for your traveling convenience. What features are available via the web app? Read on after the break!

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