All Articles Tagged epic fail

T-Mobile has issued a warning that the ongoing, dare we say catastrophic failure of the Sidekick servers could result in permanent data loss if Sidekick users in any way reset their devices during the outage:

“Sidekick customers, during this service disruption, please DO NOT remove your battery, reset your Sidekick, or allow it to lose power.”

Scary, but also an urgent reminder to everyone who uses Cloud Services, including iPhone owners with MobileMe, Exchange ActiveSync, Google Gmail/Calendar, or any other, similar accounts.

Best practices dictate that data doesn’t exist unless it’s in at least three locations: local, local backup, and off-site backup. Cloud covers offsite (so does a duplicate drive at another location), but if any of your data is irreplaceable, even important, you need to make sure it’s backed up locally.

You can typically save emails, and export calendars and contacts. You can get cheap external hard drives and either manually copy your files over or get easy-to-use automatic backup solutions (some, like Shadow Copy for Windows and Time Machine for Mac are even built into the OS).

Storage is cheap, photos, videos, information, etc. can be priceless. Back it up now. If you need help or advice, check out TiPb’s iPhone Forums.

[ZDNet via Engadget]

The minute our iPhone calendars turned from August 31 to September 1, TiPb’s email box started getting many colorful variations of “Summer is over, where’s our [redacted redacted redacted... redacted!] MMS and tethering!

While Apple showed off the front-end for MMS and tethering back in March, released it along with iPhone 3.0 in June, and most of the rest of the world has been enjoying it ever since, AT&T is a notable, and increasingly infuriating exception. Late summer (and when is that exactly?), and that it will be no extra charge, is all they’ve said. And whether you personally would use MMS or not, right now you don’t even have that choice.

We’ve heard all the excuses, from AT&T’s network can barely handle the iPhone as-is, and MMS and especially tethering would bring it, crashing and burning, to its knees, to a rumor that AT&T had to manually turn on MMS for every single iPhone account on their system. We’ve also heard it may be announced as part of Apple’s September 9th event. That would be very late summer indeed.

But that’s all we’ve heard. There’s been no status update from AT&T that we can find, no attempt to keep their users in the loop, no expression of sympathy for the frustration their users are voicing (or emailing us!). AT&T is being almost Apple-esque in their lack of communications and for a company that’s in the communications business — and is charging high monthly rates to its consumers — that’s just not good enough.

Is it?

So, who could it be running the approval process for the iTunes App Store at Apple? Hmm. Tough one. Let us put on our little thinking caps here for a moment…. SATAN?!

No, of course, not, nor the Church Lady from SNL, but it must be someone equally cartoonish, how else do we reconcile the App Store rejecting Tweetie 1.3 for containing “offensive language” in search results returned from the public Twitter “Trends” rankings? (via Twitter)

We can search for all manner of unholy pr0n in Mobile Safari, should Apple Reject their own core application because of what it may return as well? Are they expecting developers to become censors and str the fck out of words the way Apple.com does? (see below).

Of course, this could just be one rogue App Store review processor gone horribly wrong, but Apple still bears responsibility for a totally opaque, seemingly capricious review process that creates incidents just like this — over and over again.

They’re likely selling enough fart apps and games to make this a small problem from their end, but they’re losing badly when it comes to the good will of truly innovative developers and bleeding edge techies who form the core of any true next-generation platform.

Wake up, Apple. You’re better than this.

(And good luck to Tweetie developer Loren Brichter on getting Tweetie 1.3 approved — as it should be — and into all of our waiting iPhones quickly!)

Screen shots showing the rejected “language” in Tweetie and others for the sake of comparison after the break (NSFW-L)…

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I watched the recent Apple iPhone commercial, the one featuring Loopt that promised to keep me in stronger, better, faster contact with all my similarly teched-out friends, and immediately fired my iPhone to download it.

But guess what? It didn’t show up in the App Store. Dieter was kind enough to send me a direct link, so I clicked on that, and know what happened? I got a pop-up telling me Loopt wasn’t available in the Canadian App Store.

So, either we Canucks have no friends to stay in contact with, Loopt has yet to expand their offering to our frozen shores, or Apple didn’t bother to make a commercial with wider appeal than AT&T’s network coverage (or all of the above?)

In a global village, is it odd that an App isn’t just an App, and often medieval licensing rights prevent real parity in services?

For our international readers, any other Apps you’ve been unable to get due simply to where you live? Any Americans ever come across an App you couldn’t get?