A note on the Truphone iPhone Bug

If you use TruPhone on the iPhone, you’ll probably be interested in the following PSA from Andy Abramson

This afternoon this afternoon Truphone sent an emailout to its customers explaining that Truphone knows of a bug issue with the Apple iPhone that has existed since the launch of the 3.0 OS in June 2009.

The issue has been widely reported on sites including Mobile Crunch and theiphoneblog. The problem, as was outlined in the email, impacts all applications on a the iPhone, not just the Truphone application. With that said, the bug seems to have affected very few people that Truphone is aware of.

The bug is manifested by applications either disappearing entirely or by attaching themselves to others, so for example you may open a game and a different app opens.

To date there is no official fix for this from Apple, but many people find that a reboot or synch with their PC will often solve the issue.

Unfortunately a publication ran a story today shortly after the email was sent out to customers because the reporter is also a customer who had received the email. The story stated that the Apple iPhone bug had ‘taken Truphone users off air’ – this was not, and is not, true –and the publication has since rephrased the headline to something more appropriate, but not before various websites re-printed the story with the original headline and many people Twittered about it.

We would like to reassure all customers that Truphone is working as usual and is most definitely not ‘off air’.

Anyone wishing to take advantage of the Truphone service on the iPhone can continue to do so. It is still available for download in the App Store and is still offering great cost savings on international calling and Instant Messaging across multiple communities including Skype, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and AIM.

via VoIP Watch.

T-Mobile G1 is an almost …

T-Mobile G1

I’ve been playing with the T-Mobile G1for a few days now and I’d say it’s definitely a mixed bag. The form factor is interesting and the screen is gorgeous. As noted last week, the initial user experience is hands down the ultimate experience I’ve seen yet on any platform. With a simple login to Google, you have access to all your data – awesome! Actually using the G1 though afterwards is considerably less awesome…

The first thing I noticed using the G1 is that you have to constantly use both the touch screen and the hardware keys. There’s no way to do it all from one or the other and that’s both frustrating and confusing. There’s NO text entry in portrait mode which means this is a two-hander in almost every use case and something I hate. No easy way to tap back a tweet, sms or any form of text. You can dial in portrait mode, but there’s no T9 mapped to the keys – or a virtual keyboard. I know this is coming in Cupcake, but this is a huge miss.

Typing on the keyboard takes getting used to like on all devices. Because of the hump on the right side, I actually find typing to be less comfortable than on other devices because I’m always moving my hand to get comfortable and this is slowing me down – way too much.

The trackball is both a strength and a weakness. Cruising through a web page or a list it’s great, but when you are actually trying to click on a small link it’s way too sensitive. I’ve honestly not looked to see if this can be adjusted yet, but imagine your mouse is operating at hyper-speed on a tiny screen and you ‘ll get the idea of what it can be like to use.

In general the UI is nice to look at but harder to use than you’d expect. There are a lot of ways to access things from the on-screen buttons to the menu key as well as the back and home buttons and unfortunately you need to know when to invoke what option. The only truly simple thing is that the green button calls up your dialer and the red key turns the screen off.

The Camera is pretty average. No flash, 3MP = poor indoor shooting. The shutter is mushy and I found the lag to be considerable. Typical for a phone actually though even the iPhone’s on-screen button snaps faster than this. Neither can compare to a several year old Nokia NSeries though …

The browser is very solid. Much faster on wifi than anything else – which brings up a related point on TMO here. The coverage in NYC is pretty good though not stellar but you lose ALL signal on the train platform’s at Grand Central and there’s little to no signal on Metro North making any T-Mobile device useless for the commute. Anyway the browser is as good as the iPhone in my book. There’s no flash support, but you can easily manage multiple tabs and moving between them is quite nice given the tile management system in Android. There’s no sync for bookmarks though so you’ll be adding what you want as you go here which is a definite hole that should be filled.

Playing with the Market / App Store (whatever the actual name is) has been pretty positive and I’ve seen how well integrated people are able to write applications. The store itself is nowhere as simple as the iPhone store, but certainly not hard to figure out and there’s a nice diversity of applications in each category. I can’t speak to the quality of things in general but the apps I’ve tried are all quite good. So far, I’ve tried and am using Accuweather (killer GPS integration), Truphone, Bonsai Blast, Compare Everywhere, Connect 4 and Tic Tac Toe (for Hannah who’s 5), fBook, Last.fm, My Maps Editor, PixelPipe, Pac-Man, Shazam, TuneWiki, and Twitdroid

I love how the notification system coordinates throughout the system! New apps installed, emails, tweets, sms messages … all come through the menu bar and you are able to switch modes to engage with the latest info that’s poured in. I cannot state how powerful this concept is enough. Looks like Palm is actually doing something similar in WebOS for the Pre though on the bottom… should be interesting to compare in a few months.

All of the potential power within the G1 is rendered useless within a few short hours of light use by it’s absolute crap battery. T-Mobile and Google should be ashamed for releasing such a power hog! I found that just be leaving email and Twitdroid on, the phone was dead by around 3pm – taken off power at 7 am when I left for work. In that time, I did some light browsing over cellular and perhaps 30 minutes of wi-fi use at the office. That’s awfully quick and I’m guessing I could actually kill the battery before lunch with heavy (more normal for me) use.

The G1 is a solid first effort but I would not recommend it to anyone other than a mobile geek looking to explore. I think the average person would have a lot to get used to which is certainly true of most devices, but the mass market simplicity you should expect to find today is just not there yet … and of course the battery issue.

TruPhone to Launch VoIP for iPhone

Truphone Logo

Oliver Starr rocking some sweet news via Blognation!!

To say the application isn’t yet ready for prime time would be a pretty major understatement as it currently requires the use of terminal on the iPhone to tell the iPhone to use its on-board SIP stack to place the call over WiFi instead of via the SIM card. To use the terminal application, in turn requires that you first Jailbreak the phone using an application like iBrickr or iFuntastic.

This is not an application for the inexperienced or the faint of heart.That will all change however as the company tells me that it intends to finish development on the application which will include simplifying the activation and adding seamless switching back and forth between VoIP when open WiFi is available and the use of the SIM card when out of WiFi range. It is important to note that it is NOT NECESSARY to break the SIM lock to use TruPhone’s iPhone VoIP application. [blognation USA]

I have confidence (yes without seeing it in action) that this will be a very solid solution when it arrives and I welcome the opportunity to test it out. My previous experience with TruPhone on the Nokia N-Series has been excellent. Their software auto-switches easily between networks (not with an active call) but makes sure you can make the lowest cost call wherever you are. International travelers and people with limited cell coverage will rejoice at this. TruPhone just needs to wait out the pending iPhone software update to make sure they can still get apps installed without breaking things.

Andy Abramson has a video of this! Wish I cold figure out how to embed hipcast, but you can just click over to see it in action.

A quick sidenote… If you have a Grandcentral account, you can share that number linked to your Truphone and cell (and others) and be sure to receive a call wherever you happen to be on whatever network your devices happen to know about…