We’ve all had this problem. You’re out at Sea World and you’re taking a gazillion pictures of Shamu and you’re 4 GB Compact Flash card has only a handful pictures left when your wife says sweetly, “Hey honey, why don’t you take some pictures of the kids in the stands?” Mmm, delete Shamu or tell the wife you can’t? Ya, tough situation that once happened to me where I got in a heap of trouble for not deleting the hundreds of HO scale trains I took for a few pictures of our kids on the merry-go-round.

There have been a few solutions for this problem, namely dragging your laptop around with you and off load your pictures that way. But who wants to do that? Man, the diaper bag alone is big enough for me to want to ditch it immediately! Other portable hard drive readers, some with screen and some without, have slowly made there way into the alternative space. Of course, you can just buy more flash cards, too.

Digital Foci goes with the hard drive solution. Its new Photo Safe II accepts Compact Flash (including Extreme III, IV, UDMA), MMC, SD/HC Card, miniSD, Memory Stick, MS PRO, MS Duo, MS PRO Duo, and xD-Picture card. Ya, pretty much everything. All the pictures are stored on either an 80GB or 160GB internal hard drive. Once you get home or to the hotel, then you can connect the Photo Safe II to your computer and off comes all those saved pictures of both Shamu and the kids!

Photo Safe II is easy to use and only requires pressing one button labeled “Auto Copy”. At speeds of 5.0/MBsec, a full 1GB card will be copied in about 3.5 minutes. All file formats, including RAW, are supported. A backlit LED screen gives information as to space left, copy progress, and battery life.

Photo Safe II works on both Macs and PCs and retails for $139 for the 80GB version and $189 for the larger 160GB drive.

Hey, if you’ve been wondering why there has been a lull of posts and then a burst of them, well, my day job is keeping me busy. Sorry. But with the addition to Twitter to my life, now I have — wait, less! — time on my hands.

Seriously, since many times I’ve queued interesting ideas and leads for a story but never got to them, Twitter will help with this problem perfectly. Instead of holding back on these stories, I’ll simply post something about it on Twitter. When I get a chance to flesh it out, you’ll see the full blown post right here on SvenOnTech. So watch my Twitter feed and follow me if you already haven’t. I’m 7Mary4.

I’m not going to turn this into a door step for Twitter and then simply stop blogging technology items. Nope, I plan on actually putting more time into the site; however, Twitter will really help me get MORE information to you as I come across it.

Lastly, you’ll get some insight into who the Sven on tech is. I’ll try to refrain from TMI topics, but hey, it might happen.

For all you Twitter fanatics (yes, that’s me), there is something better for the iPhone. No, it’s not Twitterrific Premium as much as I would hope. It’s called Twittelator and unlike the former, you don’t have to pay for this to get the ad-free copy. Yes, Twittelator is free.

The great folks at Big Stone have decided that we all need a better Twitter client for the iPhone, and while I’ll readily admit it’s not as nice looking as Twitterrific, Twittelator works terrific! I immediately noticed that new tweets are rapidly displayed when you open the application. One of the biggest annoyance of Twitterrific is how it NEVER remembers my last position in the tweets list, so I tested that next on Twittelator. Guess what? It remembers. Nice. Thank you!! Another issue in Twitterrific is the keyboard disappearing when you hit the tweet ballon. No issues here.

The picture tweet works awesome as well. How many times have you lost pix for upload on Twitterrific due to a poor data connection? No worries mate, you just grab the picture from your photo library in Twittelator. Again, nice! You can also take a new picture within Twittelator as well. Twittelator fully resizes your picture to look normal on twitpic (see my first twitpic for proof.) Dude, did Big Stone like fully think this stuff out or what?

If you’re wishing brightkite would hurry up with its native iPhone app, don’t worry, Twittelator will get your geo-location down for you. Not as detailed as bkite, but still, nice.

Twittelator has an easy entry method to add all your friends into a tweet, built-in search for things or people near you, as well as the ability to see everyones tweets, featured tweets, or favorite ones. The great organization and in-depth information on each user far more than makes up for the not-so-fancy interface. And really, it’s not bad; we’ve just been spoiled by Twitterrific.

Now I have to see if Twittelator will make the long haul, but man, it’s already done a better job than Twitterrific. So much so, that I’ve just deleted it from my iPhone. If Big Stone wants to charge for this, I’ll pay!

SvenOnTech has been informed by Agile, makers of the popular wallet program for Mac OS X, that it is concentrating all its attention on a native iPhone application. In an email to SvenOnTech, Agile told us, “We are currently focusing on the imminent release of our native iPhone/iPod touch application”. Agile feels this will elevate many iPhone user complaints of crashing Safari browsers due to large data sets that the ingenious bookmarklet hack has difficult handling. With the native application, 1Password will be able to easily bring up data quickly and without crashing. Additionally, 1Password for the iPhone will be, “providing a lot more features and flexibility,” Agile told SvenOnTech.

SvenOnTech has requested a review copy and will be sure to let you know how it fares against the Safari version and if it replicates the ease and effectiveness of the desktop version. Keep your eyes here and on our Twitter feed!

Have you downloaded a slew of applications for your iPhone? Enjoying those applications? Yup, me too!

This morning while being impressed with the fact my iPhone App Store app indicated I had an update via a 1 with a circle around it (much like when you have a new SMS message or email), I noticed something bad. Real bad. Looking in the iTunes Applications section, I saw that the storage path for my application was not the NAS (Network Attached Storage) server path I had specified for my music. Instead, it was on my local drive in the default iTunes folder in a new folder called Mobile Applications. Take a look at my Info window. The danger behind this is for those thinking they are securing their data from failure on an external RAID drive actually could lose all their applications with local hard drive failure. Yikes!

Knowing this, it is advisable to back up your local iTunes folder either through Time Machine (Leopard users) or a third-party application such as our favorite SuperDuper! While your apps are also stored on your iPhone, it is unknown if they can be restored from the device to iTunes after a re-installition of iTunes. Apple did not respond for requests to explain this in time for this post.

Apple took a leap into the enterprise market last Friday with the release of the iPhone firmware 2.0, a free downloadable upgrade for current first-generation users and pre-loaded on the 3G iPhone. The vault was the inclusion of full native support for Microsoft’s heavily used corporate email server, Exchange. Now, business men and women around the globe would be able to get their email on their iPhone in real-time. In other words, when new email appeared in their Inbox on their Mac or PC at the office, it would also be on the iPhone. This method is termed “push” as in pushing email to your phone rather than the phone checking for new email every 15, 30, or 60 minutes per user defined settings.

Push email has its advantages, like being constantly up to date with your email, but it also has some nasty cons. Users that see a large influx of email coming in throughout the day will find heavy battery usage due to the constant pushing of messages. Instead of holding off at a minimum of every 15 minutes to get your email, now your messages are filling up your iPhone every minute a new message is sent to you. If you receive 10 messages in 15 minutes, your iPhone will have 10 active sessions with your Exchange server within those 15 minutes. Multiple this by the hours in your day of heavy traffic and you’ll notice a red battery on your iPhones screen real fast. Add the 3G iPhone to the mix and it may be at 20% by the end of lunch. Not that this problem isn’t reserved just for Exchange users, but also Apple’s new MobileMe is effected by this issue as well. Anytime high traffic email is pushed to your iPhone, your phone will be draining its battery very quickly.

There are ways around this battery dump for your iPhone. In the Settings section, you will find the third icon labeled “Fetch New Data”. Tapping this brings up various settings. The first is “Push” which lets you turn it on or off. If you have more than one push account, say your Exchange server at work and your personal MobileMe, you can tap the “Advanced” selection on the bottom of the screen and then individually disable push for each account to allow you to retain, say your work email to be pushed and not your personal mail.

Push technology is not a new problem for batteries and it’s one Apple needs to actively find a solution to. Other manufactures such a Research In Motion (BlackBerry) have made great strives in keeping the battery juiced throughout the day while still receiving lots of email. If Apple wishes to overtake the millions of BlackBerrys in the enterprise, it needs to get this battery drain plugged.

Ergonis Software today announced the release of Typinator 3.1, the latest version of its highly acclaimed tool for auto-typing text and auto-correcting typos system-wide across all Mac OS X applications.

The new version integrates the recently released HTML snippets set providing over 100 abbreviations for elements of the HTML 4.01 standard. Typinator 3.1 also improves compatibility with many popular applications like Coda, VMWare Fusion, Butler, Zend Studio, and others. In addition to many functional improvements, the menu bar icon has been redesigned to better match the style of Apple’s menu extras - and for the user interface purists, it can now even be turned off. Visit Ergonis Software’s website at http://www.ergonis.com/typinator to learn more about all changes in the release and to download and try the new version.

Typinator is a powerful, yet elegantly simple solution that works across all applications to detect specific sequences of typed characters and automatically replace them with text snippets, graphics, URLs, dates and special characters.

For business users, Typinator leads to a layer of operational consistency and productivity across heterogeneous applications. A standard customer service response, a signature image on an email, a clause in a contract – each of these can be inserted in any application with just a couple of keystrokes. For technical users, Typinator automates typing of code and the implementation of documentation standards.

Visit Ergonis Software’s website at http://www.ergonis.com/typinator to learn more about the changes in the release and to download and try the new version.

Availability and Pricing:
Typinator can be purchased securely on the Ergonis Software website. The upgrade to Typinator 3.1 is free for anyone who purchased Typinator in the last 2 years. For information about purchases, including enterprise licenses, volume discounts, and upgrade pricing offers, visit the website at http://www.ergonis.com/typinator.

Instead of purchasing Typinator by itself, customers can get the Macility Productivity Bundle that also contains two of the company’s other productivity tools, PopChar X and KeyCue. The pricing of the Productivity Bundle represents a saving of more than 35% over the separate purchase of its components. More information about the Productivity Bundle can be found at http://www.ergonis.com/productivity.

Typinator 3.1 requires Mac OS X version 10.4 or newer, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is recommended.

James Tagg, Truphone’s CEO, said: “What Truphone for the iPhone does is really simple but absolutely sensational: it gives people low-priced international calls, whether they want to phone someone abroad or avoid roaming charges when making calls from abroad.

“With just a few clicks to download and install Truphone, anyone can afford to take their iPhone on holiday this summer – or call their friends and family abroad,” he added.

Truphone enables an iPhone to make calls to any number over the internet instead of over GSM, at Truphone’s fabulous internet rates. The rates are especially competitive for international calls, including landlines in 40 countries at GBP0.03 [USD0.06] per minute and mobiles at just GBP0.15 [USD0.30] per minute. To Canada, the USA and China, even calls to mobiles are just GBP0.03 [USD0.06] per minute.

Making a call using Truphone is exactly like making any other call on the iPhone: a single touch to bring the dialler up on the touch screen, touch-dial the number or choose from the iPhone’s own address book, and a touch to start the call. [Visit www.truphone.com/iphone to see a preview video of Truphone on the iPhone.]

Truphone for the iPhone is available to download from Apple’s new App Store for free. There are no monthly subscriptions or other charges. Visit www.truphone.com/iphone for more information.

Truphone pricing
Wi-Fi calls to countries in the Tru Zone always cost the same amazing flat rate, from anywhere in the world. This means a Truphone call on your iPhone to Sydney or London or Moscow or Rio always costs just 3p/6c per minute to landlines and 15p/30c per minute to mobiles. The majority of the world’s mobile users are in the Tru Zone - it includes the UK, Brazil, Australia, Thailand, Japan, Russia, Hong Kong, almost all of Europe, and loads more countries besides. Calls to USA, Canada and China are even lower still: a flat 3p/min to call landlines and mobiles. Customers receive free credit worth GBP2.00 [USD4.00] when they first sign up for Truphone.

A lot of you are still standing in line waiting to buy or activate your new 3G iPhone. The folks at Rapid Repair already went through this ordeal and celebrated by, taking it apart of course!

SvenOnTech has already told you about this fun loving group of guys and gals that believe there is an under estimated market in first-generation iPhones and now we’re telling you about its crazy ways with the newest Super Phone. Rapid Repair has fully dismantled a new 3G iPhone and completely documented it on its web site. With only hours of the release of the follow up to Apple’s widely successful smartphone, Rapid Repair has yanked its new treasure apart. For us! The great thing about Rapid Repair is that it doesn’t want all the glory for itself and is giving away instructions with needed tools on how to take apart your very own shinny new black or white iPhone. If your sense of adventure is high, or your pocket book with green stuff, then you may want to travel this road less traveled and give it a shot!

If you’re looking to upgrade your current iPhone to the 3G and desire to keep the new one in one piece but would like a discount on it, check out Rapid Repairs buy-back program. You could get up to $150 for your iPhone! ]]> http://svenontech.com/2008/07/11/the-insides-of-the-new-3g-iphone-already-revealed/feed/ http://svenontech.com/2008/07/08/fonelink-21-adds-support-for-quick-sync-quick-text-and-all-new-phones/ http://svenontech.com/2008/07/08/fonelink-21-adds-support-for-quick-sync-quick-text-and-all-new-phones/#comments Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:26:58 +0000 Sven Rafferty http://svenontech.com/?p=7565

Not everyone has an iPhone (yet ) and not everyone likes iSync on a Mac. That’s where NovaMedia comes in and helps those that do wish to have a “like-one” relationship between Mac and cellular phone. FoneLink is a pretty impressive phone “suite” that will synchronize data between your phone and a Mac.

SMS message management, which includes backup and restore, using a Time Machine like interface called Time Tunnel is just one part of bring the ease and look of the Mac to FoneLink. With the addition of Quick-Sync and Quick-Text as well as support for a slew of new phones, FoneLink 2.1 may be the answer for many phone users out there looking to start a relationship between their phone and Mac.

Previous users of FoneLink will get 2.1 for free while new users can purchase it for about $34 and is available for download via a demo version from NovaMedia’s site. ]]> http://svenontech.com/2008/07/08/fonelink-21-adds-support-for-quick-sync-quick-text-and-all-new-phones/feed/