Alexander’s Blog

Today I read Jason O’Grady’s review of his iPhone 4 on ZDNet titled “My iPhone 4 is a lemon, oh my!” With all the horror stories about Apple’s iPhone, from being notorious as one of the most hackable phone on the market today to the disastrous service from AT&T that iPhone users have experienced, it’s no surprise that iPhone 4 will not be winning any awards or raving reviews any time soon from Jason O’Grady, a respected  journalist and author who specializes in mobile technology. Jason has published six books on Apple and mobile gadgets so if he says his iPhone is a lemon I absolutely believe him. Here a are a few selected quotes from his article on ZDNet. Make sure you read his entire article.

“Say what you will about the iPhone 4, but mine’s a lemon. Reviewers have called it “the best smartphone,” “worth upgrading” and “game changing,” but they’re all bogus superlatives that don’t apply to mine. Sure, it looks great, it’s all shiny and gorgeous, but what good is a phone that can’t make phone calls?

“Dropped calls. My experience was bad almost from the beginning. The first five calls that I made — business calls, mind you — resulted in dropped calls. I began my iPhone 4 experience by apologizing to my client for the phone problems. Not good.”

“Signal loss. My next bad experience was the “death grip” issue, where simply holding the i4 would degrade its signal from a solid five bars to one or zero (my video of the flaw is here). Holding it wrong? No. The antennas are in the wrong location. Apple completely missed the boat on this obvious defect and flaw in the design.”

“Proximity sensor. My iPhone 4 constantly mutes, holds or switches to FaceTime when it touches my face. Clearly a problem with the iPhone’s proximity sensor.”

“Custom ringtones. I had to fight with my iPhone to get my custom ringtones to sync and since then it’s been downhill from there. My ringtones keep playing in a stuttered loop after I answer the call. I hear a garbled version of my ringtone ringing after I answer the call. The only solution is to hang up and call the person back.”

“Battery life. For the all hype around battery life on the iPhone 4, I’m not seeing it. I charged mine overnight, unplugged it at around 8 am and got the 20 percent battery warning before 6pm. I wasn’t using it excessively mind you, nothing out of my normal usage pattern (brightness at about 50 percent) but I was using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth intermittently throughout the day.”

Check out the complete article here. You might also be interested in Sharee English’s blog “To iPhone or not to iPhone.” I am not saying that everyone iPhone user has trouble with their iPhone but a lot of people believe that iPhone is way over hyped, is over priced and there are definitely some serious issues with service and security. It’s not the greatest thing since sliced bread as Apple would like you to believe. Just Bing or Google “iPhone horror stories” and see what I mean.

About 20 percent of the 48,000 apps in the Android marketplace allow a third-party application access to sensitive or private information, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Some of the apps were found to have the ability to do things like make calls and send text messages without the mobile user doing anything. For instance, five percent of the apps can place calls to any number and two percent can allow an app to send unknown SMS messages to premium numbers that incur expensive charges, security firm SMobile Systems concluded in its Android market threat report.

Meanwhile, dozens of apps were found to have the same type of access to sensitive information as known spyware does, including access to the content of emails and text messages, phone call information, and device location, said Dan Hoffman, chief technology officer at SMobile Systems.

Check out the entire story on CNET here. The article also references an FAQ on how to use smartphones safely.

Today I decided to compare Google Maps to Bing Maps to see if there is a major difference. I wasn’t looking to compare the street views, I wanted to compare the bird-eye views. Unfortunately, Google only offers the aerial view, while Bing offers both an aerial view and a bird-eye view. So this is what you see when you use Google and Bing. This is the same aerial view of downtown Seattle location with the best Google and Bing have to offer.

Click on the images to see the finer details.

Google

Bing

The latest news on Google and privacy issues has to do with Google collecting unencrypted personal WiFi data. According to some reports, so many lawsuits are piling up that Google is saying guys can we just combine them all in one large chunk of lawsuit.

The problem is that Google seem to be collecting too much data in their StreetView cars. According to Ars Technica:

Put simply, a program called “gslite” sniffed packets from unprotected WiFi networks as Google’s Street View cars rolled down the street, separating out encrypted and unencrypted content. The encrypted data was dumped while the unencrypted data was then written to the car’s hard drive.

Well, it’s bad enough that Privacy International is accusing Google of “criminal intent” based on this report. Google says they made a mistake (wink, wink). Privacy International is not buying and says “It is a criminal act commissioned with intent to breach the privacy of communications.” It is not a matter of Google making a mistake, Privacy International claims, they knew what they were doing and had “intent to intercept”, which is a violation of criminal law. What Google did is “equivalent to placing a hard tap and a digital recorder onto a phone wire without consent or authorisation.”

Stay tuned. I am sure this story is not over.

One question that I am often asked when I am teaching CompTIA classes is how many questions are there on CompTIA exams. Thanks to my student Dawn, here is the information for CompTIA A+, Network+, and Security+ exams.

CompTIA  Exams

A+ Essentials

Exam # = 220-701

No. of questions = 100

Allotted time = 90 minutes

Passing score = 675

Exam # = 220-702

No. of questions = 100

Allotted time = 90 minutes

Passing score = 700

Exam # = N10-004

No. of questions = 100

Allotted time = 90 minutes

Passing score = 720

No. of questions = 100

Allotted time = 90 minutes

Passing score = 764