Lonnie Knows Everything

First of all I want to acknowledge that I didn’t write the article, so I’m not going to copy and paste it here and pretend that I did .. the link to the original article can be found right here..

I did want to add to this experience however .. When the iPhone first came out, I signed up with AT&T because I had no choice.. I had about 4 months left on my contract with T-Mobile and so they charged me an early termination fee, I switched over to AT&T only to find their rates were NOWHERE near comparable.

A short time later, a jailbreak came out for the iPhone so I decided to cancel AT&T .. they charged me with a $200 early termination fee .. When I called T-Mobile, they treated me like royalty .. 

1. They allowed me back into my old contract despite having cancelled a couple of months earlier
2. They refunded my early termination fee
3. They refunded AT&T’s early termination fee ( amazing! ) 
4. They offered me unlimited minutes for being loyal, at the same rate as my 1500 minute plan
5. When I said I had an iPhone, they knew just how to provision my account

T-Mobile has been my provider for years and I wasn’t anxious to leave them for AT&T, so I was more than happy to return .. When I did, they took great care of me.

When I read this article on the consumerist, it wasn’t a surprise to me.

After a long, anguishing wait, I was finally greeted with notice that SwirlyMMS 2.0 was available for download on Cydia today.. I will first list the pro’s and then the cons, then I will provide some pictures of the new App..  (visit them at www.swirlyspace.com)

Pro’s / What’s New:

1. There is a simple but effective voice recorder that saves in “amr” format, this is nice because the file sizes are minimized and virtually all phones support this.
2. They have incorporated GPS support, now you can optionally attach your coordinates in outgoing messages and a link to google maps will be presented to the recipient.
3. Delivery notifications are built in.
4. You can now change notification sounds.
5. You can hold your finger down on an incoming image and save it directly to the camera role, which is convenient.. you may also save incoming sounds as ring tones or as a notification sound.
6. New start up screen and background image is pretty slick.

Cons:

1. The GPS coordinates in my test seemed to be considerably inaccurate, more so than google maps when I ask it to pinpoint my location, this requires some further testing.
2. SwirlyMMS still does not properly render MMS messages, the items are still only broken into parts apparently, there’s no rendering of Wap encoded messages, or at least if there is it’s not been working for me.. essentially an MMS should be able to include multiple images on one page, with sound.
3. Still no ability to create custom folders and manage your messages within SwirlyMMS
4. Still no “Auto Download” functionality within SwirlyMMS (an often requested feature).
5. If you have a lot of picture messages, the load time is still quite slow, I haven’t verified but I believe the messages are still stored in flat files rather than a database for quick loading.
6. The image viewer is still the same as previous versions, there is no ability to use the normal gestures to zoom on an image.
7. As I mentioned in #5 in my pros, the start up image and background image is slick, but the UI has pretty much not changed.
8. The ability to record video directly would also be nice, but it’s not present in 2.0

My Overall Opinion:

The new SwirlyMMS comes in at $12 for new users, or $6.00 for upgraders .. if you do the math, that means that upgraders are paying $8.00 + $6.00 for a total of $14.00, this means that existing customers have to pay more overall than new customers, this is something that makes no sense to me.

While the addition of the voice recorder is nice, the other features are rather minimal, the GPS implementation is basic and the other features something you’d have expected should be there anyway.

Bottom line:

If you’re an existing user, unless you need voice recorder then I find it difficult to suggest upgrading at this time, the additional cost to upgraders to me does not make the upgrade justifiable (yet).. It’s a decision you have to make on your own.

If you’re a new user, then SwirlyMMS 2.0 will seem like a nearly complete solution for you even though the price tag of $12.00 is more than most apps that exist in the iPhone world right now.. Keep in mind however that SwirlyMMS 2.0 also does more than any other iPhone app is capable at the moment. If you’re a 3G user and a currently SwirlyMMS 1.3 customer, I would say it’s safe to wait until Apple’s offering in OS 2.0

One last thing I’m not knocking Swirly at all, I’ve known the guys since the first version came out, I’ve donated twice, offered my help as a beta tester and have been very active in the support forums, I plan to continue my support .. SwirlyMMS still holds the top spot in my list of favorite apps.

Read on for pictures..

(continue reading…)

Ok so I was waiting to expand on this to really hear more word about it and it seems to be true, no MMS support for your 2g iPhone, and the reason given is that the iPhone 2g hardware does not have the capability to support it.

I can understand holding back a feature to get people to upgrade their phones, really I can .. but to flat out lie about the reason is terrible, certainly a very large number of people are aware that the iPhone can in fact do this because those with a jailbroken iphone ALREADY can do it..  I’ve been using MMS now for a long long time on my 2g phone via SwirlyMMS, the only reason I was excited about iPhone 3.0 is because I assume it will support proper rendering of the messages as well as what we just found out, it supports video properly as well ..

The reason for excluding MMS for 2g is purely a marketing move ..  some have said “What do you expect? that they just give out major updates to make the old phone do what the new one does?” … no software update will make your 2g iPhone have 3g capability, you will not get the faster speeds, you will not get the real GPS ..  those are the reasons most upgrade…

Again I say that if they simply decided to say “No, the MMS capability is a 3g feature only” without going further to claim the 2g hardware isn’t capable of supporting MMS .. I’d not be nearly as offended.

My hope is that the iphone dev team can get this functionality operating on 2g phones, it will no doubt be a hot item for many.

Over a hundred new features are present for the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0, including  copy and paste as well as MMS (multimedia messaging). But the strange thing to me as a curious 1st gen iphone user is the fact that MMS is not available for us! it’s only available for 3G iPhones, and the remark that is most curious is that they proclaimed that the reason for this is that they are different hardware… excuse me?  my 1st gen jailbroken iPhone already does MMS via the SwirlyMMS app, so how does the fact that I have different hardware mean I can’t use the feature? clearly my phone is capable of doing it … we can upgrade to the new OS but a couple of the features are not going to be given to us…

In my humble opinion, MMS was excluded for 1st gen phones only to give you a reason to upgrade to a 3G phone..  and since I refuse to use AT&T and I refuse to switch to a 3G iPhone with horrible battery life, I may have finally been given reason to change to an android based alternative, which has included MMS from day one.

I was perusing the iPhone app store the other day and I came accross “Distant Shore”, which is a nifty little application.

The idea behind it is that you’re a person on an island, you wander around and collect shells .. that’s really all the interaction you have with the surroundings except for when you stumble accross a bottle, when you pick that up – you will find an anonymous message from other Distant Shore users ..  What we have is an anonymous messaging app with style ..

Once you find 5 shells, you get your own bottle and you can send out an anonymous message .. if someone replies, you go back to your “hut” and find your turtle mailbox has something waiting for you .

It’s strangely addictive and I’ve met quite a few people on there that I message back and forth quite regularly with..  The graphics are very nice, and the ambient sounds of the waves are very relaxing … it’s a cool app to waste time with.

You can find it in the app store by searching for “Distant Shore”, it’s available for a buck ..

The author’s site is http://www.theblimppilots.com/ and if you want to see some screenshots of the app you can jump directly to http://www.theblimppilots.com/home/?page_id=7