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Nick Cotter  //  Wired, tired, and tedious to know.

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Feb 11 / 1:50pm

iPhone Dropbox App

I've just tried out the iPhone Dropbox app for the first time. Somewhat belatedly - I've had it for months and simply never got round to trying it, or needed it for that matter.

But it is good. I have a number of PDFs in my "Reading" folder on Dropbox, where I shovel documents I'm going to read at some point in the near future. Here's what it looks like on the iPhone:

It's rather slow to load the PDF in the first place - no doubt size dependent but took nearly half a minute for this one - but once there it works pretty well. Zoom and landscape mode work fine.
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Filed under  //  dropbox   iphone   pdf  

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Sep 10 / 2:01am

iphone wifi woes

As if I don't have enough on my plate this week, my iPhone has lost all wifi functionality. Since I use it as a remote and an entry system for my Remember The Milk "brain", and since there's next to zero cellular coverage where I live, the usefulness of this device has plummeted to more or less zero.

It started yesterday morning, when it started dropping the connection randomly. By the end of the day, it would only occasionally find the home (Apple) network, and when it did, it would often fail with "Unable to connect".

So I applied the 3.1 update which came out yesterday, which didn't exactly claim to address the issue, but did claim:

"Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on".

Naturally, after the update, it doesn't detect any wifi networks. Ever.

There's a HUGE discussion on the Apple support forum about this, which suggests the following remedies (among others):

  • reset your network settings
  • reset your phone back to factory settings
  • put it in flight mode for a while
  • turn off bluetooth, then wifi, then back on again (and various permutations of this)
  • change your MAC address and restore
  • put it in the freezer for 15 minutes (!)

I've tried resets, flight mode and bluetooth shenanigans, without success. I'm hesitant to put it into the freezer, because nobody seems to be able to explain clearly how this would work, and also it may invalidate the warranty. The iRecovery tool required to change the MAC address doesn't appear to work.

So tomorrow I'm taking it into an Apple store to see what's what...

The most annoying thing about all this is a useless device. The second most annoying thing is the utter lack of response by Apple. It's like this problem doesn't exist. After all, we're just consumers.
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Filed under  //  apple   fail   iphone  

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