HugoLarge

I’ve had the original iPhone 2G for going on nine months now. I really didn’t plan on getting the 3G model until the other day when I took a look on eBay to see how much people were selling the 2G models and the sale prices. Final selling prices were well over $300 and even $400 dollars which really surprised me. So I decided to get the upgrade and sell my 2G on eBay to recover the price of the new iPhone.

So the journey began yesterday when I listed my iPhone on eBay. I’m not a big eBay user but I’ve got almost forty sales and purchases under my belt. I’ve sold high dollar items like my old PowerBook G4 this past spring after getting a new MBP. So I’m not too worried about getting a good sale price for the iPhone. I’ve listed the auction for five days and as of right now I have no bids. No biggie, they’ll come in. The big question for me was which 3G to buy.

The first choice was deciding which size I wanted? The 8GB or the 16GB model? I really don’t use my phone much for the iPod features as much as I do the web, email and social networks like Twitter. So space was not an issue.

After thinking about for a day or so I decided to get the larger 16GB iPhone since I feel it will have a better resale value if I ever sell it. Which is very probable.

So after deciding on the 16GB model, the second choice was which color would I choose? As you may have seen in an earlier post, I’ve recently bought a Flip Mino. I got the black model of the Flip but after using it I’ve noticed how bad you can see all the finger prints and dust. I took my experience with the Flip and did some other research as to what the iPhone community thought about to two colors.

After reading many forum posts and blogs I almost had my mind made up. The last thing I wanted to do was to see the iPhone in person. So instead of going to the local Apple store as I did for the first iPhone purchase, I decided to go to the closer AT&T store. I think it was a good choice since when I arrived, there was only one other customer in the store. I spent a few minutes comparing both black and white and decided to go with white.

Prior to this point I had two concerns; the first was how do I get all my data and settings off the original iPhone and onto the new one. And second was; how do I prep my old iPhone to be sold on eBay?

After a little reading I found an article on iPhoneHacks.com that explains how you can use the same iTunes backup of the old device and restore it on the new iPhone. So this is what I did to tackle the first concern.

1. First I synced the old iPhone to iTunes which like we all know takes forever to complete a backup. I did this earlier in the morning before I left home because I had planned on stopping by the AT&T store later that day. For those of you that use SMS a lot and want the most recent conversations saved and transferred then you might want to do a backup closer to the time you purchase the new iPhone.

2. Next I went to the AT&T store (since it was closer to my home) and purchased the new iPhone. One thing I could have done was turn the old iPhone off prior to buying the new iPhone since an in store activation is required but if was no big deal. For the heavy SMS users this might prevent any missed messages.

One thing I did not like was that the box had to be opened in store to activate. That blew any “unboxing” shots that I may have wanted to take. They also plug the iPhone into their POS (Point of Sale) Windows PC for some reason. I don’t know if they do all that at the Apple store but it kind of bothered me.

Once I left the store my iPhone was activated and could be used.

3. After I got home I hooked up the new iPhone to the MBP and was prompted to either setup the iPhone as a new device or do a restore from backup. I choose the restore option but was prompted that the iPhone could not be restored since it had an earlier software update. My old iPhone was running version 2.0.2 and the new iPhone came with 2.0.1 software.

At that point I went into the iTunes prefs and disabled all devices to auto sync. Just in case it tried to sync before doing the software update and restore.

After the software was updated I was able to do a complete restore to the new iPhone from the old iPhone backup.

4. During the restore process I noticed my old phone still receiving emails. This was due to the phone being connected to my WiFi. So I turned off WiFi. Problem solved.

5. Once the restore was complete, which took some time, I verified all the iPhone sync settings in iTunes were correct (from screenshots I took earlier). After all were verified I performed a sync, which also took a long time to complete.

6. After the content sync was complete it was time to verify all the settings and data restored properly. Everything looked good with the exception of two items.

One was that visual voicemail was not setup and therefor did not restore my saved messages. This may have been my fault. Maybe if I would have gone through the setup prompts, the old messages would have been restored. If anyone knows please leave a comment. I’ll have to research that one later.

The only other thing that needed setup was the passcode required by policy for my employers Exchange server.

Once those two items was straightened out, the iPhone was back to the original state.

The second concern I had was how to erase all personal data from the old iPhone prior to selling it on eBay. After more research I found another article on iPhoneHacks.com that explains how Apple includes a secure reset and erase of all data in the 2.0 software.

To do this you go to Settings > General > Reset and choose Erase All Content and Settings from the list of options. This is supposed to do a secure write over all data and reset the iPhone to factory new setting, ready to be activated (or jailbroken) and synced. The process can take up to two hours to complete so you may want to plug it into the USB power adapter.

So here I am, new iPhone all restored and synced up, using the mobile WordPress app.

I have to say, I was concerned that the rounded plastic back of the 3G iPhone would bother me as I really liked the aluminum look and feel of the 2G. But after using it for a few hours it actually feels really nice in my hand. The iPhone 3G seems to be a tiny bit wider than the 2G as well but not noticeable.

I was also unsure about the color white but it doesn’t bother me and I’m getting used to the refreshing change from all those other black cell phones out there.

So in conclusion, I’m very pleased with the new 3G iPhone design and upgrade process. And with a little planning, you can reduce the pain factor to very low.

Now let’s see how well the new 3G speeds work out.

I wanted to post a quick update on Tropical Storm Fay, which at the time of this writing is hitting us the hardest it has all day.

I took some video with the Flip Mino so I thought this would be a good opportunity to share a little of what the video looks like. Right now I’m uploading the video files to Viddler and then they have to encode before I can embed the video into this post.

So here they are…

This is a view of my back yard and the Fay wind.

This is a view of my front yard and Fay wind.

Apple has again given every MobileMe user another service extension. This extension is for 60 days and is in addition to the 30 day extension Apple already gave its users back in July. Even though the MobileMe service has been a bit less then stellar since it’s update, Apple has done a great job at making good by extending the service contracts of it’s users, twice now.

What other company do you know that would do this across the board?

I still have the 1st generation (EDGE) iPhone and for the most part it’s been working fine. Apple released firmware update 2.0.2 today via iTunes and as usual I promptly installed the update.

So far I can’t really tell if anything on the surface has been updated or fixed. I can tell you that prior to this update, going into Contacts seemed a bit slow, slow enough to make me think the app was hung. Scrolling within Contacts at times was also slow and jerky. Now, with the 2.0.2 update, Contacts seems to launch faster and the scrolling seems to have improved. 

The App Store still has discrepancies between available updates within the iTunes interface and the App Store app on the phone itself. Right now iTunes shows I have four apps that have updates but the iPhone says I have one. Which one do I believe?

Another annoyance has been a delay in typing that has been present since the original 2.0 update. The 2.0.2 update does not appear to fix the problem and it’s too early to tell if the update has at least helped. One really annoying typing delay (for me) is when entering my Passcode after the iPhone has been locked. This is a policy requirement for the company I work for to use Exchange support. The first few characters always delay in both typing response and tick sounds as I type. I’ve also noted some early typing delays when using both Mail and Twitter apps.

One thing I’ve done prior to installing firmware updates is to reboot the iPhone with the two finger reboot. This seems to clean up any running processes prior to applying the update. I’ve also disabled crash reporting to Apple (via LifeHacker) during iPhone sync which seems to have increased overall sync and firmware update speed. I know what some don’t agree with disabling this “feature” but until Apple makes the process faster, I’ll keep mine disabled.

Only time will tell if the update has improved the usability of the iPhone or corrected “bugs” as Apple says. Please keep in mind that I still have the EDGE iPhone and 3G iPhones may experience different results.

Gone are the days of upgrading WordPress manually. Thanks to Keith Dsouza of the Techie Buzz web site, you can now upgrade your WordPress blog with a few simple clicks of the mouse, all from the wp-admin console with the help from WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

The plugin installs just like any other plugin, in the wp-content/plugins folder on your WordPress install on your web server.

Once activated you will see the following message at the top of the Dashboard when an upgrade is available:

Once you click the link you will be presented with some dialog that will guide you through the upgrade process as show by the following screenshots. The dialog is broken down into three sections describing, what task has been done, the task status and what task needs to be done next.

Here you can see that some old WordPress files are backed up and ready for download to your system in case something goes wrong. The next step is to backup the database.

Here the WP database has been backed up and is ready for download. Next will show options for uploading the latest WP files.

I always choose to let the plugin get the latest version from wordpress.org.

The latest files have been successfully downloaded and unzipped to my web server. Next we go into maintenance mode for the site which is a very nice feature to let your readers know things are OK and why the site is down.

Now the site is in maintenance mode and you can verify by clicking the link. Next we de-activate all plugins, but not Auto Upgrade of course.

The plugins are de-activated and next the upgrade begins.

The upgrade install is complete but here you can check if a database update needs to be completed. The link opens a new window with the WP database upgrade button.

Here’s the Database Upgrade button.

We see that the WP database upgrade is complete.

Here we see that the plugins have been re-activated which was the next step after the database upgrade.

We’re almost done. Here we can see the WordPress upgrade has been completed and the plugin wants to do a bit of house cleaning from all the zipped and unzipped updates.

All files have been cleaned up and the upgrade is complete.

While there seems to be a lot of steps to complete a WordPress upgrade using this plugin, the alternative of doing a manual upgrade takes a lot longer to complete.

I’ve been using this plugin for some time now and I’ve had no issues. But, like anything, you may want to do a manual backup of your WP files and database prior to first using this plugin, just in case it doesn’t work as advertised for you. After you test and find it works… go for it. It’s truly a time saver. Easy button anyone?

So for the last few months I’ve been debating on which portable video camera to purchase and I finally decided on the Flip Video Mino in black. I wanted something small that used internal flash memory for capturing video. I also wanted something that was easy to use not only for myself but for my wife and daughter. The fact that I can capture video direct to the device, plug it in via USB to my MacBook Pro and upload to YouTube is exactly what I have been looking for.

I plan on using the Flip Mino for capturing my daughter as she grows up, family times, quick happenings I may encounter and for my upcoming speech class.

The Flip Mino arrived today from Amazon and I was curiously intrigued with how “Appleish” the packaging was. So I’ve taken some photos of the Flip Mino unboxing along side the Apple iPhone box. One of the small features I like about the Mino is that it has a tripod mount on the bottom which will come in handy for those speech videos. 

Here are some pictures that show off the packaging and some of the hardware features of the Mino.

Flip Mino and Apple iPhone Box

Flip Mino and Apple iPhone box inside

Flip Mino Front View

Flip Mino Back View

As you can see the box and packaging has been inspired by Apple design. The front and back of the Mino is very clean and I can’t wait to test it out.

If you want to see some additional unboxing photos go to my Flickr page where I’ve posted the rest of the photos I’ve taken. Then be on the lookout for videos to follow!

Ok, So The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW.com) posted an article this week about an article from Tom’s Hardware regarding the misconceptions on price between Apple and other PC manufacturers. I’m not here to argue their point in either direction although I do like and own Apple products. I also work as a Windows Server admin so I get my fair share of both Intel Servers, PC’s and Apple.

Both articles contain many comments from both sides arguing their agreement or disagreement with Tom’s Hardware and how they’ve compared Apple and PC manufacturer products. The one thing missing from this whole debacle is this… Let’s compare the Apple Mac Pro and the Dell XPS Tower in this way:

The Dell XPS:

And the Apple Mac Pro:

Need I say more?