The simple fact of the matter is that I need an external battery for my iPhone in order to keep up with a whole day of window shopping with my wife. When she shops, I surf, and the iPhone’s built-in battery simply isn’t built for such gruesome task.

There are a few external batteries out there that support iPhone 3G, but my requirements are more strict. Ideally, the battery must:

• Charge via the original iPhone/iPod FireWire-capable connector. Refer to next point to see why this is important.
• Act as a pass-through and allow music playback when connected to my car’s iPod connectivity feature.
• Able to connect to and charge the iPhone in its protective case.
• When charging, charge the iPhone before the external battery. Current batteries on the market already has this feature.
• Last but not least, provide a few hours of extra online time.

Nothing in the market right now meets the above requirements, unfortunately. Here are some of the products I have seen:

• iPhoneck
• iPhone Portable Power Station
• iPhone 3G Charge Converter - Not a battery per se but allows charging via FireWire-capable connectors.
• Mini Battery Pack and Charger for iPhone and iPod
• Richard Solo Backup Battery for iPhone / iPod
• Morphie Juice Pack

我们家附近的“大四川”饭馆下礼拜二就要关门了，那里的小笼包是我记忆里最棒的，今天中午我们特地跑去点了两套，好好地开了一个离别午会。

Turns out the HTC Touch Diamond is more of a dud than nirvana. Sure it has a fantastic VGA screen, but its TouchFlo 3D interface got hammered by reviewers for non-responsiveness. With a $700 price tag for an unlock Europe version, it’s too rich for my blood.

That’s why Gigabyte’s GSmart MS820 interests me. (Sorry, a tad lazy to download and re-upload a picture of MS820 from the source.) Not only does it have a VGA screen, but it has a 4.9MB camera! So far so good. I just hope for three things:

1. the camera quality is good,
2. the 520MHz CPU is fast enough,
3. and it doesn’t cost an arm or a leg.

Let’s see how it pans out in the real market.

[Via PocketNow]

After a whole day at work thinking about upgrading my iPhone’s firmware, I finally came home and actually went through with the upgrade.

The download happened in the morning, as I blogged earlier. The firmware upgrade took about 15 minutes. The data restore and phone re-activation took another 2 minutes. I am still going through music/video re-sync. Overall it was very smooth, so far.

This morning my carpool buddy told me he would be 15 minutes late, so I thought, why not use this time to update my iPhone firmware to 2.0?! I thought it would only take 10 or so minutes.

I started my desktop computer, fired up iTunes (which I upgraded to 7.7 last night, with 2 reboots along the way), and plugged in my iPhone. Sure enough, iPhone firmware 2.0 was now public available, but the download was more than 200MBs and was to take 12 minutes to completely download.

When my carpool buddy called to say he was on his way to pick me up, I still had 2 minutes left on the download. I ‘begrudgingly’ left and came to work. It was only through an iPhone email alias at work that I found out about Apple’s activation servers being down. Had I proceeded this morning to actually upgrade my iPhone, I would have bricked it, according to others who had this happen to theirs.

Phew…

[Update @ 2008-07-11T10:58-8:00] CNet has a post on this.

Company M released a product for Mac. Apple then gave an iPhone to everyone on the team that produced the product. Free.

As in no charge.

2-year AT&T contract not included, of course.

(On a side note, I finally played with the Sprint Touch today. It’s very cute, much smaller than I expected.)

[Update @ 2008-02-06T09:42-8:00] Turned out it was company M that bought the iPhones for its employees.

While I am not nearly a fan of Apple as I was 10 years ago, I do admire the company for building the iPhone and changing the cellphone scene. That’s why I actually read through Wired Magazine’s article The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry in its entirety, word after word.

Read it, read it, read it. (Don’t get the joke? Read this.)

For the past 2 weeks I had been ticked off at my iPhone. Well, not directly at the device but for the trouble it had caused me.

See, I bought the iPhone from a guy off Craigslist. Turned out the guy had purchased it using a stolen credit card, so when the credit card charge was disputed, AT&T charged me for the full amount of ~$650, just because I activated that particular iPhone and thus I am the last source of that money. Over the past 2 weeks I had been visiting and calling AT&T people in the hope of resolving the charge. This afternoon AT&T finally agreed to rid the charge from my account after diligent research.

Charge first, then let the customer drive to resolution. I see a pattern here.

Now I know neither AT&T nor Apple are at fault here, but I am displeased about my whole iPhone experience. First the $200 price plunge then this? Apple products are cool and all, but I am starting to get a bad vibe here. Maybe Apple and I just don’t gel together like we used to many many moons ago.

Despite my whining, I still have to acknowledge the help I have received from the local AT&T store managers in resolving the matter. They were nice and sympathetic, which made the whole process a bit less painful.