I love Flickr, and the iPhone has opened up even more possibilities to interact with it. Here are my favourites:
1. Flickr web application
The official iPhone client, and the best. m.flickr.com
2. Exposure
The Exposure webapp has a great feature called “Close To Me” which, predictably, shows you Flickr photos taken close to your current location. Scarily accurate, even on non-GPS iPhones like mine. Grab it from the iTunes Store: Exposure.
3. CameraBag
A webapp which applies filters to the photos taken with the iPhone’s crappy camera and makes them beautiful. Grab it from the iTunes store: CameraBag.
4. iPhone screenshots
iPhone OS 2.0 introduced the facility to take screen grabs: Simply hold down the home button and press and release the power button on top of the phone. The screen will flash, and a screen grab will be saved in your photos.
5. Send iPhone camera photos to Flickr
A very simple way of sending your iPhone photos to Flickr is via e-mail: Flickr allows you to set up a dedicated @photos.flickr.com address for your account. Go onto Your Account on Flickr and click the Email tab. Your Flickr upload email is listed on this page. Save this to your address book and use the Email Photo option to send the photo to this address.
Very nice iPhone specific version of Flickr
m.flickr.com
Unlike the rather terse release notes for the iPhone Software Update 2.01, the 2.1 notes are much more informative:
Today, Yahoo have released a beta iPhone application called oneConnect. One of the cool features is Pulse, which shows you status updates from your friends on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Very handy.
Yahoo! oneConnect™ for iPhone. A new way to stay in touch.
Less than useful release notes for the new iPhone OS upgrade:
“Bug fixes” really doesn’t tell me a lot; a link to a page explaining what these fixes are would have been useful.
I’m really happy with my iPhone, but I must admit I was initially tempted to upgrade to the new 3G version which is released this Friday. However, after thinking things through I’ve decided to stick with the “old” version. Why? Well, with the free OS 2.0 upgrade, I will get these features for free anyway:
- Native applications
- Cisco IPSec VPN support
- MobileMe
- Improved mail client
- Enhanced contact management
- Better battery life
and more.
Meaning the only differences between my iPhone and the 3G iPhone is:
So it boils down to whether I want to pay £99 for these two features. And I don’t: they are nice options, but far from essential. 3G is faster than EDGE, but for general browsing of websites I don’t think it will make a huge difference, especially because many sites serve up optimised iPhone pages already. Furthermore, enabling 3G on the phone will zap the battery faster than when using EDGE. And GPRS, while a nice idea, is far from essential in my day-to-day usage of the phone right now.
iPhone 3G
John Gruber on the iPhone upgrade dilemma:
So what it boils down to is whether you think it’s worth $199 up front — plus $15 extra per month for the new data plan with SMS — for faster cell network data.
The iPhone 3G Upgrade Question
Using your iPhone abroad is expensive, so to keep costs down make sure you have Data Roaming turned off:
Settings -> General -> Network -> Data Roaming
Furthermore, make sure that auto-checking of email is disabled:
Settings -> Mail -> Auto-Check
Finally, turn off visual voicemail before you travel:
Dial 1760 to switch the divert to voicemail off and dial 1750 to switch on the divert to voicemail.
Travelling abroad with iPhone: usage and costs
For the last few weeks, the Mail functionality has been broken on my iPhone. When looking at the Inbox, I had one message that said “Load another 25 messages…”, and selecting this did nothing. I scoured the web, and found a couple of possible solutions: resetting the iPhone, removing the mail account and setting it up again, but neither of these worked for me. Finally, though, I have found a solution and can enjoy Mail again:
- log into Yahoo! Mail on your desktop machine, not your iPhone.
- Create a new folder called temp
- Choose the ‘Select All Messages’ option from the ‘More Actions’ menu in your Inbox
- Move messages to the temp folder
- Check on your iPhone that your Inbox is empty: you may need to refresh
- Move messages back from temp to Inbox
Bingo!
