Since I became an iPhone owner a couple years ago, I’ve always found that jailbreaking has opened the ubiquitous device up to some really cool features not otherwise available in Apple’s walled garden. But as of late, with iOS updates flying fast and new features cropping up, I have found reason after reason to return my phone to its vanilla glory. With the release of the most recent version of iOS (5.0.1), I decided to give an un-jailbroken iPhone a try.

Here’s a quick list of some of the reasons why jailbreaking might be a thing of the past for me.

• Personal Hotspot – prior to the wireless carriers agreeing to free their data connections from the bounds of mobile devices and allow them to be tethered to laptops, desktops and anything else that will accept a bluetooth/wifi/USB internet connection, the only way to share my iPhone’s 3G connectivity was to jailbreak and run the fantastic MyWi application. But now with Personal Hotspot, there’s just no need to jailbreak in order to share a data connection. The only limitation to this is that on my 3GS, sharing over wifi isn’t supported with Personal Hotspot, but that’s only really a concern when I’m sharing a connection with my iPad, which so far has been a rare occurrence.
• iBooks - it just straight up doesn’t work on a jailbroken iOS 5 device. There are fixes/workarounds, but I’d rather not have to spend a bunch of time messing around in Terminal / iFile to make a 1st-party app work. Boourns to that.
• App Updates - this is a touchy subject, because one of the things you can do with a jailbroken iPhone/iPad is use cracked applications. Sites like apptrackr state that they are “for application trials, and nothing else”, but in the same breath they admit that the majority of their users come to the site to pirate. Full disclosure, I’ve done my fair share of “application trials”, but after a while of using the app, I either lost interest and deleted it, or found it useful enough to warrant the average $0.99 – $2.99 price tag. The main thing that pushed me toward legitimate app purchases – it simplified the updating process – with cracked apps, there are no update notifications, and the latest versions of apps might take weeks to show up in a cracked format. When I moved to iOS5, this became a major headache. Legitimately purchased apps are the way to go, hands down. I believe Apple’s system of selling Apps through the App Store defeats piracy the same way iTunes has done a lot to combat music piracy – something Steve Jobs mentioned when the iTunes store first launched.
• Performance - while jailbreaking your device doesn’t necessarily slow it down, as soon as you install any application that requires Mobile Substrate, (like my favourite jailbreak app, BiteSMS) you can be certain of a drop in performance, especially when it comes to opening or switching applications. This is especially noticeable on my aging iPhone 3GS. I’ve seen a marked speed improvement this week since upgrading to iOS 5.0.1 and staying away from jailbreaking.
• OTA Software Updates - I don’t know if this is a byproduct of jailbreaking or not, but the OTA update for 5.0.1 failed on my iPhone and iPad, both of which were jailbroken at the time. I’m hoping the next round of updates go smoothly on my vanilla iOS devices.

One marked improvement I’ve seen on my iPhone 3GS since upgrading to iOS 5 is that it has improved the speed of installing multiple apps or app updates from the iTunes App Store. In iOS 4 or earlier, each app would download and install one at a time, making installing updates for many apps a sometimes slow process.

In iOS 5, however, apps will download and install simultaneously, speeding up the process of installing many apps or updates. More specifically, what happens now is that once an app is finished downloading and begins installing, iOS immediately begins downloading the next app in line. This process of installing and downloading in tandem noticeably speeds up the process, which is good for those of us who are constantly updating the many apps installed on our iOS devices.

Kevin Rose posted on his Google+ page October 15, 2011 that he envisions iOS to include push updates for apps in the future. He doesn’t have any inside information on whether or not this will actually come to fruition, but I’m certainly with him as far as the idea is concerned. Everyone with more than just the stock iOS apps will agree that it’s a pain to have to manually poll the App Store to see if there are updates for your apps.

To take it one step further, I imagine App Store updates could happen automatically on all your devices, just like photos show up in your photo stream now. The apps are already stored on Apple’s servers, so it would just be a matter of including an option to turn on automatic updates. With all the money Apple’s been spending on servers for iCloud, I’m pretty sure they could handle the extra bandwidth of sending out push notifications.

Everyone and their dog has weighed in on the death of Steve Jobs. Will that stop me from throwing my hat into the proverbial ring? Hell no. I’ll try to keep it brief, though.

As a teenager in the mid-to-late 1990s, I was an ardent PC guy, while my best friend at the time was hardcore Mac. I never understood his fascination with this little niche market of computers that didn’t have a lot of games software and didn’t seem to be all that different from windows machines, save for the lack of a command prompt (I was ignorant of the terminal at that point).

Fast forward twelve years or so, and you’d see me purchasing my first Mac – a mid-2009 MacBook Pro, second hand (from a guy who works for Microsoft, no less). This came after two years in college, where most of the labs, recording studios and video edit suites ran Macs. The power and simplicity drew me in and when it was time for a new laptop there was only one clear choice.

Since then, the elements of my Apple ecosystem have grown significantly.

And I can say with certainty that every one of these things is the best product in each category that I’ve owned.

So long, Steve, and thanks for all the fish great technology.

For all its sheen, power, sophistication and adaptability, the iPhone’s core applications have been a source of annoyance for me. Safari doesn’t render pages all that quickly, the SMS app doesn’t allow group messaging or show photos for contacts (something that biteSMS does quite nicely) and the calculator app lacks simple functions like a tip calculator for restaurant visits.

But none of the native iPhone apps irk me more than the Calendar. I can get by with slow page renders and finding another app for tip calculation. But I don’t understand why Apple hasn’t made any significant improvements to the Calendar app over the last couple releases of iOS, or even in an App Store Update.

So here’s my list of beefs with the Calendar app, simultaneously acting as a list of feature requests for future versions.

1. Locations should be links to the Maps app. If I enter a location into an event in Calendar, I should be able to click that location in the event details and have it pulled up in the Maps app. So many other apps do this: Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook Places – need I go on? It makes no sense that this feature doesn’t exist.

2. Default Alerts. Not all events are the same, I get that. I may not need to be notified an hour in advance to call someone back, or to get groceries on my way home from work. But what gets my goat is that nowhere in the Calendar app or the Settings app on the iPhone is there a place to set the default amount of time in advance to alert me that there’s an upcoming event in my calendar. This means that if I’m quickly entering a meeting in my calendar, and I forget to set an alert, I’ll never be notified in advance of it happening. How is that functional?

3. No Weekly View (and no landscape view). One of the things I like about Google Calendar (and Outlook, although trust me, there are few things I like about Outlook) is that it shows me my week at a glance – I can see the work week ahead and map my time accordingly. When I go to my phone, there’s no such option, and it would be so simple to implement – just turn your phone to landscape orientation to see the weekly view. I prefer typing in landscape as well, and the Calendar app denies me that convenience.

So, there you have it. I know it’s not a long list, but I do think there could be some serious improvements made to the Calendar app. Come on, Apple – don’t let this become one of those situations like Microsoft has with Internet Explorer – simultaneously the market leader and the least innovative browser out there.

What do you think should be added/changed? Leave me a comment below. And if you’re looking for alternatives to the iPhone Calendar app, here’s a great list.

Facebook launched its location-based service today, called Places. I’ve been reading about it on Mashable, TUAW and pretty much every other tech blog in my Google Reader for weeks, months even. So now that it’s finally here, I was excited to download the new version of the Facebook app for iPhone and give it a try. And this is what I found.

This feature will be available in my region soon? Thanks for nothing, Facebook. I hope they’re not taking time to add a bunch of locations before they launch – they should let users populate the locations, like Foursquare does. And on that note, apparently Places will integrate with Foursquare, Gowalla and other established location-based social networks. So if Foursquare has a litany of locations in my locality (aliteration FTW), why doesn’t Places feed from that? Foursquare has an API, after all.

Well, I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. Until then, Facebook Places remains a much-hyped mystery.

One of the great new features of the iPhone 3G S is its ability to record video, and the fact that it lets you trim the clips after you’ve recorded them. However, that’s where its native video editing capabilities end.

Video Edit's project editing screen

Enter Video Edit, an application by Winnipeg developers DHI Inc. Video Edit allows you to easily cut together multiple clips, trim them inside the application, and render them to a new clip, which you can then send to YouTube, email, post on a blog, Facebook, Twitter et cetera.

I got an early look at Video Edit and my experience with the application was good. The editing was quick, easy and the rendering time was fast, as promised. I found only a few shortcomings, which I’m sure will be addressed in later versions of the app.

• You can’t delete project files. Creating a project is easy enough, but when you’re finished rendering it, if there’s no further edits or additions to make, you’d think removing it from the project list would be an option. Not so.
• While every other part of the application operates in either portrait or landscape mode, the Camera Roll screen forces portrait mode.
• Uploading clips to YouTube or posting them to other sites must be done outside the application in the camera roll, after you’ve rendered the clip. I’d like to see an option to upload it inside the application directly following the render.

Video Edit employs help overlays to get you started. It's so simple you barely need them.

But that’s it – just three small gripes on an otherwise great application that fills a much-needed gap in the iPhone’s functionality.

For more info on Video Edit visit www.videoeditapp.com. To be released June 2010.

Recently I acquired a lovely new 2009 Acura CSX, which I have really enjoyed driving these past few months. One of my favourite features of the car is that it has a USB port which I can plug my iPhone into and play music through the factory stereo system.

However one significant beef I have with this option is that the controls on the factory system are terrible for selecting music. I have 3770 songs in my library, and scrolling through them with a slow-to-react wheel is definitely not the most efficient method of selecting music. Especially when I need to do it quickly and get back to keeping my attention on the road.

To circumvent this problem I’ve gotten into the habit of picking an album or playlist before I get into the car and then plugging my phone into the USB port. Once that happens, you relinquish control of your music to the car’s controls, which, as previously mentioned, are shitty.

But I shouldn’t have to do that. I want to be able to quickly find what I want to listen to and get on with the driving. I hate to say it, but I think Ford’s Sync technology actually does a great job of this.

One way that I like to listen to my music, and maybe this is weird, is to put my library on shuffle, find a song from an album I like, then turn shuffle off to hear songs from that album. I can’t do this in the CSX, though, because it sorts songs by song name and not by album.

My solution is to create a playlist with all the songs in my library sorted by album name as opposed to song name. It should allow me to do what I want to do – scan through a bunch of songs until I find the one I want and then turn off shuffle to hear that album.

Despite my grief with using the system this way, I should say that the USB port in the car is a really amazing feature and something that sold me on the car originally.

It’s my first week as a Mac owner and I can tell you so far it’s been a hell of a lot of fun. I don’t know why I didn’t buy one ages ago. Oh yeah, the crippling hole it put in my wallet, that’s right. But this time around I had some extra cake from FINALLY selling my old car (a ’96 Acura Integra) and decided to spoil myself. So I finally did away with my old Toshiba laptop (it is sitting in its case in the closet, next to my old desktop PC) and got myself a lovely 15′ MacBook Pro – 2.66Ghz Intel Core Duo processor, 4GB RAM and a 320GB 7200RPM HDD. It is soooooo sweet. I’ve been diddling around in iPhoto, iWeb (which I didn’t even know existed until I installed the iLife suite yesterday) and my personal favourite so far, GarageBand. It’s all just TOO easy to use. I am still waiting for it to ask me for the right drivers, or for some weird hardware/software conflict to happen … but I don’t think it will. It’s so crazy.

So now that I own both the iPhone 3G S and a MacBook Pro, I really don’t see what possible use I could have for the new iPad. First off, what a terrible name. I’ve been reading for weeks that the rumoured names for the device were iSlate, iTablet, iPad … and iPad wins. Get ready for the maxi pad jokes, Apple. Actually, MADtv has that pretty much covered in this sketch from four years ago.

And okay, it’s a nice device for consuming media, and the iBook store is neat, but the iPad falls in its ability to be a do-everything device. It lacks a camera and it doesn’t multitask. I heard one defence for the iPad stating that it was made this way on purpose, as to not pull sales away from the MacBooks. That makes sense, but then what do I need the iPad for? I haven’t quite figured it out.

So the fanfare and the hype that has been building up for weeks didn’t quite deliver what it promised, but when does it ever do that? I’d say rarely ever. Maybe iPad version 2.0 will take some of the critics cries into consideration.

Another disappointment I felt during the whole Apple CES keynote was that I expected iPhone OS 4.0 to be released, but it looks like I’m going to have to wait for that, too. I guess that’s okay, though, as I don’t think I’ll upgrade to OS 4.0 until blackra1n or somebody else figures out how to jailbreak it. And my guess is Apple is going to make it a lot harder to do this time around.

All being said, yes. I’m a total Apple fanboy now.

And look at the super awesome shiny wonderful case I am getting for my MacBook! Excited!

My sister just got the iPhone, which I have had (and been in love with) for quite some time. Anyway, she asked me for a list of apps that I use, to get her started. I decided it might be good to share this with everyone, and maybe you can comment back with some that you love and can’t live without.

Apps I Use Every Day

Facebook
Tweetie 2 (twitter app)
Google Mobile (has voice-activated searching)
Evernote (for keeping track of ideas)
Remember the Milk (for tasks)
Remote (to remote-control your computer’s iTunes library)
CameraBag (neat photo taking app with filters)

Apps I Use Rather Frequently

Flixster Movies
Air Canada
Bump (contact sharing app for iPhones)
Urbanspoon (restaurant suggestion app)
Epicurious (recipes)
LinkedIn (social network for business)
eBuddy (multi-platform instant messaging app – MSN/Google Talk)
Photoshop mobile (photo editing app)
Shazam (recognizes music and tells you what it is – from the commercials)

Other Fun Things

PocketGuitar
Ocarina (flute application – blow into the microphone and press on the buttons to make sounds)
Boxcar (push notifications for twitter)
Kijiji
NESynth
Rogers My Account
FS5 Hockey – air hockey game
Tetris
Shrek Kart (like mario kart)

That’s about all for now. have fun! You might also consider jailbreaking your phone to allow it to install apps not sanctioned by Apple. These are things like MyWi (which turns your phone into a wireless network hub, so you can access your phone’s internet connection from any laptop, anywhere), a flashlight application, et cetera. There are myriad customizations you can do to your phone with an app called Winterboard, but be wary. It may slow down the phone’s performance.