Remember the time: all of your data would be deleted whenever the batteries died on your iPAQ or Palm?

Remember the time: you would have to ‘dial up’ to the Internet whenever you wanted to go online?

Remember the time: you had to use a stylus on the screen, and manipulate these tiny little scrollbars to go up and down the page? (I’m looking at you Windows Mobile and UIQ)Remember the time: you had to connect your mobile phone via Bluetooth in order to have an Internet connection on your PDA?

Remember the time: the only way to get apps onto your phone was by downloading it from a website on your desktop and installing it through the desktop software?

Remember the time: you had to pay $50 for an Office suite on your PDA? (and you still have to for some suites!)

Remember the time: you had to use a third party SMTP email service to sendq, Hotmail or Yahoo mail from your mobile device?

Remember the time: you had to use an external jacket to get a memory card slot, and you could add CompactFlash cards and PCMCIA cards?

Remember the time: the screen of your mobile device wasn’t sealed properly and you had to use hair down the stylus silo to get all the little flecks of dust out?

Remember the time: 256MB SD cards used to cost $200?

Ah, it was a hard-knock life for the mobile device enthusiast back in the day, the kidsters don’t know how easy they have it now!

In other news, data power users can now get amazing deals with the iPhone 4 with the major carriers. This post on APCmag.com details how you can get $750 worth of calls and 6GB of data on a Telstra plan for only $98.50 a month. If you combine Vodafone’s $49 cap (which is $59 a month altogether if you get a 32GB iPhone 4) with a 12-month $39.95 Internet on your Mobile Pack, you can get 7.5GB of data for $88.95 a month. Optus’ Timeless Extreme plan comes with unlimited calls, text and voicemail and 5GB of data as standard, although the APCmag.com article I link to earlier has an Optus representative claiming that the $129 Business Timeless Advantage Plan now comes with UNLIMITED data. Phwoar!

Here’s how to get all of the features of MobileMe – and more – for under AU$30. Penny-pinchers can get almost as many features for AU$7.25.

The main features in MobileMe are iPhone tracking, PIM and email push sync, and online cloud storage, with 20GB of storage altogether.

iPhone tracking: AU$7.25 – AU$22

Perhaps the most valuable feature of MobileMe is the Find My iPhone function. This tracks your iPhone using Google Maps, lets you send a message and/or play a sound on the iPhone (even if it’s on mute), and do a remote wipe or enforce a password lock on it. This is really the only feature that you’ll have to pay for to substitute MobileMe – everything else can be had for free or a small fee, depending on the features that you’re after.

If you have a jailbroken iPhone (which is ridiculously easy to do now, just visit jailbreakme.com from the iPhone’s browser), you can install an app called iLocalis that offers even more features than Find My iPhone. It comes with a 10-day trial, and after that you can pay for a Basic (5 Euro, AU$7.25) or Premium version (15 Euro, AU$22).

The Basic version lets you track your iPhone’s location through Google Maps, send an SMS or make a phone call through the iPhone using the web interface (which means you’ll see the number if someone has put a new SIM in it), activate call forwarding on your iPhone (if someone else has put their SIM in the iPhone, you’ll get all of his or her calls!), and have a message box appear on the iPhone’s screen. The Premium version adds the ability to do a remote backup, remote wipe, lock your iPhone, activate an alarm, remotely record 30 seconds of audio from your iPhone and send it to an email address (this doesn’t seem to work properly right now – it sent me a 1KB AIFF file), and create commands for the iPhone to do based on location. The latter feature is interesting – you can get the iPhone to do things like send an SMS, lock, activate call forwarding and show a message box if it enters or leaves a certain geographic location.

Click on the thumbnail to see a larger image

The service is a little rough around the edges – nowhere near as polished as Find My iPhone – but it works. To install iLocalis, open Cydia, go the Manage tab, tap Add Sources, tap Edit, then Add, then enter http://ilocalis.com/repo/. After Cydia has refreshed, go to the Search tab and enter iLocalis. Install it, sign up for a username and password, then log-in to the iLocalis web interface on a desktop at http://ilocalis.com/index.php.

PIM and email push sync: free

For PIM (contacts and calendar) and email push sync over the air, you’ve got a few options. Yahoo Mail is the only service that will natively do push sync on the iPhone, but it’s limited to Mail, Calendar and Notes. If you want Contacts sync as well, you’ll need to use a Windows Live Mail or Gmail account and set it up as an Exchange account. To set these up, go to the Mail, Contacts, Calendar section in the iPhone’s Settings, tap ‘Add Account’, and select Microsoft Exchange. Enter your email address, use the same email address as the username, and set the password as your account password. Set SSL to enabled. The only other field you’ll have to enter is the server name, which is m.hotmail.com for Windows Live and m.google.com for Gmail.

As for storage, MobileMe gives you 20GB altogether to share between PIM and email, and online storage. Gmail’s storage grows by the day, and at the moment you can get around 7.5GB, while Yahoo and Windows Live both offer unlimited email storage.

Online cloud storage: free-AU$4.99

For this I’m going to focus purely on storage capacity, the ability to transfer/sync files from a PC and Mac, and an iPhone client for accessing files. There are lots of other features to consider – file size limits, bandwidth limits, file types supported, file sharing functionality, versioning, etc, but this is beyond the scope of this article, and I may cover this in a future post.

You can get 2GB of free storage from Dropbox and SugarSync. Both services have iPhone, PC and Mac clients, give you an extra 250MB of data for each friend that you refer to the service, and also offer ‘bonus’ storage if you complete the tutorials for setting up the service. I was able to get 10.5GB of storage free from SugarSync by using their TrialPay system – this gets you to sign up for a ‘free’ service from one of their partners, and I chose the Vistaprint 250 free business cards offer (although I ended up buying premium cards anyway and spent $65 altogether – I’m such a sucker!).

Want more storage? Sign up with SkyDrive and get 25GB of free storage. There’s no iPhone client, but the iSMEStorage app for the iPhone lets you tap into your SkyDrive storage (and other cloud services as well) and costs AU$4.99 in the App Store. It’s not as pretty or intuitive as the Dropbox and SugarSync clients, but you do get more storage for free by linking it to a SkyDrive account. Not surprisingly, SkyDrive only comes with a desktop client for Windows. To sync files from a Mac or Linux computer, iSMEStorage has free tools that mount SkyDrive as a virtual drive in Finder like iDisk.

Unfortunately, the ultrasn0w carrier unlock for the iPhone 4 is still pending – hopefully only another day before that hits!

Telstra had contestants from Master Chef cook food, Optus had a Kelly Rowlands concert at Town Hall for the first 50 people lined up, and VHA treated its customers to a VIP party at The Ivy. I went to the last two events, and given that I had been to two media events prior to that (Navman and Belkin), I was well and truly sloshed by the end of the night!

I tried lining up at the Optus queue to get an iPhone 4, but it took sooo long. Last year, I got to the George St Optus store at 11pm and walked away with an iPhone 3GS at 1.20am. This year, I got there at the same time, and 4.5 hours later, I’d only just made it to the same STREET as the Optus Store – the line was wrapped around the block. Drunk, cold and tired, when someone mentioned that it would be another two hours before we made it to the store, I gave up and went home.

My local Optus store at Bondi opened the next day at 7am. I got there at 8am and walked out with a 16GB iPhone (they’d run out of 32GBs already) at 11.30am. Gosh!

On Friday, there was a long queue outside the Bondi Apple store until they ran out of iPhone 4s. They’d sold out by the time I got there at 11am this morning as well (went in to buy a case). Apparently Telstra and Virgin Mobile are completely out of their stock and not expecting more for another three weeks, and I’m sure Optus, Vodafone and 3 aren’t far behind. I’d be surprised if there were any iPhone 4s in Australia by Monday!

MASSIVE APC REVIEW: iPhone 4

liveeast Apple iPad column

HTC Smartphone Buyer’s Guide

You can also  see catch a glimpse of some of the print stuff I write for APC on its iPad page. I wrote the current issue’s ‘Unlimited broadband’ cover story, as well as the ‘Turn your iPod touch into a phone’ tutorial (you can see my pic on the side ) and the ‘Pimp my iPad’ story further down.

Here’s the situation. I’m currently halfway through a two-year contract with Optus, paying $129 for the unlimited plan with my iPhone 3GS. To break out of that contract, I would have to pay $816. But then I thought – surely Optus will give me a concession if I stuck with them instead of moving to another carrier? I brought this up with the customer service rep over the phone, and she transferred me to the “retention” department. Ah ha! The next person I spoke to said that she could whittle that fee down to $320 if I re-contracted with Optus within 30 days. Sweet – iPhone 4 comes out this Friday!

Now, I don’t have to go back to the old $129 plan that I was on to qualify for this deal – I could go with the cheapest $49 plan if I wanted to. The new $129 unlimited plan is seriously sweet; as well as unlimited calls, SMS and MMS and voicemail, it comes with double the data the old plan had at 6GB, plus unlimited 13 and 1300 numbers, unlimited Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, eBay and FourSquare access and $180 of international call value. But I’m going to go with the cheaper $99 unlimited plan instead, which has slightly less data at 5GB and only $100 of international call value – but all the other free inclusions, and much better value than my old plan.

Even better, there’s a 12-month contract option. To break it down, I could:
- Do nothing, and stay on my existing $129 unlimited plan until next year with the iPhone 3GS. I would pay $1548 altogether for the remainder of my contract (12 months)
- Break my contract for $320, switch to the $99 unlimited plan, get the iPhone 4 for free, get an extra 2GB of data a month, free social networking access, free 13 and 1300 numbers (this used to be extra on the old plan), and $100 of international phone call credit, and pay $1508 altogether for the 12 month contract.

So I’m actually saving money in the long run while simultaneously getting more value, AND getting a new iPhone 4! It’s a no-brainer. I’ll give my old iPhone 4 to my mum once the jailbreak’s out, and get bonus points for being a loving daughter.

Here’s a photo I took in New Zealand last month.

Out of the camera, it looked terrible, but a few tweaks (namely HDR toning) and some judicious cropping, and it looks significantly better!

(Check out a larger version of the above image on my Flickr page)

According to Redmond Pie (one of the more reliable online sources), it won’t be out today like I (and the rest of the iPhone 4-toting geek populace) had hoped. But it’s close! I can feel it!

I’ve been an Android die-hard for the last couple of months, but as soon as my iPhone 4 is unlocked, I’ll be back to the iPhone. Not necessarily because it’s better – I just want to have the experience of using an iPhone 4 as my daily device for awhile. There are certainly things that I will miss about Android: widgets on the homescreen, the handy notifications window (so much more advanced than iOS 4′s push notifications – bleh!), the handy back and search buttons, and seamless push Gmail.

Wow, why am I going back to iPhone 4 again? Oh yes – the Retina display, the excellent 5-megapixel camera with 720p HD recording, more apps (Android is getting ever closer, but iOS still has the edge), and not having to worry about running out of storage – Android 2.1 still forces you to store everything in main memory! Time will tell whether I stick with it once the initial new-gadget sheen wears off.

Here’s a quick video I shot with the iPhone 4.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fskoga95N-Q]

These are the things that are currently happening in my world:

• Writing up a storm. The freelance world is being very good to me!
• Working on my photography portfolio. Finally assembling a mix of photos to post on Flickr. Teaching myself Photoshop – steep learning curve, but very rewarding! Also did my first ‘photo shoot’ and can technically say that I have sold some photos.
• Just got the insurance approved for my stolen Canon EOS 5D Mk II. Some scummy low-life stole it from my bag at a farewell party, took around three weeks before the insurance came through, but now I am once again reunited with my love!
• Been on a travelling spree. New Zealand in June, Hong Kong in July, and Hawaii, Los Angeles and Las Vegas in October!
• Still a hard-core gadget monkey. Chomping at the bit for the iPhone 4 jailbreak to be released so I can unlock the iPhone 4 that I bought in Hong Kong. Hope it’s released before the iPhone 4 launches here in Australia on Friday! Current gadgets of choice: 64GB iPad 3G, Samsung Galaxy S, Livescribe Echo pen, Audio Technica headphones, Canon EOS 5D Mk II

Here are a few of my favourite “portfolio” shots