SoundClip audio booster for iPhone

Here's a simple, cheap and ingenious little iPhone accessory that won't change the world, but will probably do what it says at a reasonable price. It's the SoundClip from Ten One Design, and it clips over your 3G iPhone speaker hole to slightly boost and clarify the sound. It does this by firstly directing the sound towards you, which will obviously help a little, but also by containing a tuned 'port' of some sort, to boost the sound, they claim, between 6 kHz and 20 kHz. That's a somewhat ambitious claim as there is no way the iPhone speaker will produce much audible at 20kHz. Nevertheless, a boost around 6kHz is believable, and will increase the clarity and focus of the sound somewhat.



The real benefit of this little clip may well be in gaming, where your hands tend to cover up the speaker. On the down side, however, I don't think you'll be able to fit a Soundclip when your iPhone is in its case, though I might be wrong there. If I am right, I can't see that most people will bother going to the effort of de-casing their phones to put on the SoundClip. So there's a challenge to you, Ten One--get this to work with thin cases like my lovely Seidio so I can have it permanently attached and I might be a convert.

Also, qudos to Ten One for the honest explanation of the device they give on their website. They don't overhype it all, but are frank about the small improvement it will make, and they have frequency response graphs and audio clips to back up their very reasonable claims. At the reasonable price, who could complain? Of course, if they'd like to send me a review sample...

Apple releases Firmware 2.2.1. If you're JBd or unlocked, do nothing, just wait.

Apple has just released a minor Firmware upgrade numbered 2.2.1.

The release notes say it contains "bug fixes and improvements, including the following:

- Improved general stability of Safari

- Fixed issue where some images saved from Mail do not display correctly in the Camera Roll"

If you are jailbroken or unlocked, do not apply this update. It will, like any firmware update, undo your jailbreak and you'll lose all your jailbreak apps. So wait for the DevTeam to come up with a new jailbreak for this update, then wait a little longer until it's been tested for a while by users.

Those who have unlocked their phones using yellowsn0w will find their phones relocked when you apply this upate, so once again, wait. There is no killer functionality in this update that I am aware of that you'll be missing out on.

Clippy and hClipboard give you copy and paste on the iPhone AND choice!

If you have a jailbroken iPhone you now have not 1 but 2(!) choices through which you can implement global cut and paste. Now I have to say that I can't believe how much fuss some people have made about the iPhone's lack of this feature, which in the scale of things is pretty minor compared to a number of other omissions, but nonetheless it's a handy feature to have. And the good news is both Clippy and hClipboard. although very fresh releases, seem to work and work pretty well. And such high profiles apps are likely to be bug-fixed and tweaked quickly, so they'll only get better.

I'm fiddling with bith of them as we speak, and will get back to you with my opinions shortly. Clippy is very straightforward and requires no setup, but has less features. hClipboard has a multi-item clipboard, a template system and is a real powerhouse, but requires a little more setup through your iPhone's keyboard settings.

I won't go into all the details, because Michael at HighTechDad has already done that better than I would have, but I'll come back with my recommendation soon. The bottom line though, is that my iPhone just got a little better, and there's yet another reason to jailbreak. In fact, there are now minus 10 reasons not to Jailbreak!

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WARNING: If you're running IntelliScreen, as I am, you may need to go into its Performance setting and turn on Clippy and iKeyEx respectively to get these apps to work.

Google Calendar on your iPhone/Tasks synced with PC

I'm still waiting patiently for Pocket Informant to appear on the iPhone. Okay, not so patiently, but I have only checked WebIS's website once today.

Meanwhile, I had set up a Google Calendar in order to use my preferred iPhone To Do list application, TouchTodo. The deal is, I installed Google Calendar Sync on my PC, which periodically syncs with Google Calendar. I can add tasks, not in Outlook tasks, but in the Calendar, as time based entries, with the task preceded by the word "TouchTodo:". That syncs with Google Calendar, then from within TouchTodo on the iPhone I can select Sync and it will download those tasks over the air. It's a tad clumsy, but actually works really smoothly in practice.

Then my partner complained about how hard it was to find spaces in our (okay 'my') diary to spend time together, so I proposed making my Google Calendar available to her. Next thing we know we have mutually shared calendars, which is very handy, but how to access that from the iPhone?

There are quite a few solutions to this, which you can find if you Google. One is an app available in the appstore, though this doesn't work with the iPhone Calendar, but is stand alone. You can also view your Google Calendars in Safari. This is functional, but the data view is a little simplistic and it's obviously a little slower than the inbuilt iPhone Calendar.

Then I discovered the free NuevaSync service. In short, you sign up for it, then create a new Calendar account via your iPhones Settings. Your inbuilt Calendar app then syncs over the air with Google Calendar via NuevaSync's servers. So now I can still use Outlook on my PC, with the Google Sync app periodically updating my Google Calendar. From my iPhone, using the standard Calendar app, I can now see my Calendar and my girlfriend's, singly or together. They're also colour-coded so that you can tell one from another. Although I don't think that colour scheme can be changed at present, this is very cool

There are plenty of other Calendars on Google Calendar which you can view, but if you want them to sync with the iPhone you must import them into a Calendar of your own. That's easily done.

In short, this is a great system, and I think it's better than the Standard Outlook>iPhone Calendar setup I had before. On the downside, now that I am syncing Outlook>Google Calendar>NuevaSync>iPhone Calendar, it's naturally a bit slower to see updates appear, but that's about the only problem. I think this one will be a keeper on my iPhone.