Then, last night I stumbled upon an iPhone app, SkyView which uses Augmented Reality (AR) to reveal the current positions of planets, stars, constellation, satellites and even the International Space Station (ISS)!

I demonstrated the wonder of the app to my kids outside our home just now. Although the sky was cloudy, we could still see the moon so I used the moon as the reference. SkyView accurately revealed the exact position of the moon on my iPhone screen. Tonight, we found a lot of constellations, including Virgo which was behind the moon. Next to the moon was Saturn, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Virgo, moon and Saturn.

Not too far away from our moon, we found three satellites, the COSMOS 1536 (below the moon), COSMOS 1975 (slightly above the horizon but behind the apartment and MIDORI II (ADEOS-II) (further to the right of the moon). See their illustration in Figure 2, 3 and 4 respectively.

Figure 2: COSMOS 1536

Figure 3: COSMOS 1975

Figure 4: MIDORI II (ADEOS-II)

Beside these, we also found the Hubble space telescope and the ISS (International Space Station). Both of them were below the horizon and behind (or under?) our house!

Figure 5: Hubble space telescope and ISS

The SkyView app is a great iPhone app for astronomy hobbyists and perfect education tool for both parents and kids. It’s certainly worth investing. It costs only $1 and there is also a stripped down version which is free.

The above screenshot shows the signal bar on my iPhone 3GS with iOS 4. By comparing with the screenshot below, it is obvious that the signal bar (especially bar 1 and 2) has become taller.

At the same location (my desk), I covered the back of my iPhone 3GS with my palm, the signal would drop 1 to 3 bars after about 22 seconds. After updating to iOS 4.0.1, I repeated the test. The signal bar would reduce 1 bar after more than 25 seconds.

Well, this is a very low tech test and is not accountable to conclude that the new software in iOS 4.0.1 has displayed the signal strength more accurately. Anyway, there is a huge difference before and after.

Two years later, I bought a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. It ran Zaurus and OPIE GUI environment. The Zaurus SL-5500 was Sharp’s first PDA to run Linux. Linux was the main reason I chose Zaurus. It was fast and colorful (at that time). It came with a couple of useful apps and desktop sync software. Syncing to a desktop running on Linux was good. After using it for a few months, some commercial apps which I bought, began to crash more often after I updated the operating system. I gave it up after a few attempts to restore the original operating system. Here is the photo of Zaurus (I managed to find its charger) with iPhone lying beside it. Well look at its size! The iPhone 3GS is half the thickness of Zaurus.

The other drawback of the Zaurus is its retractable physical keyboard. The keys are too small for my fingers and typing is real pain. So, BlackBerry with physical keyboard is totally out of the game. Here is the picture of Zaurus with its keyboard and iPhone with the virtual-touch keyboard for comparison:

I was tempted by HP and Toshiba but, hey, they ran on Windows. No way! In early 2008. I purchased a 2nd generation, 32GB iPod Touch. I was immediately captured by its charms. In December 2009, I got a 32GB iPhone 3GS. My response was: “Damn! I should have gotten it earlier.”

Both PalmPilot and Zaurus need stylus to tap on their screens. If you lose your stylus, you need to buy a new one. iPhone is more convenient because everything is manipulated with your fingers. Apple’s innovative multi-touch screen gives more user experience and more operability to the device.

All I can say, I have never used other PDAs like I use my iPhone. I mostly use my iPhone in my work (especially) and for fun during leisure (social networking, music, games and etc.) Here are some apps I use to boost my productivity while I am on the move and even at my desk.

Paymo is a free online time tracking and billing service. With a small fee, user can upgrade the service for unlimited users and invoices. I use Paymo to track my time spent on various projects and business/work related activities. The Paymo free iPhone app works in both online and offline mode. When I am out to support my clients, and/or having business or technical meeting and discussion, I can easily track my time with this tiny useful app.

With design based on the concepts and techniques described in David Allen’s book, “Getting Things Done”, OmniFocus for iPhone is a powerful to-do app that let you stay focused in whatever you are doing or trying to complete. The app is priced at $19.99 which is a little bit on the high side. I was hesitating for a while because of the price. After using it, I will say, “Save your money for OmniFocus and forget about other to-do apps.” Before this, I was using Things and I am still using it. The only reason I want to keep Things is that it allows assigning teammates to your tasks. OmniFocus is more comprehensive than Things and it let you stay focused in getting your jobs done, which is most important. Besides, you can sync your data via MobileMe, Bonjour, WebDAV server or locally mounted disk on your Mac. Personally, I think it is worth the investment.

Things is an easy-to-use to-do app priced at $9.99. It’s a good alternative to OmniFocus if you are on a tight budget. The price tag of $9.99 is considered quite high especially there are some free to-do apps, but to do a good job, Things will be above average. Unlike OmniFocus, syncing can only be done with a WiFi at your local area network where your Mac is running the desktop version of Things. One feature which I don’t like is its ability to assign more than one tag to your tasks. Too many tags confuse me.

Evernote is a free online service which let you save your ideas in the form of texts, voice memos or photos. You can save a web clip or PDF. Syncing between multiple devices and Macs over the Internet is a breeze. I use it while I am writing computer codes to note down what I have done and new ideas that come along. You can tag your documents for easy retrieval later. If you would like to enjoy a larger storage and monthly usage bandwidth, you can upgrade the service to Evernote Premium for $5 a month or $45 a year. Evernote is a good companion for notetaking while you are working, engaged in meetings and discussion and even at leisure.

Invoice2Go allows me to issue invoices on the go without a notebook or desktop computer. With it, I no longer need to go back to office to issue invoices. It saves me a lot of time from traveling back and forth between office and clients. Just email the invoices to your clients and you can make the delivery right away. For only $9.99, it saves you time and gasoline.

Dropbox is a free online storage service. You can take any file with you on your iPhone to meetings. Your co-workers or clients can drop files to your Dropbox and you can pick them up anytime, anywhere on your iDevice or Mac, provided they are connected to the Internet. It also allows you to share your files on Facebook or Twitter via link. By getting your friend to sign up you can earn 250MB of extra free disk space (up to 8GB) for every new account created. Click here to sign up.

No single person or thing is perfect. Soon after people got hold of their new iPhone, there came the reception problem. The antenna of the new iPhone 4 is located at the bottom left corner of the phone (away from the user’s skull/brain), which is a clever requirement forced by FCC. By holding the iPhone in your palm will short-circuit the antenna and the signal will be attenuated after a few seconds. Some people have even experimented on this issue so well that they have concluded that the signal (and call) will be totally attenuated within 10 seconds.

Then, there is even a Steve Jobs sham on Twitter spreading unofficial information that Apple may recall iPhone 4. And then a legitimate news media (read here) has fallen into this takeoff.

Since Steve returned to Apple and started to revamp Apple’s product lines, there have been constant stimulations and endless excitement and rumors you can religiously look forward to for every 3 months. Even if you are not an Apple user, you will be affected as well.

I am fascinated by the propelled rumors and how Steve Jobs deals with these grapevines. Steve Jobs is undoubtedly the CEO of 21st century!

A week or two before Apple published Job’s open letter, I learned about an open source Flash project called Gnash from Twit. You can listen to the podcast here.

I really don’t believe in develop-once-deploy-everywhere development concept. I am more a native application guy because I only believe in native performance without relying on third party software components to run the applications. My experience with Tweedeck served as a wonderful example.

Tweetdeck was developed using Adobe’s AIR and Flash technology and is a develop-once-deploy-everywhere kind of application. Its user interface on the Mac really sucks. It looks more like a Windows application rather than Mac’s native Cocoa application. One thing annoyed me was that I had to upgrade Adobe’s AIR whenever it became available. I feel happier for not running Tweetdeck now.

A Java application has its downsides as well. It too depends on Sun’s JVM (Java Virtual Machine). Java has never become an implementation language in my software development career. Only recently when I began to involve in web application development, I have to work with JavaScript. The experience is awful, in my experience.

It is understood why Adobe is so furious about Apple’s decision not to allow Flash on its mobile platform. The reason is obvious: Adobe loses its grip on Apple’s mobile devices and has been discounted in Apple’s mobile computing gameplay. But Apple is not an easy-to-squeeze apple, it is huge and capable.

Apple has been working on an open web standard HTML5 and Apple’s own version of Flash, Gianduia. With HTML5, Apple’s computing platform becomes even more open, unlike otherwise as Adobe claimed. Both are exciting new technologies which I would like to implement to the web application I am developing.

I will write more about HTML5 and Gianduia when I have found time to research more about these two.

Mine is a 32GB Black iPhone. The specifications can be found on Apple website so I am not going to repeat them again here. I used a sleek Nokia 6300 before this so it took me some time to adapt to the bigger/wider iPhone. This is not really a problem to get used to, actually. So, let’s put aside the physical differences.

I had been looking into various smart phones by Nokia and Sony Ericsson before I settled for Nokia 6300 almost two years ago. Well, nothing is comparable to iPhone as I find today.

On the 4th day, I had already got a chance to take my brand new iPhone into action. I completed a task outside and needed to go back to my home/office. I usually made payment to my suppliers at the bank. Then I would go back home/office to scan and email my suppliers before they could send me the goods. This usually would happen a few hours later or in the evening because I have the habit of being cost-effective when running errands outside. With iPhone, I snapped a photo of the bank transaction slip with its built-in 3 megapixels camera and emailed the photo to my supplier immediately. By the time I stepped out the bank, my supplier had called me and confirmed receipt of the fund. Everything was done on the iPhone at the bank.

While the competition in smartphone market is mounting with Google’s Nexus One and Android enabled phones with attempt to take down iPhone, nothing has come closer to the 3 billion downloads of iPhone apps at Apple’s App Store.

I am using quite a number of applications for productivity and I find them all useful. I am able to check my schedule and make appointment, follow my to-do list, review some documents (PDF, graphics etc,) which my co-workers and I shared. More, I can email, facebook and tweet anytime, anywhere with the iPhone (the list goes on.) These tasks are a little over killed on a MacBook I can say.

When my dad was in the hospital a few months ago (I still had not had my iPhone then), I had been in and out of the hospital with my backpack. It was quite annoying trying to find a good spot where I could sit down, open up my 13″ MacBook and connect it with a 3G broadband. Sometimes, the seat had been taken by patients’ relatives. Most of the time, my MacBook and I became the attraction of bored people sitting around me. Some nosy people would peep at my screen. Checking and replying business emails had became a difficult task as my privacy was invaded. It was like houseflies buzzing around while you were eating your chicken pie. Were you able to enjoy anyway?

With iPhone, this scenario has changed a little bit. I am still able to communicate and do some light tasks without the need of my MacBook and houseflies peeping. I can add, modify or delete appointments and contacts on iPhone and sync with my Macs via MobileMe. I am also able to update my to-do list and sync with my Macs via WiFi later when I am home.

As a software developer, I spend most of my time at the keyboard spewing codes other than blogging, emailing, facebooking and tweeting. I would rather save this coding task on my Macs if there is any code editing app available for iPhone. When I am not at my desk, I would want to follow up with tasks like the reviewing of drawings/images (icons, logo etc), design and technical documents on iPhone.

The iPhone is handy during short discussion sessions (less than 15 minutes) with co-workers and clients. A relatively large MacBook would look clumsy in this situation.

I can also use iPhone as a remote controller to navigate Keynote presentation slides using Apple’s Remote. This app makes me look more professional (and well, cooler) when presenting because I need not walk to my MacBook to press a key every each time I want to change the slide. I can do it on my iPhone.

Well, the list goes on and on so long you have not run out of imagination of  how to utilize your iPhone. I would never go back to Nokia or Sony or anything else except iPhone.

The iPhone 3G that makes you drool...

I was truly disappointed after reading the details on Maxis’ website. The selling price is very high and apart of this, Maxis locks you in with either 24 months or 6 months contract. The worst thing is that if you breach the service contract or choose to opt out before the contract matured, there is a huge penalty awaiting you ahead.

We have paid so much for the iPhone with our own pocket, why is there still hefty monthly service fees and contract commitment?

Is that another dirty Apple‘s trick?

It looks kind of odd for an Apple enthusiast like me to comment about Apple negatively in two consecutive blog entries.

In my opinion, Apple’s marketing and sales strategies have  leveraged Apple to become the most successful and profitable computer company. Ever since Apple released the first generation iPhone, it has become a hit globally including Malaysia. You will not be surprised to read petitions from fellow Malaysians to urge Apple to make available iPhone in Malaysia as soon as possible.

Well, like else everywhere, Apple does not only make profit from iPhone sales, it makes another tier of profit from the service contracts. The arrangement is made with service provider prior to the launch of iPhone. That’s why Maxis’ iPhone service contract comes with huge unfair penalty.

Very well, to me, iPhone is a nice to have it but not a must have but still wants to have it kind of thing. It is cool. It will make heads turn and eyes pop when you take your iPhone out of your pocket.

If you read carefully Maxis iPhone 3G rate plans here, you will find the data service is not unlimited. There is additional data usage charge after you have used up the allocated usage stipulated under your contract.

Now a dangerous pitfall that will lead you to huge phone bill is that if you are using some iPhone apps which automatically connect to Internet to update itself or sync information, your usage meter will be running without you knowing it until your bill arrives. Most applications will connect to Internet automatically even your iPhone is in standby mode. Beware!

Personally, I prefer using an iPod Touch and a regular cell phone to having the all-in-one iPhone. I will have total freedom to change my phone as I wish or when necessary. With iPhone, you are locked in with it unless you become to hate it so much and will just chuck it away into the garbage.

I still will consider getting an iPhone if Apple allows iPhone users to choose any service provider they like. I believe iPhone sales will leap even higher with this restriction removed.

As for the running meter of data service, I am not too concerned as I will be able to comprehend and prevent it as I am technically savvy. How about people who are not? They will either have to pay huge bills or to disable iPhone apps. What use then if you disable iPhone apps?