I have been comparing the two browsers all day today, and I have found that FireFox has many more “personas”, and “themes”, than Chrome has, hopefully that will change soon. I am in love with the FireFox Two Little Birds persona. I have settled for the Tibi theme in Chrome, but I don’t really like any of these Chrome themes as much as the FireFox themes and personas. It’s a personal thing, I know…

However, as far as extensions and plug-ins go, now the Chrome allows you to add extensions, Chrome is hands-down the best browser out there as far as I am concerned. Above, you can see a screen shot of me typing this blog post on my Chrome browser. Along the the top, next to the address bar, are all the little icons for all the extensions I have installed.

I have installed the following:

Gmail

Google Voice

Google Buzz

Google Caledar

Google Wave

Facebook

Twitter

IE page

bit.ly

delicious

Sharaholic

Chrome SEO

You can get any of these extensions from this link: https://chrome.google.com/extensions

Happy browsing!

By following the directions in the above link, it is possible to add more pages for your apps on your iPhone. I am running the latest version on firmware, and this procedure works perfectly.

I have not tried a sync with iTunes yet, but I will update this post when I do.

Thanks guys at AppleiPhoneSchool.com !!!

1) Navigon – An excellent GPS turn-by-turn voice navigation system. It includes a points of interest feature that is the best I have used to find restaurants and tourist attractions. 5 stars.

2) WunderRadio – Turns your iPhone into a radio.  It allows you to listen to AM and FM stations across the globe.  I live in Raleigh, NC, and this app lets me listen to FM stations across NC that have spotty reception at my home.  Plus I can listen to all the old AM and FM stations I loved when I was in Chicago! 5 stars

3) WeatherBug – Best weather app for iPhone.  Forecasts and radar maps. 5 stars

4) System Activity Monitor – When some iPhone apps are closed, they do not release all the memory they reserved back to the operating system. This can cause your iPhone apps to run more slowly over time until you ‘reboot’ your iPhone.  But with System Activity Monitor, you can force that memory to be freed up, as well as see what programs are currently running, and look at disk allocation.  5 stars plus

5) Tweetie 2 – the best Twitter app I have used, and I have used over 4 of them.   4 stars

6) Toodledo – A to-do list that can be sync’d with an online version. 4 stars

7) Google app with voice search – Lets you do Google searches on the iPhone just by speaking into the microphone; it has incredibly good speech recognition capabilities.  5 stars

8) WiFiFoFum – Find all the WiFi hotspots around you. Includes details on encryption, and a radar map showing locations of the hotspot. 5 stars

9) WSJ/CNN/iDruge etc- All the news apps for iPhone are excellent. 5 stars

10) TFLN – Texts From Last Night is a humorous collection of mostly drunken texts from college.  5 stars for humor content

11) Ontri – triathlon training log, includes GPS feature to log how far you ride/run, along with an online companion program. 4 stars only because it’s hard to log weight lifting.

12) Swim Log – If your kids swim, this can be a helpful app to track their times. 4 stars because it doesn’t remember names of swim meets and you have to re-enter them for every event.

13) iFitness – if you travel a lot, this is a great app to use for ideas on exercises you can do to keep in shape outside of the gym. 5 stars

What are your favorite apps? Appcraver.com is a fun website if you just can’t get enough apps.

My old Sony Ericsson W580i, and New Apple iPhone 3GS POS

I have found in the 2 short days of owning this phone that it gets very hot, as early reports indicate, too hot to use on occasion, and no, it was not left in a hot car or out in the hot NC weather. Forget about the cute, lime green protective cover made out of that stretchy, rubbery silicone stuff. It makes the phone even hotter. And supposedly, if you own a white iPhone 3GS, the phone gets so hot, the white back cover cooks itself until it turns golden brown.

When I worked as a cell phone transmitter designer for a major cell phone manufacturer, the small size of the phones, combined with a small PCB area for heatsinking the power amplifiers, caused headaches for engineers trying to remove heat that is always produced by the amps when transmitting. Ususally the heat would find its way out of any holes in the phone’s case, including the earpiece holes near the top of the phone, which is not the ideal solution, but at least the heat got out of the phone and did not damage the electronics.

In the case of the iPhone, the heat problem appears to be associated with the batteries, given that the brown areas on the back of he phone correspond to the battery area.  So as an engineer, I would guess that either 1) there is too much heat being generated in these phones becuase of all the new features added, combined with the fact that there are NO openings in the case for the regular phone components like keypad buttons, and add on top of all that a huge, heat generating backlit display, or 2) battery problems, 3) it’s something else.  Engineers always know to add option #3.

Here is a link to an excellent article to help you decide if you should get the new iPhone 3GS.

In any case, I loved the ability to listen to radio stations using the WunderRadio app that I otherwise could not receive while at my gym. Using their public WiFi, however, the phone got so hot while using it with an armband, I had to turn it off for a while lest I have an Apple logo burned into my upper arm.

I love the Facebook and Tweetdeck apps, and email, but I HATE the lack of MMS picture text messaging support. Come ON AT&T and Apple, I want to send other AT&T users photos using picture text messages, not email, since, duh, the other phones don’t support email too well…Right now, I am using the PicFree app from Pinger to do this task, and it works ok with other AT&T MMS-enabled phones.

So overall, I want to ditch this phone and go back to my Sony Ericsson W580i. I think I will.  Now I need to figure out how to do that.

******UPDATE**********

My iPhone 3GS has not had the overheating problem since I turned off the GPS locating feature.  (The “WunderRadio” app wanted to turn on ‘location services’ to see where I lived, allowing it to determine my local radio stations.)

I just did a Google search on ‘iPhone GPS overheating’ and found this link, which confirms that another user has found that turning off the GPS will keep your iPhone from cooking itself.

So when you are finished using an app that wants to turn on the ‘location device’, make sure to go to ‘settings’ and turn off the location service. This will improve your battery life as well.  A cell phone radio engineer friend tells me sometimes GPS circuits can use as much current as the phone does in transmit mode.

I have also had a problem with the iPhone overheating  in 3G mode when left in a purse or gym bag if one of the apps was accidnetally left running (accidentally left WunderRadio on during my swim while the phone was in the gym bag with a weak 3G signal!) Others indicate this also causes heat a problem for them.

So the moral of the story is:

1) Put phone in Airplane mode when not using

2) turn off WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS location services when not using

3) ditch the cute silicone covers, they will not allow heat to escape from the back of your phone

4) Remember to check to make sure all apps are turned off before placing your phone in your purse or pocket. A good way to do this is to use the Activity Monitor App from Recession Apps. (what an aptly titled company).

For some reason, I could no longer add new songs to my iPods, or sync them. They showed up in iTunes, but I couldn’t do anything with them.  The little LED just stayed green, it never blinked orange indicating that data transfer was occurring, even though iTunes said that it was syncing.

What ended up sort of fixing the problem is the removal of the USB drivers for the iPod in the device manager. Then I reconnected the iPod, and ONLY allowed the Apple USB drivers to be installed.  I did not allow Windows to install the drivers for the new ‘disk drive’ that it wanted to install, or the ‘generic drive’ drivers that Windows also wanted to install.

So now, iTunes can see the iPod and sync it, but I can’t use it as a USB drive since it does not show in Windows explorer.

And for some reason, my iPod nano works just fine, just as before, on this computer….

UPDATE:

The fixes above were only temporary.  As soon as the shuffle was disconnected, and then reconnected, Windows XP acted like it had never seen the iPod before and asked to reinstall the drivers…I posted my final solution on the Apple iPod Shuffle forums here: iPod Shuffle gen 1 and gen 2 Windows XP driver problems.

Basically, the solution was to connect the iPod to a different computer that had iTunes installed, and then to ‘enable disk use’ on the settings page.  Then I was able to plug my iPod into the first computer and have the first computer recognize the iPod without any troubles.

So anyhow, we rented a car that had a Sirius satellite radio in it.  OK, I am sold on satellite radio now.  I never thought that I would want one of these for a lot of reasons, like the monthly subscription fee for starters…  But after a couple of days of playing with it, I was hooked.  You can listen to BBC Radio 1, and also to Fox News, and even Radio Sweden was on for a while…along with a mind-blowing selection of music.  Don’t like what you are hearing?  Just tune to a new channel and you are basically guaranteed to find something you like, with NO COMMERCIALS.  And with CD-quality sound. 

There are weather and traffic reports for major American cities, along with some NPR classic programming, like ‘Car Talk’, and loads of sports programming.  And Howard Stern, too. (But don’t let the kiddie-winkies listen to Howard because he’s not censored on Sirius and the F-bomb is dropped every other second…You can turn on Radio Disney at this point.)

Too cool.  Gotta have it.  Hope it catches on so I can get one someday. Try Sirius online free for 3 days…