iConverged

(Update July 16: Nope. Better, but still messed up. See update below)

So I just patched my iphone 4 with ios 4.0.1. While consumers, and specifically tech sites were going nuts about the reception, I just installed the bumper and it fixed the problem for me. That was pretty much a non issue with me post the bumper.

The one issue that really bugged me was the buggy proximity sensor. Every time I put the phone to my ear, with a bit of movement, I would either mute the call or add another line. Most irritating. My initial tests seem to indicate that ios 4.0.1 fixes this nuisance. I certainly hope that is true as I continue to use it. I’ve been reading others say it does not fix it, but I tried 3-4 calls now and I did not experience that issue. But time will tell.

I don’t really care if they increased the bar size, decreased the bar count and what not.

What do you feel? Did 4.0.1 fix the proximity sensor bug?

Update: July 16:

No, 4.0.1 does not completely fix this. It seems to certainly be better, but I can’t say its completely fixed. I’ve made several calls now and I’ve managed to:

a) Start Facetime by mistake

b) Put a call on mute

without my doing anything out of the normal (sitting on my chair, talking to a colleague over the phone)

Fortunately, Jobs publicly announced the proximity sensor fix in the next release. I look forward to it, and a refund on my bumper.

And the apple antenna page is cool too.

(July 13: sorry for the downtime, looks like my bandwidth limits were exceeded. Upgraded my hosting package – fixed)

(note: Only the call part is Vanilla SIP. The procedure for registering a Facetime user into their servers etc. is all non-SIP, encrypted/ciphered.)

(for my user review of the iphone4 and bumper read here)

Well heck, good job Apple! I just tested facetime and did a quick check on its protocol. No hacking needed – just an on the wire black box inspection – its just plain SIP and STUN for firewall discovery. Apple plans to make this protocol public, and they seem to have done an excellent job. And thanks for showing the world that you don’t need complicated encryption and proprietary tunneling tricks for an excellent experience. You need a good codec set, a good media stack that can adaptively switch codecs and manage buffers  and a good ‘point-of-presence’ network for the most part.

I am just going to restrict this post to an overview of the flow.

Enjoy:

click on each image for a larger size (if they are small)

This is a facetime all flow – good, plain, SIP (they use MESSAGE for some proprietary data exchange during the call)

rest is perfect sip.

The protocols are here to see (besides SIP)

Ah here is their 200OK for INVITE

A quick look at their RTP stream:

Good Job Apple. Thanks for putting in an excellent quality, standards compliant SIP client embedded into your dialer experience.

(Updated Jun 30 with iphone 4 bumper strip review)

I was one of the 600,000 people who managed to get in their iphone 4 orders on day one, before all the servers collapsed.

So anyway, I got my iphone 4 yesterday (Fedex dropped it in at around 11:30 in the morning). Here is my brief review so far:

(These are just my observations as a user. For a more indepth review, read Engadet’s iphone 4 review. )

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After 4 years of serious Blackberry 8700 and 8800 use, my wife convinced me to switch to the sexier iphone. I was pretty wary knowing it is not very good for business usage. However, my wife’s prime interest was to get me off the keypad while driving. To her dismay, I am now an expert fast typist on my iphone virtual keyboard – but I do listen to her and for my own safety don’t thumb responses to email while stopping at a light. Here are my experiences (so far) on what I did to bring my iphone closer to my needs. I have the iphone 32G 3GS. My previous phone was the wonderful, but, well not oomphy BB 8800.

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I noticed quite a flutter on several blogs and news sites on a new service from Trapcall that allows you to “see” Caller ID even if the caller blocks the caller ID.

A layman description: Jack is an agressive sales person who loves calling his prospective customer Bob with his caller ID blocked, so that Bob will be forced to pick up the phone and have a chat with Jack.  This is a good ploy, because Bob may otherwise ignore the call if he recognizes Jack’s number. (There are of course more serious situations like domestic abuse etc. reported on other sites)

So what does Bob do ? Well, Bob sets ‘Call Forwarding on No Answer’ and/or ‘Call Forward Busy’ etc. on his phone to point to a Trapcall 1-800 number. That’s all.

So what happens ? Jack calls Bob. Bob gets an incoming call without an ID. He ignores it. This makes the call route to Trapcall’s 1-800 # which does  its ‘Voodoo’ and routes the call back to Bob, who gets an incoming call again,  but this time with Bob’s caller ID !! So he can now really ignore it.

How does this work ?

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I’ve always believed the concept of location is important to an application, but it does not really define an application. Continuing that line of thought, I think many companies who join the ‘LBS is a killer Application’ idealogy have it completely wrong.

Location is NOT going to be successful as an Application. It is going to be super successful as a tool. Let me justify my stand.

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Some more goodies from HSC.

MSRP for Android and RTP stack for Android. And yeah, these releases don’t have additional documentation answering stuff like ‘how do I install’. We hope you know that already And if you need docs on how to use the stacks, please refer to the original open source efforts.

Get them here.

Hola,

continuing the “season of giving” for Google’s Android, HSC has also ported the popular java stun stack, JSTUN for the android platform. Download it here. 

Folks, my company just released an updated version of the SIP stack and UA (MJSIP) ported for the latest SDK 1.0r1. This is the same SDK that G1 uses. This is an update to this post.

The new SDK changes several things in the UI and well as some APIs. Kudos to the team lead Nitin Khanna (first.last at hsc.com) for continuing the commitment to android. 

Grab a copy of the latest version from here.

Image credit

Yahoo recently launched Fire-Eagle, which is essentially an ‘open platform’ that allows two simple things:

A) Users can update the system whenever they want with their location

B) Application Developers can access the system whenever they want to know the location of consumers and do anything with it (i.e. serve any application that can make use of that information)

Of course, ‘Users’ can explictly set permissions on who can or cannot view their location.

For a long time, I have wanted to see such an open and simple platform, where ‘executing a service based on location’ is completely independent of ‘the technology used to provide the location’. Because I believe providing individually accessible repositories of data is the key construct to building a hierarchy of innovative products. You collect data, expose it to others so they can transform your data into information. And your information, is data for the next application. So turns the wheel of the Web 2.0 circle. And a location repository is one key missing element to personalize services.

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