iPhone WiFi weirdness

I’m having trouble with the wireless on my 3G iPhone. Either an action works perfectly (for instance downloading e-mail or visiting a website), or it will just time-out. I just jailbroke it and installed sshd. ssh-ing to my it via 3G miraculously works perfectly. However, when connecting to it via WiFi it’ll simply refuse data. That is, until you let the iPhone try to get data itself by for instance visiting a website. Then suddenly the ssh packets come through again. In the background (with screen) I’m running a very frequent ping to my local gateway which makes ssh work perfectly again via WiFi. A very unsatisfying hack.

It seems like an aggressive power safe on the WiFi.

iPhone (0)

On the day of release, I bought an iPhone. We all know the great features; thus let’s talk about the annoyances.

It crashes and gets sluggish a lot. Especially Safari crashes a lot and the contact list at one moment took 10 seconds to get responsive. Over time random crashes in all applications appeared. Rebooting it, actually, seems to have solved it (for now).

Wifi is unreliable. Sitting right next to the router it’s still a game of chance whether it will load a website properly or just time-out. This often leaves me disabling Wifi, and using HSDPA instead (which is our 3G), which has a terrible coverage. Outside reception is great, but even inside a building near a window, it only shows one or two “pips”. This again, often leaves me disabling 3G in favor of the (slower) but the more reliable GRPS (?).

I use iTunes on Windows in VMWare to sync my iPhone, which works great for the music. For the other stuff, like contacts and photos it just does not work. Syncing with google contacts or the windows address book just doesn’t work on windows. There isn’t even any support for calendar syncing for windows. I still have to look intro a free exchange compatible server. (Anyone?)

T-Mobile in the Netherlands seems to have trouble with the administration of all new subscriptions. Billing information and visual voicemail still don’t work.

(Nevertheless, it’s a great toy)

Power PC dumped

Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips

When Apple will switch to x86 and ia64 it will be possible to run mac osX on your own home bought computer, given that they don’t avoid it by changing some opcodes.

One other things is sure; they will loose some power. As long as they provide binaries and provide one set for all apple computers they will have to add support for both ppc and x86 in one binary distribution which will undoubtely be a lot bigger if not slower too.

It will be interesting to see how this issue will evolve.