If you’ve noticed your iPhone’s battery just isn’t cutting it you might be considering a backup battery. These are compact devices, some cases too, that connect to your phone’s dock connector and charge it on-the-go.
There’s actually a surprisingly wide selection out there, and these are some details you should pay attention to when looking for a backup / external battery for your phone.
- Capacity: iPhone’s have about 1200 mAh capacity, so bear in mind how many times you mind want to charge your phone.
- Size/shape: For this to be useful you’ll have to carry it with you. Pick a battery that fits in your bag, case or purse.
- Price: Prices range from about $9-$60. More expensive batteries aren’t necessarily any better. Read on for my suggestion.
I chose the Monoprice iPhone Battery Pack (1900mAh). Its holds enough to charge my phone 1 and 1/2 times, its small enough to slip in my bag and it was super-cheap! $9 + $2 shipping to Canada got this to my door in just under two weeks.
Monoprice is an excellent company; in my experience their products are exceptionally high quality and very reasonably priced. The backup battery was no different-it does exactly waht its supposed to. You charge it with your iPhone cable or dock and pack it away for when its needed. Then when you’re running low on power just plug it in the bottom and the phone starts charging immediatley.
So if you’re thinking about getting the Monoprice device, or any backup battery, go for it. You won’t regret having the security.
Here’s the deal: you can use push email from MobileMe, Yahoo or a Microsoft exchange account. This is kind of limiting, seeing as most of the world doesn’t want to drop $100 on MobileMe (see my older post), doesn’t use Yahoo mail and isn’t a corporate email junkie. The good news is that someone has been thinking about the rest of us and that entity is Google. They are offering a free service called Google Sync, which is essentially a personal Exchange account that you can use with your iPhone and other mobile devices.
I have four email accounts that I want pushed to my iPhone. 1 Gmail, 2 Google Apps, and 1 external account. Since you can only use 1 Exchange account (Google Sync) on your iPhone I had to come up with a crafty solution.
Continue reading ‘Push For All Email Accounts on iPhone’
UPDATE: I’m happy to report that the Zoom + Screen Sharing issue has been resolved in Snow Leopard. The remote Mac will now zoom out when using the normal keyboard commands.
Using the built-in zoom and screen sharing capabilities (or any VNC) together on OS X can be a real pain in the posterior. If you leave your screen zoomed it becomes virtually unusable via screen sharing or VNC. That’s because there is no way to effectively move the cursor (and therefore the screen position) or turn off zoom (since you can’t easily access System Preferences, and the keyboard shortcut isn’t applied to the remote machine).
Continue reading ‘ZoomOut on OS X’
New and refurb iMac.
Some of you know that I ordered a refurbished 24″ aluminum iMac last August. The ordeal proved to be an exercise is in my patience and sanity, but now that the dust has settled I can make a few conclusions. The biggest problem was the faulty displays that shipped in my first two iMacs. I explained the problem in detail when I got the first machine. The second was slightly better, but had more or less the same problem. Since I was a month behind on some work, I decided to keep the second machine until I was back on track. Generally that means giving up any hope of getting a replacement (within 14 days of purchase). Service was supposed to be my only option. I figured that didn’t matter, since a new refurb unit would probably have the exact same problem.
Continue reading ‘Refurbished iMac: Overall Experience’
While people would rarely choose to share their boots, its perfectly acceptable to share ones boot disk. Amongst your computers that is. After a series of unfortunate events surrounding my Mac OS X Leopard disc, I found that there are many ways you can get a fresh copy of OS X running on your Mac.
It started a few months ago when I got my new iMac. Long story short; it was a disaster, I got a new one, its a little off as well.. Anyways, it scratched my Leopard DVD. No problem though, I acquired a new image and tried to burn it to a double-layer DVD. Toast quit halfway through and seems to have toasted the DVD drive. The half-baked disc was stuck in my iMac and the drive isn’t recognized anymore. This pushed me to find a different way to install OS X, and I learned a lot in the process.
Continue reading ‘One Boot Fits All’