The iPhone Software.com

The iPhone is known for having a temperamental battery life
span, often ranging from multiple days of power to less than a transcontinental
flight. The reason for much of this
inconsistency is that the iPhone essentially goes to sleep when it is not being
used. When it is being used you can go
from basic functions to those that eat up battery life like a terminal
cancer. If you are trying to maintain
battery life there are several standard suggestions that people tend to
follow. Reduce screen brightness, turn
off EQ, 3G, and Wi-Fi, turn off Push features, and shorten the speed of the
Auto-Lock feature. Beyond the obvious
there are a few things to think about and tips to follow if you want to really
extend the life of your iPhone battery.

The first tip to follow is to simply reduce the use of your
iPhone. This may seem obvious, but
people often forget that the iPhone is a phone first and iPod second. Listening to music on your iPhone will eat up
the battery, but watching videos either online or in the iPod section will kill
it faster than anything else. If you
absolutely need your battery life to remain consistent you are going to have to
go to the basic functions of your phone and only use it for calls.

You can easily go in and select different settings in your
iPhone to reduce the drain on the battery.
Location services, all push functions, data fetching, internet
functions, and the rest can all be shut off manually. Each of these communication services will
continually drain your battery as they constantly communicate through your
network. The ultimate way to really shut
this down is to enter Airplane Mode.
Airplane Mode, as the name indicates, is what you turn on when you are
prohibited from having any signal coming in and out of your iPhone. You can do this for periods of time when you
know you are not going to use your phone, but will need to later on. This will essentially shut down the power
drain as long as you are not using the iPhone functions. To set Airplane Mode on your iPhone start by
going to Settings. You will find the
Airplane Mode Off / On button right at the very top above the Wi-Fi selection
section.

Sounds in general are often going to cut short your iPhone
battery life. These are used by the
iPhone to notify you about almost everything, from new emails to the basic
clicks of the keyboard when texting.
This is an easy way to get a little extra juice out of your iPhone on
long bouts away from an outlet. Again,
go to the Settings option and then go down to the second block and select
Sounds, which is directly above Brightness.
Once you are in Sounds you will have the option to turn off a whole host
of things, with Vibrate right at the top.
Below that you can turn off sounds for New Voicemail, New Mail, Sent
Mail, Calendar Alerts, Lock Sounds, and Keyboard Clicks. All of these can go easily without impeding
iPhone functionality, but you may have to consider whether or not it will be
worth it to turn off vibrate altogether.

The sleep cycle for the iPhone is one of the most important
ways that it saves battery, so this should be respected. Constantly waking it up and then allowing it
to go back to sleep drains the battery in the same way that turning your car on
and off uses an unreasonable amount of gas.
When you do not need to actually use the iPhone just simply put it away
and let it rest.

If you want to ensure long term battery life efficiency you
are going to have to go through the Charge Cycle regularly. This Charge Cycle on your iPhone means that
you will have to go from a full charge to a full die. This will make sure that the lithium battery
in the iPhone stays working well. Try to
do the full Charge Cycle every four weeks or so, and every month and a half at
the very least. For most people this is
no problem as dying iPhone batteries are a part of everyday mobile life.

To really solve your issues with iPhone battery life you
should be keeping chargers with you at all times. iPhone car chargers are still standard and it
is easy to plug into almost any computer and charge up for a little while. Currently there are dozens of back up options
that allow you to keep a back up power source that you can charge from when you
are not near a stationary power outlet or computer. These are not that expensive and should be a
priority for iPhone users that travel regularly.

For more standard tips for extending your iPhone’s battery life check out:

How to Extend Your iPhone’s Battery Life

Yeah, yeah, we all know those cell phones glued to our ears are little microwave ovens beaming their death rays directly into our pineal glands.  And for years, the debate about how dangerous (or not) that might be has raged.

An Israeli app-development startup called Tawkon decided to attack the issue head-on, creating an iPhone app that predicts the amount of radiation your phone is pumping out, based on factors like how far you are from a cell tower, whether you’re in standby mode or actually on a call, even what kind of iPhone you own (e.g. the 3GS’s improved chipset produce lower radiation levels).

Not surprisingly, the House of Jobs isn’t happy that an app exists that’ll tell you how big a death ray your telephone is.  So far, they’ve rejected Tawkon’s App Store submissions, on the grounds that a diagnostic tool of this nature would create confusion with iPhone owners from a usability perspective.  Undeterred, Tawkon continues to petition Apple for App Store approval (and a suggested price tag between US$5.00-10.00) while developing Blackberry and Android versions. 

[Via TechCrunch]

It’s official: Apple will begin selling iPads on Saturday, April 3rd, with pre-orders beginning on March 12.  Sales will be done through “selected Authorized Retailers.”

Note: this is for the basic Wi-Fi model.  The 3G ‘Pad is promised for late April, but the House of Jobs doesn’t have a date set in concrete yet.  This is also for the USA release: elsewhere in the world, both the Wi-Fi and 3G’s have the “late April” disclaimer.  Also, the Wi-Fi pad can be reserved online, and picked up at your nearest mall’s Apple Store.

(Speaking of which: feel free to share any stories/photos of store feeding frenzies you might encounter…)

App availability — not to mention how many devices are hitting the retail channels on Day One — are not known at this time.

Learn to speak French, find out everything you need to know about medicine, and find out the weather in your home town.  Here are some iPhone applications that mix functionality with hidden features.

FREE French Tutor

Educational applications have become a central part of the
iTunes' App Store, but they really range between a number of different sub categories.  Some of them are encyclopedic in nature,
offer up preparations for certain gate keeping tests, or act as
dictionaries.  Foreign Language
assistants have always remained near the top of the Education section, which
shows exactly how important it is for people to escape the trappings of single
language culture.  FREE French Tutor has
been one of the most popular of these, probably because FREE attracts people
more than anything else.  FREE French
Tutor itself is structured around a quiz format to help teach you different
French elements.  These are divided up
into Home and Family, Town and Country, Opposites, Basic Phrases, and
Questions.  Each of these is supposed to
address a different area of the French language, and within each quiz you have
the ability to select different quiz types such as Multiple Choice or Write
In.  Most of the questions in the FREE
French Tutor tests are pretty easy, but they do their job relatively well.  You can save the scores you get from different
quizzes so you know what you are up against next time as you try to
improve.  Over all FREE French Tutor is
incredibly limited and includes banner ads in some limited locations.  FREE French Tutor is really just the Light Edition
of the more complete 24/7 Tutor series for French at the iTunes' App
Store.  Here you can get more specific
and complete tutors for French, as well as other languages like German, Spanish,
and Italian.  FREE French Tutor ends up
feeling a little like an advertisement for the other 24/7 Tutors iPhone
applications, and if you do not already know some to work with you will be lost
in general.

Medscape

The inclusion of medical based iPhone applications may be
one of the great developments on the iPhone. 
For many doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals it has
been standard practice to keep mobile devices with them for quick
reference.  Here they may have quick
symptom references, drug catalogues, and other software to assist when in
serious work.  This is all part of really
bringing technology to assist in proper and adequate healthcare.  Web MD has been part of the major bridges
between the world of professional reference tools and the general public, and
Medscape has been a very useful wing of this. 
Before downloading the Medscape free iPhone application you must go to
the website and create an account.  Once
you do this you will log in to it using the Medscape free iPhone application
and finish the installation process. 
This seems like quite a bit of work, but it is worth it for such a
complete service on your iPhone.  You can
choose to download the Medscape Clinical Reference articles right to your
iPhone or just access it online using the application.  It is usually best to just access it online,
but if you want to use it in a professional setting you may just want to go
with the full download version once you have it installed.  Once in the full version of Medscape from
WebMD you will find an easy to use interface that will help you get to the
3200+ articles that they have in the database. 
Right from the opening Reference tab you can choose to search for the
information you want or browse sub categories with Drugs, OTCs & Herbals,
Diseases & Conditions, and Clinical Procedures.  You can also use the Interaction Checker right
from there, which is incredibly important for those in the healthcare
field.  The News tab is nice to get
updates from health news and the CME department does a comparable function.  The Medscape free iPhone applications is one
of the best iPhone applications that has been released of one of the best web
services that is available.  There are
more complete medical software packages that people could use, but Medscape is
accessible and easy to reference right from your iPhone. 

AccuWeather

Weather applications have gotten their own section at the
iTunes' App Store, which seems a little specific.  The reason for this is that when the internet
became indispensible and began shifting consumers' media consumption from Push
to Pull, weather was one of the first areas to be affected.  No one wanted to sit around and wait for the
weather update when they could simply go in and find exactly what they were looking
for from a web service.  AccuWeather is
one of the most popular Weather free iPhone applications, right under the
mammoth Weather Channel.  AccuWeather actually
works incredibly simply in that you get a base search box where you search for
a specific area.  You also have the
ability to use the location services to zero in on your exact location.  The search function of AccuWeather is a
little difficult to deal with so you have to be pretty accurate when entering a
location name.  Once you actually zero in
on your location in AccuWeather you will find pretty detailed information.  You start in the basic Weather tab that will
allow you to look at the weather predictions in various distances of time.  You also then get to switch into Radar
imagery of the area and look at any risks that are there because of the
weather.  The Video section is kind of
nice if you appreciate traditional weather coverage, but it is not likely the
first place you will go to check weather coverage.  Over all this is an above average free weather
iPhone application, but it still could be improved in certain areas.  There are other pay iPhone applications that give specific functions from the AccuWeather.com base, but the basic AccuWeather application is the only free version from this service.