Today at Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference to address the iPhone 4 antenna problem, Steve Jobs announced that Apple will be giving away free Bumper cases and will be refunding those who have already purchased the $30 case.

Steve announced that because they simply can’t make enough Bumpers, iPhone 4 owners will be given the choice between a select amount of cases to receive free of charge.

Personally, this is what I was hoping for. It is good to see Apple finally recognizing the fact that  the iPhone is flawed and that they must do something about it. Would I rather see the phone be recalled? No.. That would screw things up not only because a recall would be very expensive, it would also bring back those long Apple Store lines that we saw on launch day.

What do you think? Is this the right thing for Apple to do? Should they have totally recalled the phone?

You can watch the full video from Apple’s press conference here.

Too tired to go out in the backyard and kick around that soccer ball? Well, now not only do you not even need to go outside, you don’t even need a soccer ball! ARSoccer for iPhone is another one of thoes augmented reality apps, the ones that make things appear through your iPhone’s camera that aren’t actually there in real life.

ARSoccer by LaanLabs sports two game modes and three difficulty levels. You can choose either Arcade Mode of Free Play. Arcade Mode keeps track of your stats, including “hits”, and how long you have been kicking around the virtual ball, whereas Free Play simply lets you brush up on your skills.

One bad thing about the app is the fact that your floor must be perfectly clean in order for the app to work right. Before playing for the first time, the app warns you of this and somehow meters how clean your floor is, not quite sure how it does this but whatever. I have noticed that only on some floors does the app register my kick. On some it will ignore my foot and the app simply won’t work. This would have to be the one and only problem I have with the app.

This app is great for showing to friends [If you can get it working right!] and costs only $0.90 in the Apple App Store.

Do I recommend this app? Yes!

Have you noticed this? Apple, the company known for their beautiful, high quality packaging seems to be skimping on the boxes for their flagship product, the iPhone. Let’s take a look.

Contents of the origional iPhone’s box:

• iPhone
• Stereo Headset
• Dock
• Dock Connector to USB Cable
• USB Power Adapter
• Documentation
• Cleaning/polishing cloth
• SIM Ejector Tool

Here’s what’s in the iPhone 4′s box:

• iPhone 4
• Apple Earphones with Remote and Mic
• Dock Connector to USB Cable
• USB Power Adapter
• Documentation

What’s missing in the iPhone 4′s box?

• Dock (Now being sold for an extra $29.99)
• Cleaning/polishing cloth
• SIM Ejector tool

Why is Apple doing this? What’s going to be missing next year?

The iPhone 4 has to be one of the most popular products of the year, up there with the iPad. Today I’m going to both tell you about my buying experience and give you an un-biased review.

I woke up at about 5 a.m. the day of the iPhone 4′s launch and walked over to my neighborhood Apple Store. As I had already pre-ordered the phone, I didn’t expect there to be that long of a line. But boy, was I wrong. By 6:45 a.m. (before the store was even open) the line stretched way out of view of the store. I stood in line for a few hours. My dad called at about 8:45 to remind me that I had a 9 a.m. doctor’s appointment. I left the line that I had already waited in for two hours to go to my appointment. I got back at about 10 a.m. and got straight back in line. The line ended on the other side of the mall and the Apple Store employees warned us that there was a 4-5 hour wait. After about seven hours of standing around and listing to Leo Laporte’s “This Week In Tech” podcast I finally made it to the front of the line. I purchased the phone and got the heck out of that mall.

So that was a breif summary of my buying experience. Now, let’s start the review now, shall we?

Hardware

Unlike the 3G S, the iPhone 4 brings many new hardware features to the table including the new design with the metal band, the front facing camera, the A4 chip and the 5MP camera with flash. The iPhone 4 feels a lot sturdier and less fragile then the previous iPhones, the 3G and the 3G S. Also, the glass in the iPhone 4 is said to be less fragile than the glass in previous iPhones.

Camera

The camera in the iPhone 4 is stunning. It takes 5MP pictures and records 720p video. It absolutely blows away the cameras in the iPhone 3G and 3G S.

Here are some sample photos taken with the iPhone 4: (Click to enlarge)

A4 Chip

Even though the frequency of the new A4 Chip is still unknown, it sure does increase the speed and power of the new iPhone. As you can see here, the new processor makes the new iPhone 4 a lot snappier than the iPhone 3G.

Retina Display

One great new feature of the iPhone 4 is the Retina Display and the higher resolution. Steve Jobs pointed out at the announcement of the iPhone 4 that the pixel density of the new phone is so high the human eye can’t even recognize the pixels from the average viewing distance; however, there has been some debate as to weather or not this is true.

The Antenna Issue

As of today, June 29, 2010, the issue with the iPhone 4′s new antenna has still not been fixed. When holding the iPhone in the bottom left corner the cell signal drops dramatically. As of now, the only way to fix this is to use a case such as Apple’s Bumper case or to simply hold it differently.

Software

Multitasking (Fast App Switching)

One of the biggest features of iOS 4 (Previously known as iPhone OS 4) is multitasking. I think multitasking on the iPhone 4 is great; however, most iPhone apps in the App Store right now do not support it. Even though it works with out-of-the box apps and around a dozen third-party apps from the App Store, the fact that Apple gave developers little time to update their apps to support iOS 4 and the iPhone 4 really kills the feature. Overall, the feature has a lot of potential and could become quite useful once developers update their apps.

Mail: Unified Inbox

One of the downsides with the Mail application before iOS 4 was that you had to go back in the menus quite a bit to change inboxes. Now, just like Mac OS X’s Mail application, you can view e-mails from all your accounts in one inbox.

Folders

As Folders are not the biggest feature in iOS 4, they are still welcome. Folders are a great way to simply clean up your homescreen. Until iOS 4, there was no simple way to do this so people like me with over a hundred apps would have to scroll from page to page to find the app they wanted. Now, you can keep your homescreen nice and tidy with folders

Custom Homescreen Wallpaper

Finally, Apple lets you change your homescreen wallpaper! Jailbreakers have had this option for years, now Apple decides to catch on.

iMovie for iPhone

No, iMovie is not included in iOS 4, neither is it free. It costs $4.99 and it’s available in the App Store for iPhone 4 only. I downloaded it right after picking up my iPhone and I have to say, it’s not all that great. It’s basically a really, really skimmed down version of iMovie ’09 for Mac OS X. Unless you are BIG into movie editing on your iPhone 4 you might as well sync your iPhone with your computer and edit it on there.

Rating

Overall, I have to give the iPhone 4 a 4.25/5 stars because of the antenna issue. Once Apple fixes this, I will give the phone a perfect score, 5/5 stars.

What do you think? Do you have a iPhone 4? Are you getting an iPhone 4?

Along with Safari 5 came a nice little feature, extensions. Extensions allows developers to make little modifications/additions to Safari and then let people download them like they would an application. Today, I am going to be telling you my top five favorite Safari Extensions.

You may need some help enabling Safari Extensions. Click here. Also, make sure you’ve installed the new Safari 5 before trying to turn extensions on!

Gmail Checker

Gmail Checker places a little button with a mail icon in Safari’s toolbar next to the address bar. The little red notification dot appears when you have new emails in your Gmail inbox. This extension is great for power users who use Gmail for email.

Google Reader Snow Leopard

Google Reader Snow Leopard basically changes the feel of the Google Reader UI to match the Snow Leopard UI. It makes google Reader look like Mail or iTunes except that It’s still on the web.

GReader-Checker

Like Gmail Checker, GReader-Checker checks Google Reader for new articles and displays how many unread articles are waiting for you in Google Reader. It places a little button by the Safari address bar with the RSS icon. When you have unread articles waiting for you, the little red dot will again appear.

Add to Google Reader

Have you ever noticed Safari’s little RSS button right by the refresh button when reading a blog? Typically, that button will take you to Safari’s RSS reader and display that website’s RSS feed. With this extension, instead of taking you to Safari’s reader, it will take you to Google Reader where you can subscribe to the feed.

Q-URL

You go to dozens if not hundreds of websites a day. You don’t have much time but you don’t want to have to keep bookmarking sites you want to read later. This is where Q-URL comes in! When there’s a link that you want to save for later, you just simply right click it and add it to your queue of links waiting to be visited. When you do have time and oyu want to visit the links that you have queued up, simply click the Q button next to your Safari address bar.

What are your favorite Safari extensions? Click here, here, or here to get more information on Safari Extensions!

Do you like saving time? Do you find yourself typing the same thing over and over again on a daily basis? Why not try TextExpander for Mac? TextExpander is a Mac application which allows you to give it some text that you routinely type and then set an abbreviation for the text. For example, say I always type “CPAley’s Tech Blog”. I could set it so that when I type bblog it automatically takes bblog and replaces it with “CPAley’s Tech Blog”.

TextExpander has to be one of the best productivity apps out there. It’s more of a tool than an application. If you have multiple computers, you can even synchronize TextExpander though either MobileMe iDisk or through Dropbox. One thing TextExpander is good for is email signatures. If you want an easy way to add an email signature in an email, you can just make a new snippet for it. Another way to utilize TextExpander is to create snippets for words you misspell often. As an example, when typing “Hey”, sometimes I accidentally type “hry”. So what I did was made a snippet and set the abbreviation as “hry and the snippet content “Hey”.

TextExpander can save you a lot of time. It even tells you how much time you have saved with a nice little stats window.

You can also purchase an iPhone version of TextExpander from the App Store for $1.99. However, that is not what I am reviewing.

Overall, I have to say that it takes a week or so to really get some use out of this application. Right out of the box, it’s not going to appear like the most useful thing. After a while though, chances are you will be using it often like I do.

I thank the wonderful people over SmileOnMyMac for sending me a review copy of this sweet little application!

Extra extra, read all about it! The new iPhone is finally here! No, it’s not called the iPhone 4G nor is it called iPhone HD. It’s simply called.. iPhone 4. In this post I am going to be telling you what I think about the new iPhone and why I’m thinking about buying it.

This is big. Guys, when the first iPhone came out it was lacking so many features including 3G wireless networking, Multitasking, Cut, Copy, and paste, and a front facing camera. With iPhone 4 and iOS 4 most of the expectations are being met. Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone has been a great phone from the start, It has just been lacking some features. Fortunately, most of those features have now made their way to the iPhone.

Two birds with one stone. Think about it. You take your iPhone everywhere, and unless you’re a serious photographer, you’re not going to be carrying a big, bulky camera around everywhere. iPhone 4 has a five megapixel camera and it records HD 720p video. Of course, only a few people have actually used the new iPhone’s camera, but if it’s as good as they say it is, this is a game changer. Even better, you will be able to fully edit your video right on your iPhone with the iMovie app that will be available for $4.99 in the App Store.

A4 processor + Multitasking. The reason that I’ve grouped theese two features together is because in my opinion, they go hand and hand. I’m excited to see how the A4 chip will make multitasking. How many apps will we be able to have open? If it’s as fast as the iPad, then it should work pretty well.

Will I buy one? YES! Yes! Yes! I really don’t think we’ve seen this amount of features in an iPhone update before. When Apple says that iPhone 4 is the best thing since the original iPhone, I don’t think they’re kidding.

What do you think? Will you be buying an iPhone 4? Why or why not?

Read my review of the iPhone 4 here!

There has been a lot of buzz over rumors that Apple will announce a new Apple TV at WWDC on June 7th. Engadget has posted that It has heard news from “a source very close to Apple” that an Apple TV update is coming. In this post I will be going over some of the featurtes of the rumored Apple TV as well as giving my opinion.

Some of the features of the rumored Apple TV update are:

• Smaller, iPhone like design.
• 1080p video.
• Cloud storage.
• Lower price point; $99.
• Runs on iPhone OS 4.
• Runs on Apple’s A4 CPU.

I find some of these new features really interesting. To start, It’s pretty weird how it will run on iPhone OS 4 as it’s a touchscreen operating system. How is this going to work on a TV? How is Apple going to add 1080p video to a device the size of an iPhone? I guess that’s why they’ll include the A4 chip.

One bad thing about the update it that it will only have 16 gigabytes of storage opposed to the 160GB in the previous model. I’m assuming that this is where the cloud storage comes in.

I’m excited to see what Apple announces at WWDC. We know that they’ll announce a new iPhone, but will they also announce a new Apple TV or will they wait for their iPod event?

What do you think? Will Apple refresh the Apple TV anytime soon? Will you buy one? Do you already own an Apple TV?

Do you like to take screenshots? What do you do with the screenshot after you take it? Do they  just sit there on your desktop feeling all lonely and unused? Why don’t you share them!

That’s where ScreenGrab for Mac comes in. ScreenGrab has something a little different from the built-in screenshot taking keyboard shortcut in Mac OS X.What makes ScreenGrab different is that it gives you the option to have your screenshots automatically named and uploaded to your website via FTP.

ScreenGrab has other nice features including automatically shortening the url of the image, open in web browser after upload, delete local copy after upload, and many more.

Overall, ScreenGrab is a great free application that I find myself using often. If you like taking screenshots of interesting things on your screen and uploading them, I highly recommend this application.

Calling all chatters! The official IRC channel of CPAley’s Tech Blog is now up. If you don’t know what IRC is, it stands for Internet Relay Chat. Look it up on Wikipedia.

There are two ways to connect to our new IRC channel:

With a IRC client: connect to: irc.thenerdtv.com. Port: 6667. Channel: #Colby

Without an IRC client: point your web browser to http://cpaleytech.com/chat

Have fun!