I use my phone mainly for email and at a distant second actual phone calls.  I occasionally check Twitter but that’s about it.  After my upgrade to iOS 4.0 my iPhone 3G became unusably slow; long pauses switching between screens, loading screens, accepting calls.  I received an incoming call and when it finally showed up the call timer showed 18 seconds.  Painful.

With the iOS 4.1 update my phone feels responsive; it’s hard to say how it compares to iOS 3.X since it’s been a while since I upgraded.  Screens transition reasonably fast and there are no noticeable delays.  If you have an iPhone 3G upgrade to iOS 4.1 right away.

On reboot I again connected my iPhone and was prompted to install the new OS.  It first started a backup of my phone and I waited for it to advance.  And waited some more: I gave it an hour and nothing was happening.  I checked my resources and iTunes.exe was taking 90-95% CPU utilization but there was no disk activity.

This was happening on Windows 7 Professional x64 and I had read about issues with iTunes and 64 Windows 7 so I hit the internet and chased down searches.  I found this thread that suggested ending the MDCrashReporter.exe process: tried it but the backup was still just sitting there.  Since I was at a standstill I also stopped the applemobiledevicehelper.exe process: suddenly everything started progressing and my OS update completed without issue.  I would have liked to try it again and only stop applemobiledevicehelper.exe but that wasn’t possible, plus I was happy to be done and didn’t want to mess with success.

I’ve had my iPhone 3G for about six weeks now and since the latest firmware update 2.1 I have a strange call issue.  The phone will ring, I’ll answer and the call will last about ten seconds before disconnecting.  It will continue happening for all calls: to correct the issue I have to turn off the iPhone and turn it back on.  Not just pressing the top power button to put the iPhone into sleep mode: actually powering it down.  Once powered back up everything returns to normal and continues to work properly for about ten days when the disconnected calls start again.  Let’s hope the next firmware update corrects this.

When confronted with a large selection I decided on something that would cover the iPhone completely, meaning a screen shield and a case.  Ultimately I decided on the Griffin FlexGrip case.

Since I had the white 16 GB iPhone a white case seemed like the way to g, but it’s available in quite a few colours.  I chose this case or three reasons: For $20 CDN it came with a screen shield and was textured to eliminate slipping either in my hand or on a surface.

The screen shield is covered front and back in a film of plastic: remove the one side, apply it to the screen and remove the other side.  Simple in theory but lots of adjusting to get it just right.

The textured silicone is one piece and you stretch it over the iPhone to get it in place.  It’s a good feel and gets the job done.  I find the sides bow out a bit but it’s certainly not a deal breaker.

Easy, cheap and cheerful: what’s not to like about the Griffin FlexGrip.

I’ve used every version of Small Business Server right up until the RC1 of SBS 2008: it was the only all around server product that Microsoft offered with wizards and hand holding that allowed you to have an active directory and Exchange for the small office environment.  I needed something that allowed email access from anywhere (OWA), easy remote connectivity and simple remote desktop connection, and basic file sharing.  SBS had these features from the get go and have added more wizards and simplification with each version, making it a must have product for my small office.

Unfortunately WHS turned that thinking on it’s ear with its outstanding backup, file sharing, remote access and easy storage handling.  It’s dirt cheap for what you get and I run the OEM version on decent server hardware.  I only ran the release candidate of SBS 2008 to see if they’d implemented the same outstanding backup from WHS, but they didn’t.

Windows Home Server did everything I needed except email serving.  Luckily I had solved that issue some time ago by using Gmail as my main email client through web or IMAP in Portable Thunderbird or Outlook.  I’ve had a domain for ten years now and have used 1&1 for web hosting most of that time.  Every email user should register a domain and at the very least use it for email: one ISP move and it’s paid for itself in lack of frustration.  I have my email account set up so it automatically forwards a copy to my Gmail account, which neatly filters out spam for me.  My ebabble domain email is set as the default address.  The only issue is in Outlook it shows my Gmail email address “on behalf of” my domain address, which really annoys me.  Gmail is accessible anywhere, even nicely implemented on my shiny new iPhone.

For those that need to run a mail server on WHS just use the built in POP and SMTP services built into Windows 2003: here’s an excellent walkthrough for Windows Server 2003 but if you remote desktop into WHS you can accomplish the same.