Bibliophiles take notice! If you have eBook files on your PC or Mac, chances are you can read them on your iPhone or iPod touch.
All you need is Stanza installed both on your iPhone/iPod and your computer, a wireless network and Stanza-compatible eBooks.
Interested? Take a look at our latest iPhone tutorial: How to Transfer eBooks to the iPhone to Read in Stanza
If you’ve had a computer die, a hard drive fail, for if you’ve just accidentally erased a music file or folder on your PC or Mac, you know it can be very frustrating (and expensive) to get your music collection back to its former glory. And, if you’re an iPhone owner, perhaps the most annoying aspect of the situation is knowing that your music and/or video files are locked away on your iPhone, kept from being copied back to your computer because Apple has locked down the content.
But your music and video files aren’t as much a prisoner of your iPhone or iPod as you might think; there are software tools which allow users to copy their music or videos from an iPhone or iPod back to a Windows PC or Mac with a few clicks of the mouse.
In our latest help article, we show you the tools that make copying music from an iPhone or iPod to a Windows PC or Mac as simple as pie.
Read: How to Get Music, Videos Off Your iPhone & Onto Your PC or Mac
One of the least talked about features of iTunes 9 is its new “Organize Library” tool, which tidies up your iTunes library contents with a more ordered folder system. If you’re like us, the more organized your files can be, the better, so here’s the Organize Library function in a nutshell.
On a PC or a Mac: Open iTunes 9 and go to File > Library > Organize Library. From this selection, you’ll get a small window with two options: Consolidate Files and Upgrade to iTunes Media Organization.
Consolidate Files takes all of the media files in your iTunes library (wherever they may be on your hard drive or drives) and copies them to a single folder/subfolder setup, while leaving copies of the files in their original locations.
The Upgrade to iTunes Media Organization option reorganizes your iTunes Music folder with separate folders for music, movies, podcasts, audiobooks, etc., making your iTunes folder structure a bit less of a nightmare to wade through should you need to find a file outside of iTunes.
Whether or not you use iTunes to automatically sync with your iPhone or iPod, we recommend all users have iTunes keep their music files organized. Not only does it make specific files easier to find, it also makes complete, library-wide backups of your iTunes database and media files a snap; you simply backup a single folder (and its sub-folders), and you’re backed-up and worry-free.
If you’ve ever tried syncing your iPhone with a different computer, you already know Apple only permits the iPhone to sync with one computer at a time; to sync with a different computer, you have to wipe your iPhone and begin again. This is mostly an aggravation during normal use, but what if you’re moving to a new PC or Mac, or need to format (erase) your hard drive and re-install the OS? How do you keep from having to erase your iPhone and create a new iTunes partnership?
The answer is to move your iTunes configuration files from your old computer to your new computer. This works on both Windows PCs and Macs, and with just a few simple steps, you can backup your iTunes configuration files (and even your entire iTunes music and video library), and then restore the files on a new computer for uninterrupted syncing.
In our latest tutorial series, we’ll show you how to backup and restore your iTunes library so that your iPhone will place nice with the new system or OS installation.
We’re always looking for new and interesting ways of using the iPhone, and some of the most important tools in our kit are utilities – not utilities that run on the iPhone itself, but those that run within Windows or the Mac OS and allow us to do more with the iPhone.
But these tools (often popular and sometimes obscure) can be hard to find, so we’re building a new page that will become a one-stop shop for PC and Mac iPhone software tools and utilities.
Take a look at what we’ve put together so far, tell us what you like and recommend tools and utilities that we haven’t included on the list.
There are several situations where one might need a silent ringtone for the iPhone — the most recent being use of the new Google Voice service.
There are a handful of iPhone apps — GV Mobile, VoiceCentral, GVdialer — which allow you to dial out using your Google Voice phone number (you can also dial from the web interface). However, when using Google Voice to make an outgoing call, an incoming call to the iPhone begins each connection. If you don’t want your iPhone to ring during this incoming call, you can create a contact for your Google Voice number and assign it a silent ringer.
Unfortunately, there is no such ringtone included on the iPhone, so we’ve created a very small file (12kb) you can download and use.
Just download the ringtone file (SilentRing.m4r), connect your iPhone via iTunes and drag-and-drop the file to the iPhone section on the left-hand side of the iTunes window. The silent ringtone will now be an available option for specific contacts or as the default ringtone from the Settings > Sounds menu.
Geohot’s purplera1n iPhone 3GS jailbreaking utility has been getting a lot of attention lately; the software appeared quickly following the release of the latest iPhone and was just updated over the weekend to include a new Mac OS version.
In addition to jailbreaking the iPhone 3GS, you can also reportedly use the hugely-popular Ultrasn0w to unlock a purplera1n-ed iPhone 3GS.
As always, jailbreak and unlock iPhones with caution – Apple is always working to undo these unofficial hacks and there’s no way to tell what future OS upgrades will do to altered iPhones.
When the iPhone 3GS was announced, iPhone 3G users where told they’d have to pay $399 or $499 to upgrade. The 3G came out in July of 2008, and since AT&T requires users to be at least a year into their contract to qualify for upgrade pricing, if you owned a 3G, you had to pay full price or wait. But on June 17, AT&T changed its iPhone 3GS upgrade policy for iPhone 3G early adopters (those who bought a 3G in July, August or September of 2008) reducing the price by 50% and making the upgrade much more enticing.
Upgraders who ordered the 3GS through AT&T before the change were issues a credit for the difference at the AT&T store, but those who pre-ordered through the Apple Store were told they’d have to wait for Apple to go through the orders, sort out who was eligible for the reduced pricing, and issue a credit for the difference (about $200).
Today I spoke with an Apple Store rep who told me Apple is still sorting through pre-orders to determine eligibility. She said the process will take several more days and that Apple hopes to have credits issued soon. Those eligible for the revised upgrade pricing will receive an email from Apple as soon as eligibility has been established.
So, if you ordered a 3GS from Apple at the $399 or $499 price and fall into the iPhone 3G early-adopter range and meet the requirements for the credit, you should be hearing from them via email soon. If you don’t receive an email by next week, you should contact Apple Customer Support at 1-800-676-2775.
If you have received, or do receive, your Apple credit, please let us know by posting in the comments. We want to stay on top of this.
When you were a kid, you probably took things apart to see how they worked. Some of us grow out of this phase, but luckily not all.
The folks at RapidRepair have gotten their hands on one of the first iPhone 3G S units to go on sale, and they’ve done what any self-respecting techie would do – rip it apart. And, by “rip,” we of course mean methodically and carefully disassembled it.
Their work has yielded not only some interesting photographs, but definitive information on the components used to build Apple’s newest smartphone. The site was able to confirm the unit’s SoC, the Samsung S5PC100 (PDF), its memory chips, etc., and have created a handy comparison chart that displays component details for the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G S and Palm Pre.
via EngadgetMobile
Hotmail – or as it’s now called Windows Live Hotmail – has never worked with the iPhone. Users with @hotmail.com or @live.com email addresses could not configure the iPhone to check their email because Hotmail did not offer POP3 or IMAP support. If you had an iPhone and a Hotmail account, you’d have to use Safari to log into the webmail system and grab a nearby magnifying glass.
Happily, this is no longer the case! Microsoft has added POP3 support for Hotmail, meaning that iPhone users can now set their smartphones to work with Hotmail. Best of all, our test iPhone and iPhone 3G had no problem automatically downloading the configuration details (POP server, SMTP server, SSL settings etc.) when adding a Hotmail account in the iPhone’s Settings menu. There’s no Push support, sadly, but you can set the iPhone to fetch Hotmail every 15, 30 or 60 minutes.
If your iPhone doesn’t play nice when you attempt to add your Windows Live Hotmail account, here are the manual settings:
POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25)
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes
