Category Archives: iPhone

iPhone

Dec
19
2012

EA Sale – Fifa 13 for only £0.69p

Filed under , , by

Electronic Arts currently have an iOS sale on at the moment, 55 games with up to 90% off. The highlight for me is Fifa 13 being £0.69p

Here is just a few of the iPhone apps that are £0.69p
Battlefield:Bad Company 2
Fifa 13
Need for Speed Most Wanted
Word Smack
The Sims 3

and a few iPad apps again that are £o.69p
Battlefield:Bad Company 2 for iPad
Command & Conquer Red Alert for iPad
Fifa 13
MADDEN NFL 12 by EA SPORTS™ For iPad
Need for Speed Most Wanted
Word Smack

This is just a selection of the many games that have been reduced. Got to love the EA iOS sales 🙂
Electronic Arts

Aug
02
2012

Olloclip Lens for iPhone

I have had the Olloclip iPhone Lens for quite sometime now and I never ceased to be amazed at the quality of the photos that this little lens can produce with the iPhone 4S. Priced at a reasonable £59.99 this lens kit comprises of the following :

  • Macro Lens which applies roughly a 10X multiplier and allows you to focus the iPhone within 12-15mm of the subject
  • Wide Angle Lens with cover which gives you approximately double the field of view of the normal iPhone.
  • Fisheye Lens with cover which gives you 180 Degree field-of-view
  • A nice little bag to store them in

20120802-110324.jpg

To use the fisheye lens you simply slide it over your iPhone with the larger lens covering your camera, to use the wide-angle simply switch it around. However, to use the Macro lens you need to unscrew the wide-angle lens from the Olloclip. This is where the bag comes in handy, once you have unscrewed the wide angle lens simply pop it in the bag and store it securely whilst you take your photos.

A couple of things to note is that due to the design of the lens it cannot be used with any case which to be quite frank that’s understandable. It fits snugly onto your iPhone 4/4S so that it won’t drop off and secondly it cannot be used with the flash on, well it can but you get reflections of itself, see below 😉

I recently read that you can remove the Fish Eye lens from the Olloclip by twisting it as if you were unscrewing it. However, I didn’t dare try it and well, to be honest although I rarely use the Fish Eye lens I would rather it remain attached lol.

All in all this is a cracking little lens and I would highly recommend it.

Check out some of the images I have taken with the Olloclip Lens for iPhone below, take a look at the Flickr Group and feel free to comment with links to your photo gallery either on Flickr or elsewhere.

Keeping Look Out
A fly on a dandelion, no edits using iPhone 4s and the Macro lens.
Keeping look out

Rocks of coffee
Instant Coffee granules on a spoon. iPhone 4S with Macro lens
Rocks of Coffee

Are you lost
iPhone 4S with Fisheye lens attached

Are you lost?

Another Charm
iPhone 4S with macro lens attached
Another Charm

Meeting of ladybirds
Again another iPhone 4S with macro lens shot
Meeting of LadyBirds

Pretty impressive eh! To see the difference between with and without the wide angle lens I took two photos in the same spot, as you can see the wide angle lens provides quite a significant jump in the visible area, with obvious distortions though.

Stadium of light WITHOUT lens
Stadium of Light

Stadium of light WITH wide angle lens
Stadium of Light Wide Angle

Stadium of light with fish eye lens
Fish Eye

Example of macro with flash on

20120802-102629.jpg

Example of wide angle with flash on, guess I need to clean the lens eh!

20120802-102853.jpg

 

Aug
09
2011

My experience with Three

Back in September of last year I posted an entry asking if 3 was better than 2. After testing with a MiFi since then I decided that Three probably was better than O2 so took the plunge and moved my iPhone number to them.

Rather than put myself into a long term contract I selected the £15 per month Sim Only option which more than covers my needs.

  • 300 any network minutes
  • 3000 texts
  • 1GB internet
  • 1 month rolling contract

I have to say that out and about the service was great, internet tethering was fantastic and download speeds were pretty much not far off my broadband speed 😮 I was very happy indeed.

However, the signal I got at home (where I spend a lot of time) was far from ideal. One bar was pretty much all I was provided with and the phone frequently went from 1 bar to No Service. A tweet about it resulted in a tweet from Three who tried to help me out, ultimately I needed to call customer services in order to discuss the issue.

Customer services immediately put me through to the “iPhone team” who advised me restore the phone  to factory defaults – well I did that but it made no difference at all. The customer service team then advised me to test the connection in several other locations and that if that still failed then I would have to take it to Apple as it would be a handset fault!.

Again, out and about it was great but indoors it was diabolical. Now to be fair to Three, the locations I tested O2 don’t always have a 3G connection but if they don’t it will go to an Edge or GPRS signal so at least I won’t lose signal and be unable to make calls. This is where Three fails to hit the mark for me.

The last straw for me was when my wife tried to call me when I was visiting relatives. My daughter was badly hurt but even though I had one bar it failed to connect the call and she had to call me via my brothers mobile.

After checking out alternatives I decided to go with Giff Gaff (Referral Link). As it runs on the O2 network, I know it’s coverage so can be assured that, apart from when being at the Stadium of Light, I will get a signal when I need to. I am only a couple of weeks using Giff Gaff but so far it’s been great  and it’s also incredibly priced £10 per month gives me 250 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited internet usage! (though does need to be set up for Internet and MMS usage – more on that on my next post).

Although I have lost tethering I still have a Three MiFi which I will use from time to time when I don’t have a 3G connection on Giff Gaff or when I need to connect my laptop to the internet when out and about.

Thinking about joining Giff Gaff? Click this referral link, you will get a free sim with free £5 credit and I will get some referral points 😉

Get a free Giffgaff Sim

Sep
21
2010

Is 3 better than 2?

Since the original Apple iPhone came out back in 2007 I have always been with O2.

Having signed up for a 18 Month contract with the Original iPhone I was over the moon with O2 when they allowed me to upgrade to the iPhone 3G when it was released by Apple and duly purchased the iPhone 3G and more recently the awesome iPhone 4. In the beginning every thing was fine, 3G internet access, calls, text everything worked perfectly.

However, things started to go wrong last year with O2. Their 3G network was terrible for internet access whenever I was at the football. What I could not understand was why one season it was ok and the next it wasn’t  so blamed it on a combination of the Stadium of Light and O2! After asking my followers on twitter who they were using and their experiences I discovered a bit of a pattern :

O2 – Woeful once at the Stadium
Orange – Not as bad but does fail
Vodafone – As Orange
Three – No feedback
T Mobile – No feedback

So I guess that there were simply too many people in one location for the mobile operators to cope with.

Recently on twitter a couple of people had mentioned a Three MiFi and how they use it as an alternative connection to O2 as they could get a better connection whilst on the road or wanted an internet connection for their iPad whilst out of range of a WiFi network.

As I have not been happy with O2 for sometime due to their connectivity problems I decided to purchase a PAYG MiFi from Three in order to trial the Three network and see what it’s like compared to O2. After checking the pricing I opted to buy a MiFi with 3Gb data which lasts 3 months on PAYG, and costs £69.99, so that I can “trial” the Three network and see what it is like. I also used topcashback.co.uk (referral link) to get £12.00 off the cost.

MiFi

For those which don’t know what a MiFi is it’s basically a 3G dongle with built in WiFI, this clever little device allows up to 5!! devices to share a 3G connection on the Three mobile network. You can either get the MiFi on a 12 month contract or on a PAYG basis.

As you can see from the information above the MiFi on Three is MUCH better than O2’s network on my iPhone. I suspect that the O2 network simply cannot cope with the the massive increase in smart phones, be it Apple iPhone’s, Andriod driven phones or even those strange Windows driven things 😉

So far in my testing the Three network seems far superior to O2’s and once my contract expires in June 2011 I will be migrating to Three with my next iPhone!

Sep
23
2009

TomTom? More like LOST TOM!

On two recent trips I decided to use TomTom for iPhone instead of my standard TomTom and very stupidly I left my my standard unit at home.

Driving around Edinburgh it was losing GPS signal, putting me on roads no where near I was and lagging so badly behind that it was really difficult to take the right turnings when they were really close together. We resorted to using Google Maps to route ourselves to our destination.

Obviously the limitation is with the iPhone rather than with TomTom hence them saying you need to have the car kit WHICH YOU CANNOT BUY YET!

Really wish I had not bought this, I feel ripped off and will be firing off an email to them as they simply should not have released this without the car kit.