Way back, one of our readers begged for an iPhone LoJack solution. He wanted his iPhone to “call home” regularly in case of loss or, let’s be more realistic, theft. Over the past week, I finally had a chance to give this request some time, and I put together findme. It’s a command-line program that returns the location of the cell phone tower nearest to your iPhone.

read it here tuaw.com

Here’s a life-changing tip for iPhone owners from physics professor Richard Muller:

Dear David,

One feature I really miss on my iPhone is a feature of my old cellphone: “vibrate THEN ring.” I like to sit in a meeting and feel the vibration, get up and leave with nobody knowing why. But sometimes I am walking or otherwise active, and I don’t feel the vibrate; sometimes I have left the phone recharging, and I don’t feel the vibrate. So what I really miss is 10 seconds of vibration followed by a loud ring.

read it here pogue.blogs.nytimes.com

One of the more useful Mac OS X utilities for interacting with the iPhone, iPhoneDrive, has been renamed “MegaPhone” and now includes the ability to send text files, PDFs, or Word files to the iPhone Notes application for reading and editing directly on the device.

read it here iphoneatlas.com

Apple has updated its Knowledge Base article titled “How to verify iPhone hardware is working correctly” with information about liquid damage.

The iPhone has an indicator at the base of its headphone jack that is normally white.

read it here iphoneatlas.com

Happy Friday! We head into the weekend with a new roundup of iPhone tips and iPod touch tricks submitted by you, the most dedicated readers of Touchip. Don’t forget to share your own tip with us, or post them directly to our iPhone and iPod touch forums.

read it here touchtip.com

Low and/or fluctuating signal strength collectively represent one of the most frustrating issues affecting iPhone owners. It can cause poor reception, dropped calls and other afflictions. The problem can be exacerbated by firmware updates, as recent reports have shown.

read it here iphoneatlas.com

iPhone/iPod touch web site Springlets adds quick search bookmarklets to your device’s home screen for commonly searched sites like Wikipedia, IMDB, and a handy Google I’m Feeling Lucky search, among others.

read it here lifehacker

You say your iPhone seems to be on the fritz—that when you make a call you can’t hear a word anyone on the other end of the line speaks? Although I’ve addressed this issue at iPhone Central, given that, in the past week, both a colleague and reader have queried me for a solution to the problem, it’s time to give that solution wider play right here.

read it here macworld

Occasionally your iPhone or iPod touch starts syncing when you connected it to your Mac only to drop out of the sync process. Even worse, once the cycle stops, it continues every time you plug your handheld in. This fix is fairly easy, but you won’t find it in iTunes.

read it here macobserver

It’s undeniable that the iPhone is indeed loaded with a lot of new exciting features. One of the latest innovations when it comes to Apple iPhone is the use of a virtual QWERTY keyboard rather than a physical keyboard. This is coupled with a multi touch screen display.

Apple wanted to make everyone excited with the release of the iPhone. Nevertheless, users can get most fun using it since there are a lot of tricks that you can do with its keyboard.

read it here iphonisms

This mod allows you to show off your background like you could on 1.1.2 by using Dock. To the best of my knowledge, Dock doesn’t work in 1.1.3 anymore With a little tinkering with webclips I’ve stumbled on a way to achieve the same results. Now I just flick left or right to access my icons, and when done I just slide my springboard back to the center screen which I keep blank.

read it here everythingicafe

I spent some time today figuring out how to configure my iPhone to work with AppRiver’s IMAP service. It is better than POP3 because you have access to any sub-folders that you create under your inbox from Entourage/Outlook.

read it here chadalderson

I can’t tell you the number of readers who have written in asking for a stand-alone iPhone Contacts Application. It’s not something that I particularly was trying to solve for myself (I don’t mind tapping Phone then Contacts) but this morning, I stumbled on a simple way to accomplish this on your 1.1.3 iPhone.


read it here tuaw

I hate it when someone SMSes me, and I miss the vibration, and I go for hours without checking my phone. Thus I created SMSNotify, a script that vibrates your iPhone every 15 seconds when you have an unread SMS.

read it here cre.ations.net

This is a small “application” that allows you to use the iPhone as remote for an AppleTV device.
It looks like this:


read it here picpoc.ro

iPhone 1.1.3 firmware allows you to put icons on your home screen for websites, but many of us want to put phone numbers on there for a Speed Dial screen. iPhone developer, Nate True put a little hack together that lets you have a (somewhat) speedy speed dial icon. There’s no jailbreaking required for this one - it can all be done using Apple-approved Web Clip creation.

read it here multicellphone

Adam Gershowitz, an assistant professor at the South Texas College of Law, raises an interesting point about the iPhone and similarly tricked-out mobile devices: If the police stop you and find some legal cause to arrest you, they are probably free, under judicial interpretations of the Fourth Amendment, to search the device.

read it here salon

While the iPhone still doesn’t support Exchange-sans-IMAP, Apple has posted a Knowledge Base document explaining how to set up a corporate mail server for IMAP so that you can use iPhone to retrieve your email from that server.

read it here iphoneatlas

We’ve been following SeeqPod for a while as the company has honed its music search engine, which lets you play the internet’s hidden music on your computer, IPhone, or iPod Touch.

read it here wired

I spent the first half of this week in Belgium showing off some cool projects from work, arrived home last night to find that David and Kieran had painstakingly compiled the proper formats for Irish phone numbers, including internationally formatted mobiles … you know, +353876502582 becomes +353 (87) 650 2582.

read it here dogg.ie

Some users have been getting frustrated with the low sound volume of their iPhone speakers… very, very frustrated.

We’ve already told you how to increase the volume of the ringtone, but what if that’s still not enough?

read it here iphonealley

Foolhardy, adventurous, or otherwise unlucky enough to attempt to update an unlocked iPhone, resulting in its untimely demise? Have you been staring at you iBrick with longing regret for a functioning iPhone?

read it here intomobile

At Macworld, one of the speciality programs was a lecture series called iPhone Supersession given by Ben Long and Christopher Breen.
The iPhone Supersession takes you way beyond the basics, exploring areas including converting the media you own to an iPhone compatible format, contact and event organization, the best of Web-based iPhone applications and accessories, and power management. Need more? We’ll explore popular (and not so popular) hacks for turning your iPhone into a portable entertainment and information powerhouse.

read it here macrumors

This is one of those completely useless but cool things that one figures out when one is spending far too much time trying to do something else and not accomplishing it. In my case, I’m trying to figure out how to force an iPod touch or iPhone to load a backup set.

read it here tuaw

iPhone 1.1.3, being perhaps the most significant software/firmware update for the device yet, is causing the biggest troubleshooting headaches of any release yet. Users are experiencing a range of issues, and we’ve discovered some effective fixes:

read it here iphoneatlas