There are a number of tricks to upgrading an iPhone in the United States.  Most revolve around the fact that AT&T subsidizes the cost of new iPhones.  So your old iPhone may be worth as much or more than the cost of a new iPhone if you’re up for a two year renewal.

I’ve been lucky to have every model of iPhone break on me at least one time (except the 4 which hasn’t failed yet) and have every phone replaced by Apple.  My iPhone 3G broke twice.  The first was my now well-indexed bit on the white screen of death.  In the second phone, the sleep switch stopped working (a common problem with early iPhone 3G).  Technically, I’m on my fourth iPhone in just over two years.

The day before the iPhone 3GS launched (June 18th, 2009), I took my malfunctioning 3G to the Apple store downtown Boston.  Since it had been just under a year since I had bought the 3G, Apple replaced the phone and I had a brand new iPhone on my hands.  I ended up selling the 3G for about $380 to someone who wanted to unlock it and send it abroad. Since the new 32 GB iPhone 3GS  was only $300, I got the new phone and pocketed some cash for a screen protector and a Gela Skin.

Today, I did near the same thing with the 3GS.  I only had the 3GS break once on me. One day the device stopped booting properly and would not make it past the Apple logo no matter how many restores and resets I performed.  Since the phone was non-functional, I took it in only a month prior to the release of the iPhone 4, and got a brand new 3GS.

Here are some starter things that will go in your favor:

• If possible, always buy your iPhone from the biggest Apple store in town.  My experience is that Apple stores are best at taking back purchases from their own location.  I’ve heard of AT&T taking returns rejected by the Apple store but that’s not been my experience.
• Be on the upgrade cycle.  Get your contract to line up with the annual June release date for the new iPhone.  This is when the older gen iPhone is at its highest value used.
• Wait to return a partially working phone until just prior to the launch of a new iPhone.
• Make sure you have the new iPhone on reserve at the Apple store prior to the sale.
• List the iPhone on Craigslist, including the OS number and the baseband number.  These are found in the Settings -> General -> About page.  The baseband number is the modem***.  Make sure you use the words ‘unlocked’ and ‘jailbroken’ in the listing even if your iPhone is neither.  For example, “The phone is not unlocked or jailbroken.”  This will improve your  chances of showing up in results.
• Plan to meet the buyer near your target Apple store.
• Plan to have backup buyers in case the first fails to show up.
• Bring a small paperclip to the sale, so you can remove your SIM card.
• Remember to do a Settings -> Reset -> Reset All Data at the end of your sale. Do not give your phone away until you have wiped all data!

At one point I considered adding AppleCare, since that would extend the time the phone could be owner.  However my experience is that most people buying past generation iPhones are doing so to jailbreak and run on different carriers.  Apple will not return jailbroken phones, so Applecare and the secondary market for iPhones actually collide somewhat.

This guide is adapted from Dustin Caruso’s note on viewing source in Safari for the iPhone.

1. Visit this page using Safari on your iPad.

2. Use your touch selection skills to copy the following line of javascript:
javascript:var%20sourceWindow%20%3D%20window.open%28%27about%3Ablank%27%29%3B%20%0Avar%20newDoc%20%3D%20sourceWindow.document%3B%20%0AnewDoc.open%28%29%3B%20%0AnewDoc.write%28%27%3Chtml%3E%3Chead%3E%3Ctitle%3ESource%20of%20%27%20%2B%20document.location.href%20%2B%20%27%3C/title%3E%3C/head%3E%3Cbody%3E%3C/body%3E%3C/html%3E%27%29%3B%20%0AnewDoc.close%28%29%3B%20%0Avar%20pre%20%3D%20newDoc.body.appendChild%28newDoc.createElement%28%22pre%22%29%29%3B%20%0Apre.appendChild%28newDoc.createTextNode%28document.documentElement.innerHTML%29%29%3B
3. Tap  + then Add Bookmark

4. The first text field is the Title field. Use the title, View Source.   Leave the second field (the Address Field) alone and hit save.

5. Tap the Bookmarks icon and then edit.  Find View Source in the list and tap the right arrow for the bookmark’s details. Now tap the Address Field and hit the X icon to clear it. Tap and paste the javascript from the clipboard.

5. Tap the Bookmarks navigation item to save the changes.

Voila.  Go to any web page using Safari, tap the Bookmarks icon and hit View Source.  Safari will open a page of source code in plain text in a new window.

[Note: Since this entry was written, I have been releasing iPhone applications to the iTunes store.  You may be interested in checking out our iPhone and iPod Touch Applications. -rob]

Yesterday, however I had a serious problem with the phone.  I was at Rock the Bells in Mansfield, MA and reached for my phone only to find that it had a solid white screen.  It would not respond to the sleep or home button.  I tried the hard restart (reset), and it would go blank, then if I did it again, flash the white briefly.  I did the hard restart (10 seconds home and sleep) a few more times and got to the Apple logo.

The device then boot up normally to the home screen, however the moment it went to sleep it would not come back to life.  It would just be a dead screen.  I could get it to come back to the home screen again by doing multiple hard restarts (not every one was successful in getting to the Apple loading screen, sometimes holding the two buttons only resulted in a vibration) but even then it required multiple attempts. If I missed the home screen and it went to sleep then the process had to be repeated.

When I got home I plugged the device in and even though the screen was blank, my PC and iTunes would make the device vibrate briefly and see the device as working.  However, no combination of hard resets and plugging it into the USB would get things ‘back to normal.’  I should note that I did have enough power in the phone during the course of this white screen / sleep problem.  I could tell because on occasion when it would get to the home screen, it would show I had battery power left.

I went ahead and tried a restore of the device to factory settings, since iTunes was seeing it fine.  Then I went ahead and restored my backup.  Same problems, sleep state problem, white screen problem.  My final measure was to do yet another complete factory restore and see how the phone operated, i.e. was there something wrong with my previous settings such that it was causing the operational problems?

No.  Same problems.  I took it into the Apple store on Boylston downtown Boston this morning and a person at the Genius Counter replaced after a I provided a brief description. The Genius Counter technician did not spend any time troubleshooting / verifying them.  This leads me to believe that this could be a common enough problem that it is occurring in other phones i.e. a white screen / sleep state nonresponsive.

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I asked what might have been the problem and he seemed firm that it was a hardware issue and did not express any surprise.  He suggested that possibly there was something going wrong with the screen power.  I wasn’t going to argue with him, because I really just wanted to get my iPhone working again and was happy to have a brand new replacement.  But the glitched confused me because it seemed intermittent.  Why would the iPhone occassionally operate fine after boot but only then become unresponsive after sleep.

Another clue was that the tech also suggested that I set up the iPhone as a new phone rather than restore my backup, ‘just to be sure.’  This means that the tech felt there might have been something that had simply gone wrong in my backup.  I’d like to say that this was some variant of the “white screen of death” or some type of bug in the 2.0 firmware, but unfortunatly all I can do is speculate.

Perhaps the symptoms I described represent an unofficial known issue.  If it has been recognized as such a problem and is grounds for immediate replacement.  Or, perhaps Apple is just taking a pretty wide ranging returns.  I am a brand new Apple customer and the support experience was a good one.

I did do a fair amount of searching the web for solutions and troubleshooting prior to taking the phone in to an Apple store.  I found both this Howard’s Forums thread and this Apple Support Forum thread that described white screen problems that were different from mine.

You should know that when you swap out your iPhone for a new oneyou must set up your voicemail again.  I lost all of my old voicemails and had to re-record my greeting.  This is sort of a bummer.  Fortunately, my SMS messages and iPhone photos were a part of the iPhone backup, so all of those conversations were retained.

All audio and video files had to be re-synced and for whatever reason the restore removed a few of the iPhone applications I had installed, Google, Facebook and in my library.  A few applications were also not uninstalledremained including AIM and Tap Tap.  iTunes actually issued a warning dialog that Tap Tap could not be uninstalled / removed properly and gave a hex identifier for the error.

Finally, I did have a look at the iPhone crash recovery logs directory to look for any evidence of the problem I had all day yesterday.  Interestingly, there are no logs from July 26th, the day where the white screen / dead sleepstate problem occurred.  There are logs from when I tried syncing after midnight from Mediaserverd and MobileSafari.  I don’t see anything that suggests tracking of all the hard restarts I attempted throughout yesterday afteroon.  The last crash had bug_id 115.

If you have had a similar problem, feel free to post in the comments to share with the web.

Don’t forget to follow me on twitter.

I have been wanting to sync my Outlook 2007 calendar to my Blackberry Curve (8300) since I entered all of my Babson class data earlier in the semester. My Dell D630 came with Windows XP SP2 installed.  When I installed the Blackberry Desktop Manager 4.2 SP2 and chose the Connection Options I noticed that the Bluetooth sync options were greyed out (disabled) and inaccessible.

I did some searching around and found that for whatever reason, the Blackberry desktop manager’s Bluetooth sync is not compatible with any third party Bluetooth drivers. It turns out you must use XP’s native Bluetooth drivers in order to get the Desktop Manager Connection Settings to properly recognize that you have Bluetooth at all.

The fault lies squarely with Research In Motion (RIM) for not creating a desktop management solution that recognizes major Bluetooth drivers like Toshiba’s. I think that this shows that they clearly do not care about giving their customers an easy opportunity to sync their blackberry over Bluetooth.

If you configured it so when you bought it, your Dell D630 has a Bluetooth device built into the box. When Dell sets the computer up at the factory, they install Toshiba Bluetooth Stack drivers. From what I can tell, the reason Dell uses its own drivers is because they have extensions that control other hardware on the laptop. Specifically, the little LED that lights up the Bluetooth icon near the WiFi light on the laptop itself. Using the Toshiba driver, if you turn off the Bluetooth this light goes off. If you change it over to the Windows driver the light will stay on whether Bluetooth is enabled or not.

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This takes away a glance intelligence at your current battery consumption, and I have not determined how to power off Bluetooth to save battery life using the XP driver. So there is significant sacrifice in making this change, it may be that if syncing wirelessly is not very important to you, then you should simply keep the Toshiba drivers and keep a USB cable at home and at work so that you don’t have to mess around with Dell’s D630 native driver set.

A final note on this: The Blackberry application loader and media loader tools are not available over Bluetooth. So this means that setting up your Blackberry to sync over Bluetooth is only worthwhile if you need to be able to sync calendar, task and contact information frequently without being encumbered by a USB cable.
Ok, You still want to proceed? Keep reading.

I searched around on google and found some guides hidden away in Blackberry forums for setting up XP’s native BT drivers and ended up actually having some success, so I thought I’d regurgitate the process with the proper keywords so that some other poor soul with a Blackberry Curve (8300) or some other similar Blackberry device could save some heartache.

Before you begin, you should review the steps because they require you to edit a text file and uninstall a driver.
Here’s what I did:

1. Uninstall the Toshiba Bluetooth Driver or Stack using Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs. Yes this is scary, and no I don’t know how to reverse this if you mess it up. I just lept in, and so should you.If your sound is on you’ll hear the ba-doop sound of a USB device being disconnected. This is because the Bluetooth hardware inside the D630 (and probably the D830) is actually a hardwired USB device.You may also get a little balloon notification from Windows XP telling you that a hardware device is improperly configured. That is ok. It may ask you to fix this right away. Cancel any dialogs that come up asking you to search for new hardware drivers, you won’t find any and it will take a toll on your morale.
2. I did a restart at this point, you may not have to.
3. This is where it gets a little crazy and tricky. You actually have to edit a driver config file in order to get Windows to recognize the Bluetooth hardware. This is the only way that I was able to ascertain to do this, there is no easy way.
   You need to track down the bth.inf file (this is a text file) under the c:\windows\inf\ directory. I suggest you copy this to your desktop as a backup. Open the original (c:\windows\inf\bth.inf)
4. Inside this file about 1/4th of the way down you’ll find a section titled:;————- Device section – Start ———————–Inside there are a number of brands you may recognize in brackets such as Alps, Belkin, Broadcom, and in our case, Toshiba. For me this section started out looking like this:[Toshiba.NT.5.1]
   TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth= BthUsb, USB\Vid_0930&Pid_0502&Rev_1350
   TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth 2= BthUsb, USB\Vid_0930&Pid_0505
   TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth 3= BthUsb, USB\VID_0930&PID_0506
   TOSHIBA Bluetooth Adapter= BthUsb, USB\Vid_0930&Pid_0507This is actually incorrect data. The important part is the “BthUsb, USB\Vid_0930&Pid_0502&Rev_1350″ area in the first line. This needs to match up to data for your particular hardware.
5. To get your data you need to look at your hardware profiles, so right-click My Computer and choose Properties, then in System Properties choose the Hardware tab. Click the Device Manager Button.
6. About 3/4 of the way down the list will be a USB Device in conflict, it will be marked with a yellow exclamation mark you may recognize if you’ve been around the block a few times. Right click that guy and choose properties. A dialog will open up with a Details or Device tab. Click that and at the top of the tab is a drop-down menu. Choose “Hardware Ids” from this list and you should have two items displayed. For me it was:USB\Vid_413c&Pid_8140&Rev_4316
   USB\Vid_413c&Pid_8140
7. Guess what? You need to copy this into the Toshiba section noted above. However, you only need to copy the first line from “Hardware Ids” into the section. I tried using the first item for Bluetooth= and the second for Bluetooth 2 and it installed the first correctly, but the second was in conflict. So, I suggest you only change the first line and leave the second as is:
   [Toshiba.NT.5.1]
   TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth= BthUsb, USB\Vid_413c&Pid_8140&Rev_4316
   TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth 2= BthUsb, USB\Vid_0930&Pid_0505
   TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth 3= BthUsb, USB\VID_0930&PID_0506
   TOSHIBA Bluetooth Adapter= BthUsb, USB\Vid_0930&Pid_0507You’ll notice I left the Bluetooth 3= and Adapter= values alone.
8. Save the file.
9. You should now be able to go back to the Hardware Profile dialog box mentioned in steps 5 and 6 above. This time right-click the device and choose Update Driver. Choose to Install from a list or a specific location and click Next. Check only the Include this location in the search: c:\windows\inf\ and click next again.
10. If you’re lucky, Windows will all of a sudden recognize the Toshiba hardware and you’ll see various balloons pop up and go away. Don’t let that spook you. If you’ve done things correctly, you will end up with a TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth item and a Microsoft Bluetooth Enumerator under a new hardware group in Device Manager called “Bluetooth Radios.”
11. After some clicking about you should now be able to access the Bluetooth configuration area of the Blackberry Desktop Manager.

Also, I had a troubleshooting problem where when I tried to complete the first sync it said “Duplicate records found on device.” There are guides and forums on the web that suggest trying to recreate the temporary sync folder on your computer, and other craziness. I solved my problem by simply deleting the calendar items on my Blackberry. I had only 12 records, so it wasn’t a big deal for me. If you were hoping to sync a ton of existing appointments from your BB to Outlook this may not be an option for you.

I wasn’t able to determine which calendar item on my Curve was causing the sync not to complete, but I suggest you start deleting calendar entries from you Blackberry and continue re-syncing until it completes.

Good luck!

Please Note: If you personally benefited from this tutorial, I ask you to either:

A. Donate $5 to me by Paypal using the button below. (not much considering your monthly Blackberry bill!):

B. Take a moment to write me a note about yourself, what you do and and important lesson you have learned either in business or in life.  My email address is rob [at] banagale [dot] com.

Thank you!

Minor annoyances:

1. The screen is too small to browse the web easily. Even if you use the single column or zoomed out display it is annoying. The device lets you scroll around a web page by hitting the Function key twice (locking it) then using the arrow keys. Alternatively, you can just use the arrow keys which jumps your cursor and the view focus from one link to the next available link in that direction. I found that since links aren’t always in a direct line, I needed to constantly cycle between the function’d movement and non-functioned so I could view the page and then select link I wanted.
2. Every time I try to connect a wi-fi network it asks if I want to register it. Registering essentially puts a given wireless zone in your “favorites.” The thing is that wi-fi clouds are very transient, the device should have an option to save a particular wi-fi network but not offer every single time. I don’t need to be asked if I want to save every network I come across, the answer is almost always no.
   
3. No hotswitch between messaging and the browser. I can hit home and be immediatly back at the nice application interface, I can cruise into the Gtalk IM client and back out with ease. But if I want to go from the main menu to the browser, I have to choose “last page visited” and there is a 3-8 second pause while it loads the browser back into memory. It doesn’t even seem to hold the last page content into a cache.
4. Greyed out menu items are selectable. When you hit the option button, you might have a few items that can’t be used at a given time. However, when you hit the down d-pad, it still highlights them. It should skip over to the next selectable menu item. (This is an obvious UI usability oversight IMO)
5. Copy and paste is a pain. One of the things you want to do all the time in chat is send links, but I couldn’t find out how to select a portion of text from a webpage. If I want to send the current URL I’m at to someone I’m chatting with I have to go to the edit current URL, then do a Fn-C. No thanks.
6. Proprietary audio connector. I was astounded when I realized that the device doesn’t offer a normal headphone miniplug out.

Major Problems

1. No upload ability! That’s right. If you want to upload a picture to Flickr and you click the browse button, it won’t open a dialog box to your file system. This was the deal breaker for me. I searched around and could not find anyway to do this.
2. I also tried attaching something to an email in gmail, and still nothing happens. As far as I can tell the only way to access the file system, (local and duo card) is through the tools->file manager. But that only lets you move, copy delete or rename stuff. If you can’t access it in your internet applications who cares?
3. Battery. The battery charges very slowly on this thing, and I wasn’t able to figure out how to properly shut it down w/o removing the battery. You can hold the power switch, but that only puts it in a relative sleep mode. I found that this modedrains the battery.
4. The keyboard. As much as I’d like to say it is ok, it just isn’t. I found that I would use my thumbnails rather than my thumbs to hit the keys. It is just too small, and my hands aren’t that big.

My solution:

Get the T-Mobile MDA or Cingular 8525. and load windows Mobile 6 “Most Beautiful” edition. This software includes stuff like Adobe Reader, Macromedia Flash, etc. This is the kind stuff you could really make use of on the road. The Mylo is less than useless in this regard.
These devices have wi-fi just like the Mylo, yet you can install any of thousands of user/community written applications like sound recorders etc. and then use real internet applications. This means you can run FTP, you can run SSH, you can browse for and upload from the file system, and the keyboard is nicer than the Mylo’s.

With the Cingular 8525, you get a more powerful 400mhz processor and a 2 megapixel camera as well. That device costs about $350 used, which is still $30 cheaper than the Mylo! The T-Mobile MDA is available on Craigslist for $170! That’s a full $110 less than the Mylo.

Plus, you get the option to pay for 2.5g or 3g cellular data connectivity. I demo’d the T-Mobile version last year and found that the EDGE data plan was just too expensive. But in a bind I could see wanting Cingular/AT&T’s HDSPA 3g solution.

The big difference as far as I can see is the ‘college friendly’ form factor of the Mylo, and the simplicity. Some things on the MDA are a bit complicated. They aren’t super smooth. You may have to do a restart on occasion, but that’s the price you pay for a device that can actually do stuff.

My plan now is to seek out a low cost ~$125 MDA or an 8525 for around $250. Those prices are a little low, (though MDA is fair at $170, and 8525 at $350). But the prices won’t be low once the new Windows Mobile 6 devices hit the streets. The Toshiba G900 and the Samsung i760 are going to drive the price down on mobile computing, so that hopefully, some day soon we’ll see some good prices on smartphone/pda convergence.

Until then, your best bet may be to stick with a laptop. No matter how big of a bummer it is, it is going to serve your needs better for the price than the Sony Mylo.