Erwan Macé – Passionate Geek

I attended my daughter’s friend’s birthday party last weekend and guess what? I fell in the pool, all dressed up, with (among others) an iPhone in my pocket. Needless to say that the pretty Apple device turned into a wet brick which would not even switch on.

I initially decided that rather than throwing it away, I would at least dismantle it (for the geeky joy procured by looking into its guts) and share that joy by uploading a few pictures on this blog.

To my biggest surprise, the iPhone started working again after reassembling it !! Read more for more pictures !!

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For the past two days, the buzz is all over the web. It is still a global trending topic in Twitter (its competitor?) and most blogs have now shared their thoughts about Google’s latest baby: Google Buzz.

Google Buzz is Google’s latest initiative to take its slice of the social media cake. A new platform to share status updates, photos, locations, etc. Sounds familiar? Indeed, the concept is a mixture of Twitter + Facebook + Foursqurare. You’re already using two or three of these platforms and asking yourself why you should care? Why should you start posting status updates to yet another platform? Well read more and find out why I think you should at least pay attention to this new Buzz.

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Apple and its iPhone have definitely created, over the past 2 years, a major revolution in the way we use our phone. In terms of technology: the best capacitive touch screen ever and a powerful CPU/GPU in a sleek device; in terms of user-interface: a whole new concept of navigating through the menus of your phone with your finger-tip; and of course, probably the most important of all, in terms of ecosystem: a powerful SDK combined with a 30/70 revenue share app store on iTunes. All this has allowed thousands of 3rd party developers to come up with more than a 100,000 apps in just 18 months. There is, as Apple likes to claim it, “an app for everything”.

Yet, there has also been lots of controversy about some limitations of the iPhone, such as the lack of multitasking, notifications, widgets, customizable home screen, etc…

Well, jailbreaking your iPhone (I take no responsibilities whatsoever as per the legal or technical impacts this could have on your phone), might actually help you to overcome these limitations as it will allow you to install apps that you can’t find on the official iTunes app-store. Here is a list of my top 10 jailbroken apps and top 10 reasons why I could not use a non-jailbroken iPhone anymore.

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Facebook: the 3rd edition of Facebook’s very own iPhone app will keep you connected to all your friends and Facebook pages. It also allows you to update your status on the go, as well as upload photos and videos (iPhone 3GS only). iTunes link

LinkedIn: a full-featured iPhone client for the most professional of all social networks. If you’re an active LinkedIn user, here’s how to manage your network on the go. Invites, messages, profiles, updates, etc… all the LinkedIn features available on the web are there. iTunes link

Tweetie 2: there are tons of different Twitter clients available on the AppStore and you may need to try a few to find your own pearl. Although Tweetdeck for iPhone is free, I believe that the guy behind Tweetie did a great job in terms of user interface and performance. iTunes link

Foursquare: there again, some of you might be more into Gowala or Loopt when it comes to checking in at your favorite venue. I am personally addicted to Foursquare. iTunes link

Pingle: I don’t think the guys at Ping.fm have developed an iPhone app (it might change now that Loic Lemeur and Seesmic bought them over) but Pingle lets you connect to your Ping.fm account and update all your various social networks at once. iTunes link

My Hub: you’re right, that’s number 6 and the title up there says “5 apps”. Well, at $1,99 it is still a great tool to access all your contacts from one single app. The current version brings Facebook, Twitter and Plaxo together with the native address book of your iPhone. Future releases will hopefully support LinkedIn, unified search and cached data. So I thought my #6 deserved its place in my top 5 iTunes link

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Because I know keeping all your different devices in sync can quickly become a hassle, I thought I would share with you the best method I have found so far to properly sync contacts, calendars and emails across multiple platforms.

Syncing Mac, iPhone, Nexus and Blackberry

If like me, you own more than one phone and/or more than one computer, and enjoy the freedom to switch from one device to another without troubling yourself and risking to miss some important data at some point in time, the rest of this post is for you. Most importantly this approach allows me to stay away from annoying duplicates and, worse, lost data.

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