Tag Archives: apps

Why does Apple block multitasking and wallpapers on iPod touch 2G?

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First of all, I’m back! Sorry I’ve been away for so long – I really wanted to make the most of the summer break to focus on a few other personal matters. But now summer seems to be rapidly fading into autumn, I’m back in business for the time being! There will be lots to look forward to with GEEK! this autumn – I’m going to be reviewing some cool new tech in the months up to Christmas and chatting about loads of new software!

In the mean time though, I’ll stick to the post at hand. It’s always baffled me as to why Apple decided to block out multitasking and wallpapers on the iPod touch 2G. I’ve been a proud owner of my iPod Touch for nearly 18 months now and was very pleased when Apple announced that they’d finally be supporting it in iOS4 some months back.

But then when Apple said that they wouldn’t support it on 2G, I was quite annoyed. They state that the lack of recent hardware made it difficult for them to implement the new features, but that doesn’t make much sense to me.

When the firmware was eventually cracked, I jailbroke my iPod and, to my surprise, multitasking worked perfectly. You have to close apps from time to time as it does get a bit slow if you leave too many open, but otherwise it works well.

I really don’t get why they wiped out the home screen wallpaper for the 2G iPod touch. What was the problem with that?

Alan Edwardes raised a good point in a blog post he wrote, asking why not just have a slider that could turn the features on or off in the device settings? The iPod Touch 2G can clearly cope with the new features, but it would be useful if you could choose to have them on or off. Some people could find it annoying that you do have to close apps from time to time. Still, why can’t I make that choice myself rather than having to hack my device in order to get the features?

Best IM client for the Nokia 5230/5800 – Nimbuzz

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I’ve always found it really hard to find decent apps for the Nokia 5230. The “Ovi Store” is total rubbish on the device (constantly getting the random error problem) and it’s pretty hard to work around that.

I’ve been looking for a decent IM (instant messaging) client for the device for some time and there’s plenty of choice – eBuddy, Socially, Nokia Messaging IM Beta – but none of them perform very well. Until very late yesterday night, when I came across Nimbuzz.

Nimbuzz is a free client that supports a wide range of phone brands and works as an IM and VoIP client. It supports a wide variety of services including MSN (Windows Live), Yahoo, Facebook, Google Talk and many more. You simply hook up your account details into a Nimbuzz account, log on and off you go.

The interface has really come to my liking – much better than eBuddy’s for touch devices – that’s just unusable. You can also use it in both portrait and landscape modes and best of all, there are no adverts!

An addition to all of that, it also supports VoIP – so you can use either Nimbuzz’s cheap online call rates or you can use SkypeOut (very handy). So if you have a subscription on Skype, as far as I know, you can make use of use of it from Nimbuzz (sadly I haven’t been able to test that yet as currently I don’t get EDGE or 3G where I live – that will soon change).

Overall, it’s a fantastic client. It’s very simple to use and has the best interface I’ve seen yet. You can get it free either from the dreaded “Ovi Store” or by going to nimbuzz.com. If you want to chat on the go with a Nokia 5230 or Nokia 5800 – this is the way to go!

My top 10 iPod Touch/iPhone Apps

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I’ve had my iPod a couple of days now to play around with, and have become addicted to it. Anyway, as promised, here are my 10 favourite apps for the iPod Touch in no particular order. There are both free and paid apps, so you can have a range of both if you like.

Any comments on my choices are welcome via comments, so if you’ve tried something I mention already, let us know what you think of it.

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