The Blog of Peter Filias

…a self-proclaimed Computer Ninja

Tag Archives: iPhone

iPhone 4S (and iPhone 4) Speed Test: AT&T vs. Verizon vs. Sprint

December 1st, 2011

So, the other night, I had the opportunity to test a few phones across AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon.

We had two iPhone 4S and one iPhone 4 phone.

One iPhone 4S was on AT&T, the other iPhone 4S on Sprint, and the iPhone 4 on Verizon.

I was quite astonished by the results of our Speedtest.net test on these phones, all running iOS 5.0.1.

iPhone 4S on Sprint

iPhone 4S on Sprint

iPhone 4S on AT&T

iPhone 4S on AT&T

iPhone 4 on Verizon

iPhone 4 on Verizon

Shocking. The 4S on AT&T was nearly 6x faster than the same phone on Sprint. That made me happy. Sprint has the most liberal data plans from what I gathered, but I’m glad to be that much faster. The sad thing to note her was how poorly the iPhone 4 performed on Verizon.

The Verizon phone had the weakest visible connection with 3 bars, the AT&T phone had 4 bars, and the Sprint phone had 5 bars. This is just for educational purposes. Hope you enjoyed it.

UPDATE: Thanks to Greg for running his own test. iPhone 4S on Verizon, Dec-1-2011.:

Greg's 4S on Verizon

Greg's 4S on Verizon

iPhone 4S Upgrade Woes RE: photos

October 17th, 2011

I installed iOS 5 on my iPhone 4 about a week earlier than the Oct. 12th release date. Loved it. Used the new album creation (like tagging really) to make a bunch of “albums” that made it easy. I digress. Anyway, I picked up my 4S on Friday. I took one last backup of my iPhone 4 at 835am EST on Friday.

I restored the 4S from the backup taken at 835am.

Later in the day, I noticed my Camera Roll was empty (well, it had 4 photos I took with the new phone to test the camera’s optics). NOTE: I DO NOT have iTunes set to sync my photos on the phone with anything on my computer. I just grab photos from my iPhone from time to time with either Windows’ native importer (into Live Photo Gallery) or Picasa or even Lightroom.

I tried to restore my phone again from the iPhone 4 backup, but it didn’t exist. I thought I’d try to make a backup of my 4S, just to see if it would end up showing all backups. iTunes only showed my iPhone 4S’ backup.

I started looking through my phone and noticed that its last iCloud backup was about 1.8GB in size. When I showed its details, I noticed that it had 1.5GB of photos. Crazy!!?!?!?!? I did a little more digging and found out where iTunes stores its backup files (for Windows Vista/7) here: C:\Users\_______\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync. There were 8400 files here, none with an extension.

I copied all of those files to a new folder and appended .jpg to their filenames. What this did was show me which of these were photos. Take note: There will be JPG files here from your phone’s app and browser cache, but you can have Windows (or a 3rd party app like Picasa) display the photos sorted by their dimension. This way, you can see the photos you took with the phone’s camera which are something like 2592×1936 (taken on an iPhone 4) in resolution. Icons from apps and the web will be smaller, like 320×240, and similarly small in resolution.


The files will look like this. The highlighted file, when copied to a new folder and adding the .jpg at the end, does in fact show up as a photo!

So, at this point, my photos have been saved, but they are not back on my camera, not in their own folder/album, and not in my camera roll, where I really want them to be.

In my digging, I also found iPhone Backup Extractor. This is a clever piece of software that goes into your iOS device’s backup on your computer and lets you extract out specific items, like photos, for example. I AM NOT ENDORSING THIS. I only tried the unregistered version, which would only pull out 2 items per extract. Since I was able to manually get to my photos, I ended up not buying this app. It does look VERY useful and helpful though. Something to consider having in my IT toolbox (yep, I’m that guy…the one who helps their family and friends).

Early Impressions of iOS 5

October 7th, 2011

So, I installed iOS 5 yesterday. Very easy to do. Remember, you need iTunes 10.5 Beta 7 or higher to do this. Restored everything from my backup as I hoped.

I love the new notification system, where it drops a small title bar down from the top of the screen. I also like how it shows notifications you’ve missed on your lock screen, a cue taken from what jailbreakers have had with intelliscreen and LockInfo for a few years now.

You can finally create your own albums, which is essentially like tagging your photos, much like how you label messages if you use GMail. This can prove to be useful, especially if you have 100s to 1000s of photos in your Camera Roll.

I haven’t had a chance to use iMessage, as I don’t have anyone’s cell # with iOS 5 already installed. Also, not sure how the iCloud is working out yet. I haven’t enabled it to sync photos, but it is syncing contacts, calendar, reminders, and bookmarks. You get 5GB of storage to use with up to 10 devices. 5GB can get eaten up quickly, so they sell 10GB, 20GB, and 50GB yearly plans, for storage.

I really liked how it gave me the ability to install apps I had purchased already but weren’t installed on the phone. That, my dear, is excellent.

I like how you can select a word and choose Define, and it’ll bring up a dictionary entry for the word.

I haven’t tried Wi-Fi sync, but am looking forward to that. It supposedly will sync with iTunes on my computer when the phone is plugged in to power and connected to Wi-Fi. Update: Doing it now. Hang on to your hats, kids! I pushed Sync Now. It was syncing, so I thought. Nothing happened. I can press Sync Now again,and, it says that my last sync was yesterday at 6:35PM.

Jailbroken 4.1

October 13th, 2010

Thanks to greenpois0n for their 4.1 jailbreak tool. It went fairly easy. I downloaded AptBackup first, so I could backup my “list” of jailbroken apps to Cydia’s server. Then I did the update to 4.1. Then I did the jailbreak. After the jailbreak, I installed Cydia with Loader.app, then installed AptBackup and did a restore. After that, it looked like most of my apps were missing. I plugged into the PC, got into iTunes, went to Apps, and then, magically, without even syncing, they started showing up on my phone. Maybe AptBackup just needed a little more time before the downloads were all done and placed where they needed to be placed.

UPDATE: I had my friend, Chris, do this last night. He had some issues, but mostly related to his laptop blue-screening. Anyway, he had to go into iTunes at the end, and start “checking” the apps he wanted on his iPhone. Like me, he didn’t have to actually “Sync” while on the Apps tab in iTunes for the apps to start showing up on his phone.

The Blog of Peter Filias

…a self-proclaimed Computer Ninja