iPhone microphone glitch

During vacation in Florida, my old new (will explain later) iPhone 4 become muted when making phone calls. Neither the regular microphone at the bottom of the phone nor the mic for the speaker on the top worked. Except for making phone calls, Skype, VOIP phone app, etc. worked fine for both microphones. I made an appointment at the local Apple store and the "Genius" there told me that it has to be replaced. Since the 90 day warranty (I recently paid $170 + tax to have it replaced due to a real hardware issue) just expired 3 days ago, I have to pay another $170 for a new iPhone 4.

At the same time, he did mention that this could be a software issue as the voice memo is working fine. Well the only way he suggested to clear that is to restore the iPhone as a new phone, which didn't help after spending quite a bit of time to resetting the phone and restoring it.

Luckily I brought my new Blackberry Z10 with me, so I did have a phone to use during vacation.  Once I got back home, a more thorough Google search turned up this post from MacRumors.  It referred to this blog post stating that this is a software glitch which disables the microphone for the native phone call App in iOS. The solution is to play the iPod app (or Music app in iOS 7).  Initially, this solution didn't work. However, I do have the impression that this problem happened when I was using the Microsoft Sync via Bluetooth on the rental car.

After connecting to my Bluetooth headset and playing music for a second then disconnecting it, the problem was solved.

What's surprising is that this seems to be a rather common problem based on the feedback/comments on the blog dated back to 2011.  Why on the world didn't Apple solve the problem or, even recognize it by the "Genius"?

iPad Mini update

A week of use so far and it's doing pretty well.  It light and the battery lasts over a few days of moderate use.

Seems to be a very good decision. Although rumor said that the mini-2 would come out with a retina display, that will be the earliest October.  I also didn't see too much of a difference between retina display and regular on the Macbook Pro in the Apple Store.

iPad mini

After a long hiatus, now I'm back.  After all, I've been on leave since Dec. 2011 and will go back to office after September 2013.  I have been writing during the leave but turned to Live Journal for a private dairy. 

While walking in the mall on a Saturday morning, tried the new iPad mini for the first time in the Apple Store, and decided to buy one.  Based on my iPad 2 experiences, aka buy the most expensive model on the 1st day of sale, I chose the cheapest 16GB WiFi version for $329 plus tax.  Then while restoring it with the iPad backup in iTunes, I found out that 16GB is not enough.  It actually hung both iTunes and the new iPad. Despite these problems fresh out of the box, I was really convinced that it's worth to get comparing to others. 

There are three factors led to this decision: First, the iPad Mini is slightly larger than the rest of the 7" mini-pads.  It is surprisingly a comfortable size to read news and watching Youtube videos. I never thought that 0.9" (7.9" vs 7") made such a huge difference.  Secondly, it's also super light.  The iPad is not really a device that I can hold for hours to read. Last but certainly not the least, even when it hung, I was able to see how easy it is to transfer almost all settings on the iPad.  Not like the Android on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which I had to manually change quite a few things when switching users.

So, I bite the bullet to go back to the Apple store to exchange for a 32GB version for $100 more.  It's not the most expensive 16GB storage I've ever paid for, but it's getting there. 

After 2hr of restoring and updating, the 32GB device works flawlessly and I don't really need to change anything except to enter most of the passwords, which is probably a good time.

Apps for the iPad 2

We bought a new 52" Sony LED-LCD tv for the bedroom. The problem is that our data server is in the living room with the rest of the network setup. Another problem is that the Dell Mini 1010 is too slow for many of the videos I have at 1080p. Luckily I also bought a new iPad 2. It can play HD video but the proprietary iTunes doesn't make accessing files not purchased through the iStore easy.

Finally today, I bought the Air Video that allows streaming all kinds videos to the iPad via my internal network. So far, it worked great.