Techie Talk: Top 10 Reason you should Jailbreak your iPhone

Warning.  This is not for the faint hearted.

If you own an iPhone and likes to customize your phone.  But at the same time you just not willing to bite the bullet and go Android because you hate the stuttering experience on Android devices, there is a solution for you.  Jailbreak.

Unlike old times where a wrong step in Jailbreaking will give you a very expensive Apple branded paperweight, Jailbreaking is perfectly safe nowadays.

I won't re-write the guide on how to jailbreak your phone cause a comprehensive guide is available @TaiG.  Also follow people like @Saurik or @Modmyi to get really interesting stuff from jailbreak.

One thing to note. Similar to Android, a bit of precaution is needed and don't go adding un-trusted repo into Cydia.  You know sh1t is about to go down once you see Russian popped up in your phone.
That aside, here's 10 reason why you should jailbreak your iPhone.

1) Apple UI is boring.
If you used Android before and loved how much customize-able the springboard is.  Jailbreak removes that barrier.  You can have you iPhone looks like your Mac or Windows 10 or even becomes Android Marshmallow itself.  The tweak Winterboard and Springtomize allows you to turn your iPhone into this... plus lots more cool stuff.

Or if you missed Windows 95...

2) Spotlight is super damn annoying.
Don't you hate it when you're busy swiping your phone, and suddenly your thumb miss-cued and swiped down a little bit and spotlight pops up.  Spotlight isn't exactly that helpful, although Apple kind of boost spotlight capability in iOS9.  For me, No Spotlight gives me the cure.

3) Ads are even more annoying.
I understand people put ads on their app and webpages in order to gain a bit more revenue.  But I don't remember my super mario bro 2 have ads popping up every 10 seconds.  So sorry ads, adblocker is installed.

4) Keyboard Berserk
For those who used this, you'll never use the default apple keyboard ever again.  Apple copied this into iOS9 but using 2 fingers kind of defeating the purpose.  Swipe selection wins hands down.



5) Apple's notification banner is way too big.
Imagine you're playing a game and sudden;y a message comes in.  And guess what, the default banner is too god-d@mn big that it cover a huge area of the already small iPhone screen.  Tinybar fixes this.  No more wasted screen space.

6) Know your iOS internals
Apple hides the file system from prying eyes.  But having iFile, you'll be able to see iOS without clothes on.  I can see power users drooling already.

7) Go easy on your eyes at night
If you know the blue light red light thing, and how it affect your brain and your sleep.  Then you know using smart devices at night actually messes up your brain.  But don't worry, there's a fix.  It's called f.lux.  It'll adapt the warmth and color of the screen with the time of the day so your brain will not be messed up seeing blue light e.g. the sun in the middle of the night.

8) Activate your phone
Want to look cool while using your phone?  Want to minimize the usage of home and power button cause those 2 button broke really easily?  Now you can use all kind of swipe, tap, pinch action to do lots of cool stuff e.g. hold the clock at the lock screen to capture an emergency selfie.

Activator allows you to customize your phone to do all these.  Or to make your life easier, you can get Tage to quickly makes your phone multitasking a breeze.


9) Apple notification center sucks
Android notification center wins big time.  To make your notification center as powerful as the one you get in Android, get IntelliscreenX.

10) Super powerful message app
BiteSMS sets the standard that Apple can't keep up with the messaging app.  Period.

Extra
There are plenty other jailbreak tweaks e.g. one that makes touch ID a lot more useful (I'm a sucker and still using iPhone 5, so no touch ID), a much more powerful air drop using AnyDrop, lots of camera tweak like having 4K or slomo recording on unsupported device, icaughtu that snap picture of the guy who stole your phone when he tried to unlock your phone or even LocalAPStore that allows your to get in app purchases for free.

Jailbreaking is indeed fun and you'll never realize that iOS can do so much more than what you're seeing everyday.  And we all know that all the fancy features you get in newer iOS and Android are mostly copied from jailbreak tweaks.

For those interested, you can head to TaiG right now and give it a shot. However, it's strictly for iOS8 only.  If you "accidentally" updated to iOS9, then you might want to wait a while for the new jailbreak to become available.

Techie Talk: Cheap(er) Tech. Is it any Good?

I got plenty of techie toys for these few months and not that much time posting interesting stuff online.  Either enjoying those really good tech or kind of wrestling with those not so well made ones, I'll try to post some of these here.

Today, I'm going to talk about Android again.  Android being an inferior mobile OS is a thing in the past.  With Marshmallow just around the corner and recent iOS annoying stability, Android suddenly appears as a really good choice.  But, yes there's still a but.  Is an Android device worth buying?

When we talk Android devices, we're talking those that we can actually own.  Not some Apple price range Android device (that's Rm 2000 and above).  When someone spends over Rm 2k for an AOS device, they're as good as an Android cult or some anti-Apple-Jobs people.

For this topic, I'm going to take my own AOS tablet as example.  No, not the Samsung tab that I won but the Dell Venue 8 7840 that I also won from wearing red underpants.

The Venue 8 is one of the best AOS device with Intel inside.  Note: You can get even better ARM based tablet though.  Here are some spec to accompany your popcorn.

Screen: 8.4 inch WQXGA (that's 2560 x 1600)
Processor: Intel Atom z2380 (that's quad core Anniedale)
RAM: 2GB LP-DDR3
Storage: 16GB + SD card expansion
Battery: 5900 mAh

Looks tasty right?  Indeed it is.  First of all, the build quality.  This thing has an anodized aluminium body which feels a lot more premium compared to many expensive plastic-ky  (ehem.. Samsung) devices.  The device layout needs some time to get used to like the power button and the volume rocker located at the left side.  The near bezel-less design means the device can only be held in certain very awkward way.

The good thing continues as this tab runs vanilla Android.  You know how much I hate useless f**king sh*t like Touchwiz or HTC sense or whatever name OEM called for bloatware.  But this tab has its fair share of bloats.  But there seems to be no alternative to some nifty features without these bloats, so I have to stick onto some of them.  More later.

It was all good until I realized OEM starts to cut corner on their products to be competitive on cost.

First, the RAM.  It's only 2GB compared to rival tablets which have 3GB.  That 1GB that is missing making multi-tasking experience a lot worse.  Having 3 or 4 apps opened concurrently (I had FB chat head, a browser and 2 games opened), the whole AOS started to stutter.  Switching between apps is a nightmare.

Next, the camera.  OK, I am one of the people that against taking picture with your bulky tablet.  Even that, the camera have to be at least a bit decent.  But no, the camera on this tab is awful.  The spec says 8MP with Intel RealSense.  I don't really care about the megapixel really.  But still...

Here's the picture I capture using the RealSense camera (best effort using single capture).

And the same one using my iphone (no effort needed).

Try to read Swiss Made and T25 on both picture.

The picture taken is always hazy.  I tried every option on the camera app and none seems to be able to improve the picture quality.  And it became even worse when I switch to depth mode.  The glorious RealSense mode.

I never seen RealSense demo in real life other than Intel CEO putting his face on a computer screen to unlock the device.  But the image captured using RealSense on this device is worse than cr@p.

Here's another picture of spray cans around my house.

And then I read real sense able to change the focus of a picture captured.  Makes sense since it uses 3 camera.  But the problem is the image quality is so bad that changing the focus of the picture doesn't appear to be attractive at all.

Then I hear the camera is able to do measurement as well.  I tried, it's not accurate at all.  And it doesn't work most of the time.  Maybe it's useful if I capture something tall faraway.  But right now, it's easier for me to grab a ruler and do it the old fashion way.

<Spray can picture with measurement placeholder>

To compound to the RealSense fail misery, the post processing of trying to get the depth information takes ages.  If you think your camera's HDR is slow, you never played with RealSense depth camera yet.  The post processing of these 2 spray is still going on since I took the picture 30 minutes ago.

Maybe it's the built in apps that is not working, but I tried scouring the Play store for alternatives but RealSense app is close to non existence.

There's a few more hiccups here and there like software updates are rare, and the 5.1 update only slows down the tablet even more without including patches for StageFright.

OK, if I talk any more faults about this tablet, Dell might do a product recall.  But overall it's a solid tablet.  Just too bad, the software (mr Android) is not polished to run with this discounted spec. But why?  Benchmark numbers are fantastic.  Shut up benchmark cause benchmark is just some random number and don't reflect real world scenarios.

So, is medium cost Android any good?  Well, it depends on your usage.  If you're using it for productivity like browsing web, take notes, chit chatting, then it suits your need.  But when you start loading fancy games and do heavy multi-tasking, you'll start to feel the hardware is lagging behind.

Conclusion is, you get what you paid for.  I'm kind of a power user so discounted RAM is definitely hurting me.  And Android loves plenty of RAM.  High end Android devices exist for a reason.  So it's definitely worth it to pay Rm 3000 for a Samsung Galaxy S6 or a HTC One M9, if only you can fork out that much money.

In the end, buy something that you like cause you'll most likely be looking at it everyday.  It won't be perfect, so deal with it.