IT Technology Services New Orleans

New Orleans Technology Services

Menu
Jan 03
0

Apple iPhone Alarm Fails, Again.

By | iPhone | No Comments

Happy 2011! As many of you may have already noticed, Apple tried to help you ring in the new year by making you sleep in the first couple mornings of 2011 thanks to another alarm clock bug. Don’t worry though: now that it’s January 3, this particular problem should have remedied itself. But how long until the next one?

Like the Daylight Saving Time bug before it, the New Year bug was first exposed by our friends in New Zealand, who discovered that their non-repeating alarm clocks simply wouldn’t go off once the calendar flipped over. iPhone users across Asia, and then Europe, also unexpectedly got to sleep in on New Year’s Day. By the time morning came to the US, many of us had become aware of the bug—but that didn’t stop it from affecting a few readers here and there.

The glitch only affected people who had set non-repeating alarms (the DST bug from November 2010 affected both repeating and non-repeating ones), and Apple confirmed with Engadget that all alarms would begin working properly again on January 3 (that’s today). So, if you missed the hubbub, you don’t have much to worry about this time around. Still, some of us are left uneasy: this is the second iOS alarm problem to expose itself in two months. When will the next one strike, and will iPhone users ever be able to trust their phones to wake them up on time? You know how the saying goes: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice..

Dec 30
0

10 Biggest Tech Fails

By | facebook, Google, iPhone, news | No Comments

CNN has published a lit of the “The 10 Biggest Tech ‘Fails’ of 2010,” and Apple made the list twice. The news powerhouse named the iPhone 4’s “Antennagate” kerfuffle as the #1 “Tech Fail” of 2010, while Ping was included as #10, both of which were included in our Ted Landau’s list of the five “bottom” stories of the year where Apple was portrayed in a bad light.

Taking the top spot in the list was the so-called “Antennagate” problem where some users lost all signal to their carrier when holding the device in certain way that became known as the “Death Grip.”

“First Apple said the problem didn’t exist,” CNN’s Doug Gross wrote. “Then they said it was a software issue. Then they kind-of admitted it existed and gave away free cases to help. Then, they said it doesn’t really exist anymore and stopped giving away the bumpers.”

All of which is fairly accurate and to the point, but CNN also noted that, “Months later, the problem is all but forgotten and the phones show no sign of dipping in popularity. So ‘fail,’ in this case, is a pretty relative term.”

Which begs the question of how this qualifies as one of the biggest “Tech Fails” of the year — the iPhone 4 is the single most successful smartphone on the planet, after all.

Then again, he labeled the scandal as a “Tech Fail,” and not the device itself, an important distinction. Apple’s efforts to correct perceptions was massive, and the company received more negative ink for this issue than it has since the days when Michael Diesel was hiding under his desk in Cupertino or Gil Amelio was wielding the corporate firing axe like Paul Bunyun on a killing spree.

While Apple came out the other side of this problem just fine, it took a Herculean effort by the company to do so.

Falling in at #10 is Apple’s Ping music social networking service built into-iTunes. “There’s a whole social network set up in Apple’s iTunes store now,” Mr. Gross wrote. “Didn’t know that? Well, there you go.”

He noted that not all artists participate in the service, and that it doesn’t integrate with Facebook. “And, a lot of the time,” he wrote, “it simply pushes you to buy music. Needless to say, Ping hasn’t really caught on.”

Also included in the list are:

  • 2. 3-D TV
  • 3. Microsoft Kin
  • 4. Nexus One
  • 5. Facebook privacy
  • 6. Google Buzz
  • 7. Gawker media sites hacked
  • 8. Content farms
  • 9. Digg relaunch