In case no one noticed, the battery on the 3G S could be better. While it does seem to be lasting longer for me after a breaking-in period, it still is hard for me to make it through the day without rationing how much I use it or recharging through the day.

I got the Just Mobile Gum Pro from Amazon along with two extra iPhone charging cables for around $75 total with shipping. It retails for about $60.

The packaging was only notable for the picture of this guy. It was really strange and I got a laugh from him.

The battery pack is about the size of a pager or a large pack of chewing gum (think , and relatively heavy. That being said, once you connect it to the phone, you can put it in your pocket and not really notice it. There is an On/Off switch used for switching between the charging of the battery pack and charging of the phone, three LEDs that tell you the approximate charge of the Gum Pro, and two places to plug in various cables. There is the standard female USB port, and a female mini-USB port for charging the unit.

Here are the notes that I took while using the Gum Pro-

First charge of the Gum Pro-
8/10-2.10-4.30 USB from computer
4.40-5.15 charged from Apple wall charger

8/10-10.30 pm plugged phone in with 23% left 12.00am 100% charged
8/12-11.05pm plugged phone in with 29% left
8/13- 3.01am plugged phone in with 29% left

Second Gum Pro Charge-
8/14- 6:50pm plugged phone in with 33% left 100% by 8:30
8/15 1:00am plugged in with 23% left 100% by 3:00am
8/17 2.22pm plugged in with 31% left

So for the first charge, I got about 2.2 full charges from the Gum Pro, while I got about 2.1 full charges. Both times, the battery was drained to under 5% judging by the fact that no LEDs were lit on the battery pack. I should be getting closer to 4 charges, but it is important to remember that modern batteries need a break-in period. Overall, I got 3 extra days of charge of 6 hour/day usage. I didn’t plug the phone into anything except the Gum Pro for a week while charging the battery pack once.

Overall, if you are a heavy user of your phone or just want the extra juice I would recommend this unequivocally. It has a much larger capacity than all battery/case combinations and I have only found one battery pack that stores more than 4400mAh. Personally, I won’t be using it everyday but it will be great for flights, subway trips, and any sort of travel where you can sit down for a while. If you need something to charge on the go I would go with something along the lines of the Mophie Juice Pack Air, because the Gum Pro does not really lend itself to being carried around in the pocket while walking around because of the need for an extra cable. Public transport commuters, frequent fliers, and people who have access to electricity only rarely should pick this up immediately!

Here’s the deal: I’m getting a replacement Griffin Clarifi (Here is Mr. Farinha’s review). It is a great case, I just got a bad one- no problem. Griffin is great with customer service, apparently, and is sending me a free replacement with only one requirement: That I send pictures of the destroyed case after I get the new one.

I guess in order to keep me from reselling the old case.

Here’s where the fun part comes in: I want you guys to pick how I destroy it. Whenever I get my new case (probably next week), I will pick the best suggestion as to how to kill this thing. The onlycaveats are 1) It has to be legal to do in New York City and 2) There needs to be a little bit of the case left for me to take pictures of to show to Griffin so I don’t get sued or kidnapped or anything. Oh yes, and 3) there isn’t really a prize to this except that I’ll praise you publicly. I’m a poor college student even before getting the iPhone!

All you have to do to enter this contest is to leave your suggestion in a comment here, or get at me on my Twitter by clicking that blue collection of letters under this sentence.

Long hours of riding the train in the past couple of weeks has lead me to start downloading more games for the iPhone. My two most recent purchases are iYamato and Baseball Slugger: Homerun Race 3D.

iYamato – $.99 from the AppStore.

It is 1945. You are the commander of the doomed Japanese battleship the Yamato, which was the largest battleship ever created. The American Navy knows your position- it is your job to fight them to the death. That isn’t really anywhere in the game, I just watch too much History Channel. The game consists of you controlling small anti-aircraft guns and the Yamato’s 18.1″ cannons (thank you Wikipedia). You use this firepower to defend your ship from the invader Americans. It is really only worth your while to try this on Hard mode, since on Easy and Medium modes, there is no end to the action. The game will go on until you are sunk which would take forever. On Hard mode, you will sink pretty quickly. The ship cannot be damaged, but can sink. Your ship will start to tilt once bombs hit it, and will eventually sink below the water. The guns are controlled by too-small buttons and sliders on the bottom of the screen. The main buttons control the small guns, and buttons closer to the middle fire the cannons. The controls on this game are a bit frustrating and need some tweaking because it is really hard to tell where the smaller guns are aiming at times. It isn’t a bad deal at $.99 plus tax- get it if you’re going to be bored for a while, but I don’t highly recommend it until updates change the control scheme a bit.

Baseball Slugger: Homerun Race 3D- $2.99 on sale right now.

This is a great game- no question about it. It is addicting, easy, fun, anything you want in a game. It is essentially a Home Run Derby with severely juiced up characters.  The aiming of your swing is done by accelerometer, and is quite sensitive. Graphically speaking, this game really looks like an early PS2 game- just looks amazing. You can upgrade your batter by certain achievements (Numbers of HRs, fouls, etc.), hitting homers when a “gold ball” appears, or by winning online contests. With these Gold Balls, you can upgrade your stats by getting new uniforms, pants, shoes, gloves, helmets, and. You can also pay Gold Balls to customize the look of your character, but there isn’t a performance boost to this. The online play is great, with differing rooms for those with differing skills. Points are earned by getting hits, HRs, hitting foul-poles and scoreboards. There are two glitches in the game- one where you hear the sound of a pole being hit before the ball reaches the pole (doesn’t affect gameplay at all) and one where I hit a normal HR that just kept going when it should have landed. That’s how I hit a 750 foot homerun, which was AWESOME.

Like many of you, I received the iPhone 3GS on June 19th. I upgraded from the original iPhone, and I’m here to tell you about my thoughts and observations between the two devices.

Speed: The 3GS’ namesake is speed- and for good reason. There is no more lag. At all. Everything opens fast- especially the camera which always gave me problems with the 2G iPhone.
Win for the 3GS

3G- 3G is easily four times as fast as EDGE. However, there are problems with 3G that I will enumerate on in the next section.
3GS-2 2G-0

Reception- This is probably more related to AT&T than the iPhone itself. When the 3GS has signal, it is great. Crystal clear, nice and loud calls. Much louder than the 2G! However, my experience with signal is awful. If you are out in the open, there are few problems. But anything seems to be a source of interference that degrades the signal to complete lack of usability. I will probably take the phone into the nearest Apple Store to get it checked out and see if it is a problem with my phone. The 2G never had great signal, but it was consistently a decent signal. I have used the phone in a slightly rural area, a medium city, and a large city (Whoa, I have done some serious traveling this past week).
Winner- 2G iPhone

Design- I never liked the look of the newer iPhones, but having used it, I really like how it feels in your hand. The oleophobic screen is a work of art- probably will still put a screen protector on it just in case though. The plastic back attracts grease and fingerprints like none other, but I have a Griffin Clarifi case that I can pick up Monday (Look for a review soon).
Winner- 3GS (Score is 3-1)

Hardware- The 3.0mp camera with autofocus is great. I used to not be able to take a close-up picture with the 2G camera (which influenced the purchase of the Clarifi) but the new camera seems to work very well with most shots. The compass, by itself, is nearly useless unless you are hiking. The Compass integrated with Google Maps is great. Makes it easy to navigate a new city!  The video camera works very well- my only complaint is that I forget to switch from still to video cameras. Great quality in all of these aspects. Well, except for Voice Control. It is awful. I have yet to get the phone to do ANYTHING that I wanted it to by using VC. It got to the point where I decided to be juvenile and start commanding the phone using words that are inappropriate for this particular site . When I did this, one of my family members was called. Maybe VC knows something I don’t?

Considering the 2G had none of these features without jailbreaking, it is obviously another win for the 3GS. (4-1 3GS)

Battery life- After a week, I was kind of hoping that the battery life of the 3GS would begin to get better. So far, it sucks; the phone eats up battery at a huge rate compared to the 2G iPhone due to its increased power. However, I am using the phone a lot because I love 3G when I have it. I can only hope that battery life improves. I will wait to pass final judgement on the 3GS until later, but until then, the 2G wins hands down.

So, the 3G S wins handily over its older sibling. Even though it might not have been a fair fight, I’ve enjoyed every second of it. We now return to your regulary scheduled programming.

Hopefully, anyone who preordered an iPhone 3GS will have it arrive on June 19th (specifically, me). Because if not, Apple and AT&T by extension will have a huge load of angry customers with fire and pitchforks marching on their stores (me again). I personally think that most people will get their phones on the 19th, but those who preordered later might get them the week after. Picking a Friday for the delivery/release date was probably strategic by Apple to give an extra day or two for a huge amount of inventory that needs to be shipped out.

I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but the iPhone is a cash cow. Apple and AT&T could purchase a small country with the way that they are making money off of us. But how can they not let everyone who currently has an iPhone (2.5G or 3G) update to a new iPhone contract before 18-24 months is up? Yes, I’ve heard the “it is just like any other phone contract!” argument. Is it? What kind of data plan do you get from AT&T- is it a smartphone contract? No, it is an iPhone contract! This phone is set apart from other phones, just like BlackBerrys are set apart from other smartphones. There should be an addendum to the iPhone contract that allows you to upgrade to a new version of the phone with a new contract whenever the manufacturer comes out with a newer version of the hardware. Why not do it for all phones? Besides the subsidies, there isn’t really a reason. AT&T, stop alienating your loyal customers, it isn’t a great way to keep them happy! Remember how many people have been brought to your network because of the iPhone- don’t let them get away.

I was musing on those who were saying that the iPhone 3GS is a dud. Considering the circumstances, it was a pretty smart move by Apple. Even though Apple seems to be weathering the financial storm pretty well, this new update is a great way to promote a new product without a lot of retooling. The assembly for the 3GS should remain the same- reducing the retraining costs for those that assemble the phones. The plastic cases are essentially the same, only minor retooling of machinery and workers is required by the workers. Seems like a smart business move to me.

According to a few sources (TUAW and the ever-venerable CNN SciTechBlog), Apple is beefing up their servers in a giant server farm project in North Carolina. (I suspect Mobile Mike is behind this). Up to a BILLION dollars will be pumped into this new project in only nine years.

What could this be for? Is Apple becoming Skynet (Wow, I’m tired of hearing about Skynet)? Something for mobileme?

Here is my unfounded rumor- I desperately hope that Apple is creating a push mail system in the vein of Blackberry. This is the only thing that the iPhone is truly lacking- an easy, intuitive Mail delivery system.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming…

Hey everyone, my name is Craig and I hope to be writing many pieces for iPhone Docked in the future.

Onto the good stuff- here is a list of my 3 MUST HAVE apps for the iPhone.

#3- PingPong

From 148apps.com

Skyworks was seriously my favorite gaming company back in 6th grade. They made a lot of games for candystand.com, which was the only game site that we could get to without a proxy (probably shouldn’t have admitted that).

Anyways, this game is great. At a cheap $.99, it is a great time waster and an entertaining game. 3 different paddles can be used which have differing amounts of power and spin. There’s a pretty extensive tournament and arcade section. This article is taking me a while to write solely because of this game.

The tourney mode is basically first to 11 (with a 2 point margin of victory). The arcade mode is more interesting, and much more difficult. You have a half-table, and after a few volleys and serves, you must hit targets to score points. You only have 3 “lives” which correspond to the wall scoring a point on you.  It is a lot faster than the tourney mode, and a lot more frustrating, but adds significant replay value.  I lost the arcade mode 3 times while writing this part. Seriously, I suck at the arcade mode.

#2 ITRANS NYC-

From appstorebest.com

Since I live on the outskirts of Queens, NYC, I like to get out of the ‘burbs and into Manhattan pretty frequently. While I know the MTA system pretty well, the trains have gone batsh*t crazy the last few weekends. Frustrated by being stuck on a local line for an hour longer than I wanted, I picked this app up. It has a feature that alerts you to changes in the trains schedules (which is amazing when it works), has the approximate times that trains arrive in any station which works offline, and has an updated map sanctioned by the MTA. I’ve had this app for a short time, but already I wish that I had it from the day I moved here.

An all around solid application that allows you to plan your trip with minimal frustration that usually accompanies a trip with the NYC subways.

#1 Twitterfon-

From justplaintech.com

I joined Twitter about a year ago in order to keep up with various news stories and just see what it was about. I still use it for that, but now I use it to connect with others that share my various addictions/hobbies. The best free client that I have found is Twitterfon, with a special mention to Natsulion.

Twitterfon is fast, has all the options that a regular user could ask for, and is very stable. An inline browser helps keep the app open until Apple enables apps to run in the background, or you jailbreak and use Backgrounder. @replies (mentions) and DMs are kept both in separate sections and inside your main timeline separated by colors. My main grudge against Twitterfon are courtesy of the last couple of updates, which have kind of killed the ease of clicking links inside tweets, but they seem to slowly getting better. I’d actually rather use Twitterfon than the website. The app has just introduced an ad on the top of your timeline in the latest update, but it isn’t that big of a deal for a free app.

The special mention goes out to Natsulion because it was my first Twitter client on my iPhone, and it has a lion for an icon. Really, it’s sort of cute. Just stare at its eyes for a while. You get lost in there.

Natsulion icon from macin.files.wordpress.com

Thanks for reading!