No sooner than I post about downgrading to iPhone OS 3.1.3 from iOS 4, did I start having problems with my iPhone. I had a good week with no issues, a speedy phone and life was great.

Then last weekend my iPhone stopped waking up. I have it in a dock each night while I sleep on my night stand. In the morning I turned on the phone, but got the black screen and the silver/white apple logo. I figured ok strange, guess it had a hiccup. I waited and made the doc was indeed getting power. It stayed on that screen for a minute and then went black. I tried a full reset holding down the power and home button, still would not go past the Apple logo.

Into the office I went and opted to restore. Of course last weekend iOS 4.0.1 had been released and iTunes was giving me that as my only option. I’m sure I could have forced it to grab the 3.1.3 ipsw file, but I was very tired and just wanted my phone working again. I clicked ok and waited a good hour while it got reset and it copied everything back over to it.

The Positive

I cringed at the thought my iPhone would again be slow, crashing and not fun to use again. To my pleasant surprise that has not been the case. It’s a tiny bit slow on certain things, but the iOS 4.0.1 update actually improved the speed of other items, and everything I wrote about in my previous post is no longer an issue. I’d like to say that will teach me for being an early adopter but I’ll still do it.

My iPhone 3G now has a second life and my imperative need for an iPhone 4 has been delayed a while longer.

When I first watched the keynote a few months back about the iOS 4, I was very excited about all of the possibilities. Then at the end of the keynote I was a bit depressed to learn my 3G iPhone won’t be able to handle most of the new features. When the release came out I upgraded looking forward to the features I would be able to use.

At first it seemed to be working well. Then as the days went on I noticed it got slower and buggier. Craig pointed me to a post that said to reset it 3 times in a row, so I tried that. Slight improvement but only temporarily. I even tried reinstalling iOS 4, and still the issues persisted. This was the first time in owning an iPhone that I wanted to throw it across the room or through a window. Below are the issues I ran into.

Typing
The keys would be severely delayed and act as if they were sticking, making it extremely frustrating to work on the phone.

Maps
This became also completely unusable. The locate feature which worked excellent before, would now take upwards of 2 minutes to find me, and was off several times. The redraw on the maps would hang and sometimes never load.

Mail
Also very slow, when it checked mail in the background it would bring the entire phone to a crawl.

Safari
This was a first ever on my phone. I was loading a website in Safari and the entire phone crashed and reset.

iTunes
Anytime any process was running in the background, especially Mail, iTunes would skip and stutter through songs. It would also hang while trying to move to the next song, it would take a second or two audibly but then the artwork would not change for another 10 seconds and if I pressed the next button again it would completely hang.

All of these were enough for me to say mercy, and downgrade to 3.1.3. I found the .ipsw file from my back up and followed the instructions on Lifehacker.

I have successfully downgraded and restored from a back up I did two weeks ago. My apps all load quickly, no crashing, typing works again and Maps finds me every time and updates very fast. At some point in the future, I’ll upgrade to the iPhone 4.

While I’m not a huge kei$ha fan, I love the mash up of all the old Star Trek episodes.

We cancelled our land line in the beginning of May, bringing us to just using our cell phones. After reading a friend’s experience with the new AT&T MicroCell, we decided it was a good option for us. Even though we live close to the interstate and in a city area, we still have mediocre coverage inside our home.

The MicroCell is $149.00 as a single cost. It uses you’re existing minutes and hooks up to your internet connection which does not have to be an AT&T specific connection. We have Comcast and it’s hooked up via the cable modem. The setup does take about an hour for it to register and set up the MicroCell to be a tower in your home. It’s secured and only available to the numbers you program into it via the website. You can add up to 10 lines to be authorized. Only 4 can be on it at the same time though.

The Pros:

• We now have 5 bars of service everywhere in our home, even in the basement two levels down and in the parking lot
• We were able to fully get rid of a land line and save $80.00 a month

The Cons:

• Recently I’ve had a call get dropped
• We have a slight echo/delay on some calls
• We’ve also recently had static / air noise on calls, the other user doesn’t hear it but we do

I knew there was a reason I waited to get a remote starter. I want this!

It was probably earlier this past year I saw someone post their daily photo with DailyBooth. I didn’t think much of it, but I’ve seen more people posting lately and then today Gary Vaynerchuk’s job posting even mentioned it as a possible requirement. Since my thing is photography, I figured I’d give it a shot. Might also be a good reminder for myself to see the progress of losing weight this year.

Friend me up if you’re on there.

Earlier last week on Twitter I saw someone post a link to Mockingbird. I have enough trouble convincing project managers and sales people that wireframes are worth the time, so anyway to do them faster and easier I’m all for.

I signed up for an account and laid out a sample page. The first thing that really impressed me was the complete lack of any lag. I figured using a browser interface it would have some delay but there was none. The app also uses your normal keyboard shortcuts. Just clicking delete really deletes it from the page. They have a nice library of default items including social media icons.

The other feature that I really liked was the ability to Share. It generates a special link that you can then send to someone and they get a viewable version of the wireframe.

I still need to play with it more and try some actual projects in it. I’d recommend going to their site and trying it out.

Americans have access to:

• 1,000,000,000,000 web pages
• 65,000 iPhone app
• 10,500 radio stations
• 5,500 magazines
• 200+ cable tv networks

Pretty impressive numbers. The folks at XPLANE™ have created another video educating and inspiring the community. This is from their Did You Know series.

We forget sometimes how much things have changed and what kind of future possibly lays before us. The power of the computers in our pockets is incredible in relation to just 20 years ago.

I’m toying with the idea of forwarding my .Mac/.Me email account to my GMail account. The reason being is I’m getting a lot more email into the .Mac account it’s getting kind of hard to keep up with it via Mail. I’ve got a good system of organization but I’m duplicating between my GMail account and the .Mac account. It seems crazy when the content coming in overlaps so much.

The other reason behind the move is, I’m really not impressed with the MobileMe website. It never fails, I delete things over there and it doesn’t move it. Also I find their website very slow, no matter what browser I’m using.

My third reason is I’m not as tethered/addicted to getting my emails instantly. I love the .Me push IMAP, but really I don’t have anything coming in that a search 15 minutes from now won’t catch.

Recently GMail left Beta, offered Offline options (yay!) and now offers a slew of Labs extras, like Undo Send.

I have also since setup GoogleApps for my personal domain, which is doing a wonderful job filtering out an incredible amount of spam, from two email accounts Craig and I have had since 1999.

My only hesitation is that I’ve always ran into issues getting iCal notifications to play nice with my GMail account and really that could be eliminated by going to Google Calendar.

Question to the community:

Have you been in this dilemna? Which way did you decide? Any issues I’m not considering?