iPhone 5 lightning cable problems

There have been reports that the new cable for the iPhone 5, called Lightning, has been causing problems for some people. As this report describes, the USB end of the cable fits too tightly in some USB ports and it just locks in place, becoming very hard or impossible to remove.

It's not clear how widespread this problem is, but I've not had any problems with the iPhone 5 cable  and the USB socket on my new MacBook. However, I have noticed that the socket is very loose with some gadgets I use. Sometimes when plugging things in they aren't recognised and I have to remove them and plug them back in. I wonder whether Apple is using slightly bigger USB plugs and sockets? It shouldn't be because USB is a universal standard.

On a different, but related topic, is it always better when something is smaller, lighter and smoother? In some cases it is, but not always. A problem I have with my MacBook is that I find it very difficult to unplug from the mains socket. Different countries have different power sockets, so this may be a UK problem.

We use three-pin plugs that take quite a bit of force to insert and remove from sockets. The three-pin plug on the MacBook's power cable is smaller, lighter and smoother than most of the other plugs for electrical gadgets I use like TVs, toasters and so on. The small size and smooth shape makes it difficult to get a good enough grip on the plug to pull it out from the socket. I wouldn't mind so much if my house power sockets had on/off switches, but they don't. Unless you want something powered up 24/7 you have to pull the plug from the socket. It's really hard with the MacBook's power plug.

The iPhone 5 is even worse. I plugged it in to charge it up and when it was done I couldn't get the plug out of the power socket. I tried and gave up and left it. I came back later and tried again and after a couple of minutes of effort I managed to get it out. I nearly resorted to prising it out with a screwdriver. (Screwdrivers and power sockets don't play well together, so don't try this at home folks.)

It's a serious problem and there's no way I can use the iPhone 5 power plug as it is. Perhaps I could superglue something to the back of it to help pull it out, but I'm not sure it could withstand the force required. For the moment I can use the MacBook to charge the phone or my old iPad 2 power supply which is large, but easy to use. The iPhone 5's (UK) power plug looks great, but it certainly isn't practical.

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The downside of HD resolution screens on phones and tablets

What is with the current obsession with making devices screen sizes HD resolution with a 16:9 aspect ratio? I know that the whole point of this is so that widescreen video fits exactly on the screen and can be displayed without wasted space at the top and bottom, but it compromises everything else and I find it very irritating.

On a device that is primarily used for viewing widescreen video then a 16:9 aspect ratio is an essential feature, but mobile phones and tablets are not used just for watching videos. They are used for running apps. In fact, I would guess that watching videos is actually just a small part of the total usage of a smartphone or tablet.

The new iPhone 5 (there are many other examples) has an elongated screen that is now 16:9, which makes it very tall and narrow. Hold it sideways and it is great for watching videos, but many apps are worse off and a tall narrow screen is not as good as a squarer 4:3 aspect ratio, which is more like a book, magazine or newspaper.

In portrait mode the the iPhone 5 is just 640 pixels wide and there just isn't enough width to display some apps. Those that open a panel at the side with menu options are particularly bad. The reason they open a panel is because there isn't the width to display the menu options permanently, so it's a fudge. Hold the iPhone in landscape mode and the panel can be displayed permanently, but then the screen height is just 640 pixels and this isn't enough space to see much of the app's content. It's like looking at the app's content through a letterbox.

I find it very frustrating using apps with HD 16:9 screen ratios. The Google Nexus 7 tablet is just 720 pixels wide and in portrait mode it's OK. Turn it to landscape and the screen is very wide and not very tall. It's 720 pixels tall, which might seem better than the iPhone 5, but the device uses software buttons, so at the bottom of the screen is a strip with the home and back buttons. The app actually gets maybe 680 pixels or less. This strip across the bottom reserved for the system buttons makes the vertical resolution much smaller and so apps are even more compromised. Apps are even more letterboxed on the Google Nexus 7 because of the reserved space.

As someone who uses apps more than watching widescreen video, I want a 4:3 screen ratio so there is more space for apps to display their content. This is less than perfect for people that watch video and there isn't a screen ratio that suits everyone.

Consider this though, if the iPhone 5 or Google Nexus 7 screens were wider in portrait mode with 4:3 ratios, videos would have black bars top and bottom in landscape mode, but they would have the same physical dimensions. The length and width of the video image would be exactly the same as it is now. It's really just the psychological effect of seeing black bars that people don't like.

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Get the right iPhone 5 tariff - do the maths

The iPhone 5 will be on sale in a couple of days and the question is, which tariff should you go for? There are some surprising differences and you need to do the maths to work out which is best. I will use O2 as an example because I'm based in the UK and it's a popular mobile phone operator. I'm sure you will find similar deals in the US and elsewhere.

The tariffs are listed at the O2 website, and for a 16Gb black iPhone 5 you can get a contract with unlimited minutes, unlimited texts and 1Gb of data. It's a two year contract, so the total cost is 24 x the month tariff plus the cost of the phone. Here's how the deals work out:

£26 x 24 + £249.99 = £873.99

£31 x 24 + £199.99 = £943.99

£36 x 24 + £99.99 = £963.99

£41 x 24 + £49.99 = £1033.99

£46 x 24 + £0 = £1104.00

Each deal has the same minutes, the same messages, the same data. However, as you can see, there are large differences in the total cost. Getting a free iPhone 5 might seem like a good deal, but it is in fact the worst. The more you pay up front for the iPhone, the less you will pay in the long term.

The £26 a month tariff is clearly the cheapest, saving £230 over the free phone offer at £46 a month. You are effectively borrowing £249.99 over 24 months and paying £230 interest. That seems like a poor deal to me.

Whenever you see mobile phone deals you should always calculate the total cost over the term of the contract. The results can be surprising.

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Funny Photo Maker turns snapshots into great images

Some photographs stand out on their own and they are simply brilliant. The colour, the lighting, the scene - everything is perfect. If only all photos were like this. We tend to take dozens or even hundreds of photos of our children, pets and other common subjects and when you are showing them off to your friends and relatives you can see that 'Oh no, not another photo album' expression on their face. They may smile, but they are also grinding their teeth.

Funny Photo Maker for Windows might make the experience more enjoyable for them. As you can guess from the name, the software makes funny photos. It's best with people and pets rather than landscapes and it inserts your photo into another photo. Here is an example:

That's me in the photo frame. There is also a dog holding a shredded photo, a tiger chewing a photo, billboards in the street, the side of a lorry on the highway, a shop window display, a bus stop advert, Dollar bills, posters like Iron Man, Lord of the Rings, Ghost Rider and others, and many more templates too numerous to list. There are about 150 different templates according to the developer.

The software is very easy to use and it automatically loads your photos from the Pictures folder and adds them to a tray on the left. On the right are all the templates on tabs. You just click a photo, click a template and that's it. Click the Output tab, click Export and save your image.

It's brilliant and it is free. Go and get Funny Photo Maker.

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Dual booting issues on the Apple Mac

Time Machine on the Apple Mac is a very useful feature if you have a spare USB disk drive. It makes backups in the background and it runs every hour, so you will never lose any of your valuable files. However, I came across something really odd the other day.

I have a new Macbook and I got it a couple of weeks before Mountain Lion came out, so it had Lion on the hard disk. Later I created a new partition and installed Mountain Lion on it so I have both versions of OS X. The disk is quite big at 500Gb, so two 250Gb partitions is fine for me.

This has had some unexpected effects. I expected the two partitions to be completely separate as they are in Windows. You can install two versions of Windows on a PC in two disk partitions and use them independently. In some respects though, OS X doesn't treat the two versions as separate and both partitions are used. It treats the other partition as part of the system.

Here is an example. I installed some software on Lion on partition 1. If I boot up with Mountain Lion on partition 2 and right click a file to open it in an application, apps that are installed in Lion on the other partition are on the list. I can open a file in an application that isn't even installed in Mountain Lion and it runs from the other partition. If I have installed a newer version of the app on Mountain Lion on partition 2 it offers me the choice of running the new version of the app on the Mountain Lion partition or the older one on the Lion partition. That's interesting.

One thing that really confused me is that I tried to set up Time Machine for the first time on Mountain Lion. It's new, so I have only used 52Gb of the disk. I had a free 128Mb partition on a USB drive that I thought I would use for the backup. However, Time Machine wouldn't start and it just displayed a message saying that there wasn't enough room. How can 52Gb on the Mac's disk not fit into a 128Gb USB drive? After a while it occurred to me that it wanted to back up Lion on partition 1 too, because adding up the disk usage of both partitions matched the disk space it said it needed. On giving it a larger 400Gb partition on the USB drive to back up to, it ran fine.

This is interesting, but it also raises the question of whether I need to run Time Machine in Lion as well as Mountain Lion, wether they should both use the same backup disk, and whether both are compatible. Will Lion Time Machine update or corrupt a Mountain Lion Time Machine backup?

I don't need to backup that often (I wish Time Machine was more configurable and you could make daily backups instead of hourly ones), so I think I'll switch off Time Machine in Lion. Backups will be made when I run Mountain Lion. Another option is to click the Options button in each Time Machine and exclude the other partition from backups. Then each Time Machine would only back up its own partition. I think switching off Lion Time Machine is the best option for me.

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Microsoft SkyDrive for Android

If you have an Android smartphone or a tablet then Google Drive is the natural place to store your online files. You get 5Gb of online storage space in which you can store any files you like. However, it is not as useful as it could be and it is geared more to the online storage of Google Docs files. It does little else apart from store your files.

Microsoft SkyDrive is actually better for online storage and this isn't simply because you get more space (a couple extra gigabytes), but the way it handles media files is better. SkyDrive for Android (search for it in the Google Play store on your device), has been given a Windows 8-style interface with a blue title bar and files and folders displayed as tiles. It is clean and easy to use.

If you tap a Microsoft Office file it is downloaded and then displayed using whatever facilities your device has. There is a built in document viewer in Android, but I use Kingsoft Office. It is a free office suite in the Google Play store that reads/writes MS Office files.

It's really media files where SkyDrive scores over Google Drive and photos and videos are shown as thumbnail images. You can create folders to store your photos in the Pictures folder and they appear as thumbnails with a caption. You can tap a photo and it displays full screen, then swipe left and right to browse through the images. It is just like having the photo album on your device, but it uses online storage space and not your device's.

It downloads videos and music rather than streaming them, so it's less useful for these, but I'm going to use SkyDrive to store all my photos. You should check it out.

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Chromium vs Chrome web browsers

Everyone knows about Google's web browser, Chrome, but there is another web browser called Chromium. It has a similar name and it even looks similar and works in a similar way. What is the difference between Chrome and Chromium?

It is easy to see why people get confused between the two browsers because they are both basically the same. I've heard Windows users talk about using Chromium for web browsing when I'm almost certain they are not using Chromium, but have Google Chrome instead. When using Linux you might go to the package manager and search for Chrome to install it and instead it lists Chromium. Ubuntu software Centre does this. What should you do? Let's look at the differences.

Chromium is a project to create an open source web browser that is fast, reliable, secure and uses the latest web standards.

Google takes the Chromium web browser, customises it slightly and calls it Chrome. So Chrome is Chromium with a few extra features and some modified settings. You can find a detailed description of the differences between the two browsers here, but to save you the trouble, here are the main points.

Google adds Flash to Chrome. This is so that users don't have to go and find the Flash plugin and install it or keep installing updates every time it changes. Flash is used for a lot of online video content (although this is changing) and a few other things. Google adds support for PDF files so that you can view them in the browser without having to find and install some other utility like Adobe Reader/Acrobat. Google adds support for AAC, MP3, Vorbis and Theora audio and video file formats. Google tests Chrome more thoroughly than Chromium too. There are some other minor differences, but not that you will notice.

I can't see any point in running Chromium on Windows or the Mac, but if you want to, go to download-chromium.appspot.com to download it. There is a case for using it in Linux distros where you want everything you use to be open source though. The plugins Google adds are not open source, but they make the browser much more fun. Chrome is available from www.google.com/chrome of course.

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iFighter 1945 for Android

If you like old fashioned shoot-'em-ups you should take a look at I fighter. I've been playing it on the Google Nexus 7 tablet and it is a lot of fun.

This free game is a vertical scroller and your plane (there are several to choose from), is at the bottom of the screen. There are four different control methods and the simplest is to have automatic guns that shoot all the time and to control the plane by dragging a finger around the screen. You can move anywhere and you need to because wave after wave of enemy planes swoop in from any side, even the bottom.

Sometimes your mission is over land and sometimes it is over the sea. Tanks, guns, ships and other enemies are a constant threat. It is a fast paced game that is hectic, but fun with bullet flying everywhere. You can call up a bomber too. There are the usual boss enemies that require multiple hits.

If you have an Android smartphone with a large screen or a tablet you should try it. Just search for iFighter in the Google Play store.

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