Perspectives

I never really wanted the iphone. My Ipod experiences were not excitingly great. I didnt like the Mac all that much other than the hardware and I was/am exceedingly in love with the freedom & choice of open source.

But, few things captures a woman’s mind as iphone. And I have two women at home to impress. And so, I have two iphones . But the problem? I have two iphones to fix.

Try doing something, anything that Apple does not prescribe. I shall tell you a few and I promise this will not include the standard crib about Jail breaking, unlocking, video recording and the likes.

• Transfer contacts from iphone to a reasonably dumb phone that cannot be connected to a computer. Try it.
• Send a file from computer or another phone to the iphone over bluetooth.
• Connect the iphone to a linux computer and try syncing photos or music.
• Try exporting/backing up text messages to another phone.
• Try to sync only your photos and not everything else.
• Try to manage two iphones with one laptop.
• Add a “+91″ to the front of the number you just typed in the phone dialer without deleting anything.
• Type any setting information, all in caps (say the APN of your cell network)
• Copy paste text into SMS app and try to edit it.

Obviously, this is a list of cribs at the top of my mind. Also, there are solutions to all the above, but with headache.

Stay away from Apple products if you want to do stuff with your gadgets. When they say, buy an Apple product and forget it, they literally mean it.

After close to two years of ignoring my Video ipod, I took it out today to get it back to life. I always had a hunch that it was a hardware issue, but I didnt want to decide so quickly.

The basic problem being, as soon as I power up the ipod, it will show me the “Language” screen and as soon as I try to do anything with it, it will get stuck. And all I got to do now is to reboot/reset it by now famous “holding the Menu and center buttons” for a while.

I tried updating the firmware, formatting, restoring etc. but nothing would work. Then, I decided to install linux on my ipod thinking something might be wrong with the firmware partition of the hard drive.

Atfer spending a few hours, I realised that linux was getting stuck as well. Now, I gave up trying to be nice to the ipod. I ripped open the thing by after reading an article and watching a few videos. Although, I scratched the top case a little bit, it opened up nicely and I pulled out the Toshiba MK3008GAL hard drive out. I am convinced that the hard drive has conked off, but I can’t really prove it.

Then, I started hunting around to see if there are any suppliers of the hard drive in Bangalore. None. Very disappointed. I have sent a mail to a couple of folks from Good-Hardware-old China and found another reseller from Ebay. I have shot them a couple of emails to ask them about taxes and import duties etc. Will post an update once I get a hand to the hard drive.

So, If you have a dead ipod and you are around here in Bangalore, let me know and I will help you with it.