To date almost all problems with iPhone reliability have been blamed on AT&T  Noccera makes the argument that many of the iPhone reliability issues are actually the result of the poorly designed software in the iPhone.

Mr. Vogelstein went on to note in his article that the troubles that ensued — the dropped phone calls, the frequent network crashes and so on — were not entirely AT&T’s fault. His Apple sources, he wrote, confirmed to him that “the software running the iPhone’s main radio, known as baseband, was full of bugs and contributed to the much-decried dropped calls.” But since Apple walks on water, and AT&T doesn’t, it was easy for Apple to place all the blame on its wireless carrier.

Noccera goes on to explain that Verizon’s commitment to Android is not likely to wane simply from the launch of the iPhone as Android OS phones are outselling iOS phones.  We would also suggest that the profitability on Android OS phones may be greater for Verizon as the variety of device makers allow the carrier to have negotiating power.

According to Gartner, in the second quarter of 2009, Android sales constituted 1.8 percent of all smartphones sold, compared with Apple’s 13 percent. By the second quarter of 2010 — just a year later — Android was actually outselling Apple, 17.2 percent to 14.2 percent. This must have been a shock to the system at Apple — it was being outdone by an uncool competitor.

And he concludes with:

Mainly, though, the Verizon Wireless subscriber is simply used to a different kind of experience. If they all migrate immediately to the iPhone, then truly I will raise the white flag. If they hang back, then it will signal that there are still some people who prefer something that works over something that dazzles.

We have always seen the iPhone as cool piece of technology but not exactly the best option for most wireless users.  Yes, it does have a dizzying array of applications but how many apps does a phone user actually use and what trade-offs does the user have to make to get those apps?  When we analyze those questions along with reliability and battery life our conclusion is that most users will be better served with an Android or BlackBerry based phone.

That said, the Verizon iPhone will not have any of Verizon’s advanced network functionality. This is especially interesting seeing how Verizon has been running an ad campaign promoting their higher speed network.

The development of a CDMA (Verizon’s network technology) iPhone was not an insignificant undertaking. It’s interesting that they did not include the higher speed technology.

The result is that consumers purchasing the Verizon iPhone will be locked into a 2-year agreement with a phone lacking the fastest data transfer rate.

From www.withings.com

Monitoring blood pressure is a critical activity in monitoring patients with many chronic diseases as changes can be a sign of a worsening condition.  The better medical professionals can monitor this data the better they can proactively treat patients.  While there is debate about the economic value of proactive treatments the benefit to the individual patient are without debate.

Imagining the future we can see this same idea being applied to glucose monitoring.

By matching these technologies to a mobile device the patient already owns medical professionals have an easy way to remind patients what they should do and constantly gathering the data in real-time without any additional steps for the patient.

Too often we seek entirely new ideas when trying to find innovation.  Most of the technological innovation we’ll see – especially that which will improve our lives – will be this type of hybrid technology combining existing products with the ability to think and communicate.

Original source: http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/09/smart-blood-pressure-monitor-reports-your-readings-to-iphone-video/

This particular setup utilizes a number of port addresses (not our preferred setup but it is how the client wanted it) to support additional applications with their SSL certificate.  This in essence allowed the SSL certificate for remote.domain.com to serve multiple sites in IIS 7 by using ports such as remote.domain.com:5444, remote.domain.com:6545, etc.

After renewing the certificate these sites were showing as having an expired certificate in the browser – not an ideal scenario (we tried clearing cache/history with no luck).  We checked in IIS 7 and saw that both the new certificate and the expired certificate were showing (IIS 7 –> Server Name –> Server Certificates).  After making an additional backup of the expired certificate we used the Remove action to delete the expired certificate and restarted the server.  Unfortunately the issue of the expired certificate continued to haunt the browsers.

So it was time to do some research.  The blog post at http://edbartram.posterous.com/renewing-ssl-certificate-on-iis-7-woes was similar to our problem but the solution reported, complete removal of the certificate, was likely overkill (as the author, http://twitter.com/edbartram, admits) and since our problem was slightly different might not really be the solution we needed.  What the author did mention was the idea rebounding the certificate to port 443.  Ah, we knew that 443 was properly bound (from our test of remote.domain.com) but we wondered whether in the process of renewal of the certificate did the bindings get messed up.  In IIS we selected the appropriate site and click on Bindings.

We selected the appropriate site binding (in this case an HTTPS binding with a particular port number) and clicked edit.

Sure enough, the Site Binding showed “Not Selected” for the SSL Certificate.

A quick selection of the appropriate certificate (and a view of the certificate to ensure we were binding the new certificate) and we were good to go.  Checked out the browsers and everything was working properly – no IIS restart required.  Went through doing the same on each site and everything is working correctly.

Our guess is that since we used the SBS Console to process the renewal it did not process the renewal in exactly the same manner as if you perform the renewal in IIS.  Thus while the SBS Console got the binding for 443 correct it did so in a way that killed the other bindings.  We still don’t know why IIS was serving the old certificate if it was not bound to the site and we had removed the certificate in IIS.  Those will have to remain mysteries until someone decides to enlighten us or we run across this issue again.

Many people are not aware of how the Facebook Share feature works and this often leads to a poor appearance of the shared link.  We have all seen a poor quality shared link on Facebook.  You know, one where the title and description don’t really fit and the thumbnail is either missing or irrelevant to the links content.  All of this can be avoided by adding a few lines of META tags to your pages.

Here is a very simple example of the power of using META tags to provide information to Facebook.

No META Tags: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2
Fwww.thebrysoncondos.com%2Finfoupdate%2Findex.html

META Tags: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2F
www.thebrysoncondos.com%2Finfoupdate%2Findex-facebook.html

How did we make this change?  It was as easy as adding three META tags to the <head> element of the web page.

<meta property="og:title" content="Bryson Information Forms" />

<meta property="og:description" content="This page contains links to
the allow the forms and information necessary to be a properly
registered unit owner or resident at the Bryson at Woodland Park
Condominium." />

<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.TheBrysonCondos.com
/infoupdate/imgs/BrysonLogo.png" />

By adding the META tags we are able to customize the information that Facebook displays when a page is shared.  Complete documentation, including how to embed media, is available at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share.

Recently Facebook has been encouraging developers to utilize the Recommend button instead of the Share button.  At the current time we recommend developers tick with the recommend button in most cases as it allows the user to comment which can drive additional social interaction from your user community.