How to choose the best quality color mod parts for your iPhone 4 / 4S

Posted By Ray Nicolini

Even though colored iPhone parts aren’t available from Apple doesn’t mean you can’t find good ones if you know what you’re looking for.

If you have an iPhone 4 and you want to swap out the standard Apple black or white backplate for something more colorful — like red or blue — it can be a challenge to find the best, high quality parts. Backplate swaps especially are an easy DIY project, but you want to pay careful attention to the supplier, the materials they’re using, the specific model of iPhone 4 you’re ordering for (Rogers/AT&T/GSM is different than Verizon/Sprint/CDMA), and that you have all the tools you need for the job.

Only order iPhone 4 parts from a reputable supplier

Make sure the back is made of glass, not plastic

As tempting as it can be to order colored parts on eBay or Amazon because of the low price tag, keep in mind that it’ll cost you more to replace your iPhone 4 if faulty parts cause something to go wrong. Spending a couple extra bucks for parts that are high quality and backed with a warranty is always your best bet.

Not to say there aren’t some reputable sellers on both websites. Just make sure you’re reading comments and customer reviews. If you see negative ones that should be a red flag and you should steer away from that seller altogether.

The best place to get colored or replacement parts is from a supplier that specializes in iPhone or iPad repair. I use eTech Parts for almost all my repair needs. They offer a warranty that I can pass down to my clients and are always willing to answer any question I may have regarding the quality of their merchandise.

Some suppliers only sell colored parts to businesses and repair shops. If you plan on ordering colored parts from a repair center or online supplier like PXLFIX in the form of a DIY kit, don’t be afraid to ask them who they get their parts from and if they back them with a warranty. If they are hesitant to give you that information, I’d probably find somewhere else to order them.

What to look for when buying colored parts

Several websites offer a variety of DIY color kits. There are certain things you’re going to want to look for before ordering so you’re sure you get the best parts you can.

Backplate checklist

If you are DIY replacing a back panel, you’ll want to make sure you pay close attention to the following when buying parts.

• Make sure the back is made of glass and not plastic.
• Order the correct back replacement as GSM and CDMA backs are different. The hinges are placed differently and they are not interchangeable. This goes for both a back and a front assembly.

Inspect the screw holes carefully. They should be metal, not plastic.

• Check the screw holes on back replacements and make sure they are assembled from metal. These should ALWAYS be metal, not plastic as shown in the picture above. It’s much higher quality and decreases the chance that they will strip over time. The back I’ve pictured above with plastic screw holes was stripped after removing the screws only 2-3 times.
• Watch out for aluminum or brushed metal backs. They can mess with your reception.

Front assembly checklist

If you’re swapping out or repairing an iPhone 4 screen, you’ll definitely want to make sure your parts are high quality as you’ll be ordering a whole new digitizer and LCD assembly.

Make sure you inspect the brackets and that they are metal, not plastic

• Just as with the back, the brackets “are” different for CDMA and GSM models. Make sure you’re ordering the correct part.
• There are brackets that run along both sides of the assembly. These should be made of metal, not plastic. You have to screw these down with washers and plastic is brittle and normally too thick. You’ll have issues getting the screen to sit flush.

Inspect all sensors and make sure they are similar to your stock iPhone 4 parts

• Check sensors and make sure they look how they’re supposed to. A good guide is that any colored parts should have visible sensors similar to the stock white iPhone 4. If they look different than that, don’t buy them.

What to look for after you have your parts

Once you receive your colored replacement parts you’ll want to check all of the following before attempting a full color swap or any modification.

Inspect all cables and make sure they are the same as stock iPhone 4 digitizer parts

• Check the sensors and cables on the front digitizer assembly. A good way to gauge the quality of colored parts is to examine the cables and sensors on your stock digitizer assembly to the new parts. Make sure they feel similar in thickness and that the sensors are located in the same spots. It is common that replacement fronts won’t come with the plastic front-facing camera ring or the speaker mesh. That’s okay. You’ll just remove them from your stock assembly and place them on your colored assembly.
• Also check the back panel for blemishes on the lens cover. Run your finger over it and make sure it sits flush with the glass backing. This is a common problem with many knock offs. They are either scratched or don’t sit flush. This will effect image quality greatly. Most quality parts will come with a plastic protector on the inside and outside of the glass panel to protect the lens.

Wrap-up

Even though colored iPhone parts aren’t available from Apple doesn’t mean you can’t find good ones if you know what you’re looking for. The ones I order for my clients are just as good as the OEM parts Apple uses in most regards. I just made sure I chose wisely when selecting a supplier.

As long as you do the same, you’ll be sporting a colored iPhone that should serve you well for a long time to come. If you’re considering a color swap and need detailed walkthroughs on how to replace your front assembly, rear panel, and home button – be sure to check out our guides below (CDMA guides coming soon).

And if you decide it’s not a repair you’re comfortable performing on your own, you can always contact PXLFIX, or similar online source, about a mail-in color swap.

Additional resources

• How to replace an iPhone 4 rear casing
• How to DIY replace a GSM iPhone 4 front assembly
• How to DIY replace a GSM iPhone 4 home button
• iMore DIY and mod forums

source iMore.com

Messages replaces iChat, public beta available today (Updated)

Posted By Ray Nicolini


Apple on Thursday released a public beta of Messages, its next-generation messaging app for the Mac that will be a part of Mac OS X Mountain Lion. It lets you send and receive iMessages, just like iOS devices running iOS 5. Now you can "text" chat via iMessage with the iPhones, iPads and iPod touches in you life.Note that when installed, Messages replaces iChat, but not its functionality. You'll still have chat support for your AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Jabber accounts. As with iOS, Messages lets you see when your partner is typing via an ellipsis animation. Messages also supports drag-and-drop support for sharing photos and videos.This is a beta build, so expect changes before the final version is released. Lion users can try it out. Note that iot requires Mac OS 10.7.3. Have fun!


Update: The beta release seems to be temporarily unavailable. Apple notes: "Our apologies but there was an unexpected error with the application. This problem has been noted, and an email has been sent to the administrators. Please check back in a few hours to try the download again."

BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Walkthrough With RIM’s Jeff Gadway

Posted By Ray Nicolini

by Ronen Halevy via BerryReview.com

I had a chance to sit down with Jeff Gadway, Senior Brand & Marketing Communications Manager @ RIM, this week to demo what is coming in PlayBook OS 2.0. Now that the launch is right around the corner it is nice to see where the software stands and how it works. You will all have this new OS update in your hands very soon (RIM cannot confirm a date) and try it for yourself but until then I will try to focus on what I saw in the latest build. First things first PlayBook OS 2.0 will be a ~400-500MB update based on if you are upgrading from the latest v1.0 or just turning on a new PlayBook you just purchased.

 

Gadway let us know that there are three main focus points of PlayBook OS 2.0. They are Communications, Productivity, and Connections. One of the main things added in PlayBook OS 2.0 is the communications portion but it ties in well with the rest of the OS bundling in functionality from many of RIM’s acquisitions including Gist and Tungle. The three main new apps in PlayBook OS 2.0 are the Unified Mailbox, Calendar, and Contacts application that are all native. It allows you to connect one of each of your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts and multiple email and exchange accounts. The most beautiful part is how RIM pulls it all together into one seemless mailbox. It allows you to both read your Facebook and Twitter messages and compose them from one place. You can multi-task by having multiple emails in your compose screen that you can flip between.

What I really was impressed with is that RIM seems to be focusing back on the basics that made BlackBerry great. I am talking about productivity. Gadway called it the BlackBerry Flow where RIM makes everything simpler. I simply compared BlackBerry Flow to the intuitiveness of how when you open an email on a BlackBerry smartphone the first option in the menu is reply. Once you click on that on the next screen the main option is send. In the PlayBook unified mailbox and the other applications this was clearly visible in how all the action buttons are on the right and left borders of the screen which is naturally where your hands sit. They also added quite a bit of HTML editing for email so you can bold, change fonts, colors, and other things when composing an email. Even cooler is the ability to edit email threads inline so you can respond inline! RIM also created nice connectivity between the apps which truly makes it feel like the PlayBook is getting the BlackBerry trademark productivity.

 

When it comes to the calendar app I was really impressed with what RIM did together with TAT and Tungle. The calendaring experience is very close to what you see in Outlook but with way more visual flair. For example, on the main month view screen you can see the days you are busier because the date gets bigger the more appointments you have. Also they have a little bar by each day that shows what time of day your appointments are based on a 24 hour bar. The day view lets you easily hold down an item and move it around along with inviting people to meetings and coordinating. It also has a cool view showing you who you are meeting with today. The most impressive view for me was the week view which showed you the whole week on one screen and then let you expand each day separately. The visual elements here are beautiful! Also worth noting is that if you pull down the menu bar it will show you your multiple calendars like Facebook, Gmail, Exchange, and even a local calendar and you can toggle on and off which ones you want to see.

Now this all ties back to the contacts app that is built dynamically for you from the accounts you registered to your PlayBook. It will pull in data for all your contacts and even reach out online to find more information. You will see which contacts are work contacts and then you can drill down even further with information it gets from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, articles about their company, their location, their latest updates… This is also integrated with the updated Video Chat app which gives you a presence identifier and automatically checks if a user has a PlayBook and tells you by showing a green icon by their name if they are online. You can click on any little detail in the contact and it will launch the respective app like a twitter account will launch Twitter (not an app) and a video chat ID will launch video chat. This all becomes even more useful when you are using the Video Chat app since it integrates your contact list directly into the app and automatically recognizes users. The interface also got a nice overhaul in 2.0.

Another huge update RIM has added in OS 2.0 is a new predictive keyboard. We have seen videos of this before hand but it really does simply predict what you are going to type next. You can write whole conversations just by typing the word “I” and then it will predict what you want to write next. This is impressive because it learns from your use so if you usually type I am coming home it will learn to predict that instead of the defaults. This is also an interesting new place for bridge to come in for users who like physical keyboards on their BlackBerry. You can now use your BlackBerry as both a physical keyboard and mouse for your PlayBook. That means you can use the touchscreen to move around the PlayBook screen and the keyboard on your smartphone to type on your PlayBook.

The Bridge feature in general got a bunch of new features. RIM showed off some of them like the new Open on PlayBook option by showing a picture you have on your phone on the PlayBook but this goes way further. Say for example you have an open email on your BlackBerry smartphone you can Open on to your PlayBook and it will open it up through the bridge. The same goes for things like PowerPoint attachments and Excel files. Pretty cool right? The one thing I was sort of hoping RIM had solved would be the potential for disconnect between your Smartphone and PlayBook. For example, if you read an email or change a calendar entry on your BlackBerry Smartphone it will not be able to reconcile that over the Bridge but would rely on Gmail or exchange to propagate that between the two devices.

Also worth noting are updated Documents to Go app along with other additions like a video store. App World has also been updated with a new look but it did not get the “Update All” button that I was hoping for. RIM has also updated the PlayBook OS with a Demo mode that cycles videos and tutorials so that when they are displayed at stores they will put their best foot forward. Any user can access this new mode. They are also putting out a new Discover Now 2.0 app that will help new PlayBook users discover OS 2.0 and its new features.

 

All in all I cannot wait to get PlayBook OS 2.0 on my device. This just gives us a taste of what RIM has in store for BlackBerry 10 and the phones running QNX. These apps also make the swipe left and right between apps gesture way more useful to switch between an email you are composing and your calendar. At launch there will not be a notes and tasks app but it looks like they are coming. RIM is also scheduled to release the PlayBook administration piece of BES/Fusion this quarter so hopefully that will add even more goodies.

        

I also asked Gadway if RIM is going to keep up on their promise for incremental updates instead of waiting for big splashes like they did with PlayBook OS 2.0. He explained that RIM did it this time since the different native apps needed to be interconnected first and could not be released separately. In the future RIM plans on being somewhere between the Apple approach of OS updates once a year and others that are fragmented with OS releases constantly.

I can’t wait to get to play with this for a few days on the final build once it is officially released!

How to get started with iPhone photography

Posted By Ray Nicolini

Via iMore.com

With the new iPhone photography — or iPhoneography —  we have a lot of new iPhones users, and burgeoning photographers joining us. So, Leanna and I thought it would be a good idea to team up, take a moment, and go over the basics so that everyone gets up to speed just as quickly as possible. If you’re new to the iPhone or new to taking pictures, here’s everything you need to know to get started. Bookmark it. If you’re already an expert, save the link for a friend, and jump right into our iPhoneography Forum and share your work!

The iPhone 4S camera

The iPhone 4S has an 8 megapixel camera. A megapixel is 1 million pixels, so that means the iPhone 4S camera captures images that are 3264×2448 pixels in size. That’s enough to print an 8×10 picture at 300 dots per inch (dpi), or fairly high quality. (Low quality color images print at 150-300dpi, high quality at 300-600+ dpi)

The aperture on the iPhone 4S camera is f/2.4. The f stands for “focal ratio”. The lower the aperture, the more light can be let in so you can get better pictures in a wider range of settings, and the better depth-of-field can be obtained (where the subject is in focus, and elements in front of and behind the subject are blurred). The iPhone 4S also has 5 elements in the lens, helping to keep photos sharp.

An infrared (IR) filter helps produce more accurate color, and combines with software that optimizes dynamic range and white balance. So, you basically have a camera that could previously only be found on a dedicated point-and-shoot, built right into your phone.

Quick Camera access

Quickly launch your iPhone camera by double clicking home then tapping the camera button

With iOS 5, Apple’s made it easier and faster than ever to access your camera when you need it, even when your iPhone is locked, and even if you have a passcode set.

• Double click the Home button
• Tap the Camera button

That’s it. Two clicks and a tap and you’re in the Camera App and ready to shoot.

The Camera app

Tap the Camera icon on your iPhone Home screen to launch the Camera app. The Camera app is the built-in, default way to take photos on your iPhone. Even in other apps, like Messages, if you tap the camera button to take a photo, you’ll be taken into the Camera app.

The Camera app opens to a live-view screen, similar to the LCD display you see on a point-and-shoot or DSLR camera. Controls are available right on the screen to take a photo, set the flash, access advanced options, and switch to the front-facing camera. Other controls are also available, including a hardware shutter and digital zoom. We’ll walk you through all of them.

Geo-tagging

When you first launch the Camera, you'll be asked for permission to use your current Location for geotagging

The first time you launch the Camera app, it will ask for your permission to use your current Location. That’s because, if you let it, your iPhone will store the GPS coordinates of every photo you take, so you can always easily refer back to it later. This can be great for keeping track of vacation shots, but not so great if you’re posting pictures online and don’t want the entire internet to know your address.

Whether you choose to enable geo-tagging for now or not, you can always change your mind later.

Taking a photo

To take a photo, either tap the Camera button or click the volume up control

There are two ways to take a photo with the Camera app. Both of them will fire the shutter and save a picture to your Camera Roll library.

1. Tap the Camera button on the live view screen
2. Click the volume up hardware button on the side of your iPhone

Bonus tip: If your iPhone headset has a volume up button, you can use it to take pictures remotely!

Pinch to Zoom

Pinch to zoom activates the digital zoom, and shows you the zoom slider

The iPhone has a mediocre digital zoom but if you absolutely have to zoom in, it can be very slightly better than nothing.

• Touch your thumb and forefinger to the screen and pinch them together to zoom in.
• Spread them apart to zoom back out.

Once you’ve activated the zoom feature, a slider will appear giving you linear control, if you prefer it.

Macro

You can automatically take macro shots by getting in close... though the focus seems glitchy on close ups

The iPhone will automatically adjust for macro photos. Just bring the camera close to the object you want to shoot and take the picture.

Note: There appears to be a glitch in iOS 5 that causes problems focusing extremely close for macro photos. It locks for a moment, then blurs again. Hopefully Apple is fixing this for the next update.

Changing auto-focus and auto-exposure

To focus and set exposure on an object, just tap on it. The square indicates the current target.

The iPhone camera has automatic focus, exposure, and facial recognition. It will always try to take the best possible photo it can, but it may not always know which area of the photo you want to target.

Changing the target is simple.

• Tap the screen

That’s it. Any area you tap will be surrounded by a white square and your iPhone will automatically refocus and re-balance the exposure for that area.

If your iPhone detects a face — or up to 10 faces — it will put a green square around it and automatically refocus and optimize the image around the face.

Locking auto-focus/auto-exposure

Sometimes the auto-focus and auto-exposure on the iPhone is more blessing than curse. For example, when there’s a lot of movement, or when the center of the photo you want to take is exceptionally bright or dark. When that happens, you can lock both the auto-focus and auto-white balance so that, when you move the camera around, they no longer change.

• Place your camera one the area that has the focus and exposure you want to lock onto to
• Tap the square to make sure the focus and white balance are set.
• Hold the square with your finger until it turns blue and pulsates.

The words AE/AF Lock will appear at the bottom the screen to confirm you’ve done it correctly. Move the camera and take your photos without worrying about the auto-focus or auto-exposure balance any more.

To remove the AR/AF Lock, just tap the screen outside the square.

Setting the flash

To toggle the LED flash between On, Auto, and Off, tap the current setting at the top left of the live screen

Your iPhone has an LED Flash that can be set to off, auto, and on. It’s not a great flash and as will any point-and-shoot camera, light is your friend — especially lot of daylight. If you’re in a really dark place, however, and really want or need a picture, it’s easy to turn the flash on.

• Tap the Flash button at the top left of the live view screen.
• Tap the On button to turn the flash on, or the **Auto button* to put it into automatic mode.

Taking HDR photos

To enable High Dynamic Range, tap Options, then toggle HDR to On.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and involves taking a series of pictures, one right after the other, both slightly overexposed and slightly underexposed, and combining them together to reveal more light and shadow information than a standard single-exposure photo would allow. So basically, you can see detail in the bright sky and in the shadow under the tree, rather than having one blown out or the other lost to black.

• Tap the Options button at the top center of the live view screen.
• Slide the HDR toggle to On.

The bottom of the screen will show HDR so you’ll know it’s enabled.

Note: The multiple exposures take a short amount of time to combine, so after you take an HDR photo you’ll see a your iPhone say “Saving HDR”. If you need to take a lot of photos quickly, you’ll want to make sure HDR is set to Off.

An example of a regular vs. HDR photo, with the HDR photo on the right revealing far greater detail in the sky

Displaying the grid

The grid allows you to use the "rule of thirds" to better compose your photos

The grid is useful to help you align your photographs and achieve better compositions. For example, by using the “rule of thirds”.

• Tap the Options button at the top center of the live view screen.
• Slide the Grid toggle to On.

Two sets of vertical crossed by two sets of horizontal lines will divide your screen, and you’ll be ready to compose your shot.

Camera Roll and Photo Stream

Photo Stream is a great way to backup and instantly get all your photos onto all your Apple devices... just handle with discretion for now.

Once you’ve taken a photo, it gets stores in your Camera Roll, and optionally your Photo Stream.

To access the Camera Roll from inside the Camera App:

• Tap the Thumbnail button next to the camera button.

To access the Camera Roll from the Home screen:

• Launch the built-in Photos app
• Tap the the Camera Roll tab.

Photo Stream is part of iCloud and keeps the most recent photos from your Camera Roll, up to 1000 of them and for up to 1 month, in a special album that’s stored up to Apple’s servers and pushed down to your other iOS 5 devices. It can also stream photos to an Apple TV 2 without keeping any local copies, and will store all your photos, without limit of number and time, in iPhoto or Aperture on Mac, and on a Windows PC.

Think of it as a photo only (no video) duplicate of all the Camera Rolls of all your iOS devices — including photos you’ve saved to the Camera Roll from email and the web — all in one place.

Unlike Camera Roll, however, you currently can’t delete photos from Photo Stream (that willchange with iOS 5.1 later this spring). That means if you take any risqué photos you don’t want store online, you’ll have to reset your entire Photo Stream via iCloud.com in order to get rid of them.

Photo management and editing

You can manage your photos, including emailing, tweeting, iMessaging, deleting, creating and filing into folders, and even basic editing like red-eye removal, rotation, cropping, and auto-ehance, right in the built-in Photos app. There are also several excellent photo editing apps in the App Store.

We’ll cover more on that in a future article. For now, we just want you to focus on taking photos.

Other Camera apps

A sampling of Martin Reisch's (@safesolvent) awe-inspiring Instagram gallery.

While the basic, built-in iPhone Camera app is all you really need to get started, there are several other well regarded Camera apps in the App Store. They typically provide more or better features than the built in app. Here are two of our current favorites.

• Instagram is a popular, free iPhone app for applying distinctive filters to your photos, squaring them, and quickly sharing them to the Instagram network, as well as via Twitter and Facebook. You can also see some amazing examples of other people’s iPhoneography. Read more – Download now
• Camera+ has a lot of great features, including separate focus and exposure settings, image stabilization, enhanced zoom, scene modes, and a bevy of sharing options. –Read more – Download now

What’s next

Now that you have a basic idea how the iPhone camera works, go shoot some photos. Shoottons of photos. Still life, portraits, landscapes, wild life, sports, anything and everything that catches your fancy. The secret to success here is definitely practice!