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The question of how well the iPhone 3G may (or may not) access and maintain a wireless connection to a 3G network remains open. Be that as it may, when you do connect to the Web or e-mail via a high-speed 3G connection, the results are impressive, blowing away - for the most part - the original iPhone's EDGE-only cellular-wireless connectivity. The problem is 3G takes a toll on the iPhone 3G's battery life. A toll that can be pretty frustrating when you go to make a phone call or are waiting to receive one, only to discover there's very little, if any, juice left to keep you going.

There are several settings you can turn off in the iPhone 3G to maximize battery life. These range from Bluetooth to GPS to Wi-Fi to...3G connectivity. How important you find any of these features depends on your personal preferences. (See here for a full list of suggestions on "The Art of iPhone Battery Life.")

Notwithstanding Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, turning off 3G is the one that should have the most immediate impact on the length of time between charges. Especially for someone - like me - who uses the iPhone primarily as an Internet-access device.

Sure, the toll on cellular-wireless data performance is going to be great. However, the more iPhone-optimized sites you access, and there are more all the time, the less noticeable the difference between EDGE and 3G.

Anyway, if you're one the people who feel they've been experiencing the 3G network performance issues with their iPhone 3G, going with EDGE exclusively may not be such a bad thing to do until the problem's been fully resolved.

See how to disable 3G in the iPhone 3G after the jump.

Author: Amy Mayer

Keeping your personal finances in order with a program like Quicken means you can tell quickly how much wriggle room you've got til your next payday. But when you're out and about and contemplating an un-planned (okay, impulse) purchase, chances are you're laptop's not handy. But your phone surely is. Enter, Quicken Beam. Sign up for the free service, and whenever you want, you send a text message and receive back your balance and your last five transactions.

 Go to www.intuitlabs.com.

 Click on "Get Beam for Free".

 Then click "go to site".

 Click Sign up (use your existing QuickBooks, Quicken.com or TurboTax login if you have one).

While Apple may not allow third-party developer's iPhone applications to run in the background - they must be open to run -some of its own software, including Safari and Mail among others, does multitask. So, as is the case with a Mac or PC, through a Force Quit for the former and Task Manager for the latter, you may want to or need to shut down Apple's own iPhone apps to make your device more responsive should performance slow down or even freeze.

Rather than a full hard reset, all you need to do is hold down the iPhone's Home button for a six seconds or so writes the iPhone Blog, however. This will open up resources and return you to the Home Screen in far less time than it takes when resetting everything through a hard reset.

As with the Mac, this procedure is referred to as a Force Quit.

The iPhone's Safari web browser is great, as far as mobile browsers go. But unlike many older smartphone browsers (Palm’s Blazer browser, for instance) it has only offered a shortcut for one domain name ending, .com. With the iPhone 2.0 firmware update and iPhone 3G, this has changed. Now, when you press and hold the .com button in the iPhone keyboard for a second, three more options appear: .net, .edu, and .org. Simply press the one you want with your finger to have it added to the URL your typing in the address bar.

[via tuaw]

Tired of the iPhone's default "Sent from my iPhone" signature at the bottom of every e-mail you send? If so, it's easy enough to change it to one more to your liking or get rid of it altogether.

 From the iPhone's home screen, tap on Settings --> Mail, Contacs, Calendars --> Signature.

If you don't see Signature right away, don't worry, it is located further down the page. A sweep or two of your finger and you'll see it.

Once in Signature simply delete all the text. Leave the text field empty if you don't want another e-mail signature. If you do, however, simply use the iPhone keyboard to type one in.

Copy and paste, so basic, common and useful, and yet so elusive for iPhone users: While Apple deemed copy and paste not essential enough to include with the iPhone 2.0 firmware update, it plans to bring the feature to the iPhone and iPod touch at some unknown future date. Until then, others are attempting to fill in the void. Take OpenClip.org, for example.

OpenClip is a system whereby a shared storage space on the iPhone is used as a common area to read and write data from so as to allow iPhone owners to copy/paste between applications. OpenClip is not an app you install on the iPhone, however.

For an application to be compatible, developers must participate in the OpenClip program, so as to integrate OpenClip's open source framework into their software.

Applications that don't integrate the OpenClip framework can't be copy and pasted to and from in this system You can find a list of OPenClip-compatible applications here.

So far there are eight that have pledged support and a couple that are listed as coming soon. The more who adopt OpenClip the more useful OpenClip will become.

OpenClip provides a useful Faq about its cut and past solution, which it acknoledges in interim until Apple finally integrates the feature itself ,here. See the video below to see OpenClip's copy/paste solution in action.

Cut and Paste for iPhone from Cali Lewis on Vimeo.

Apple's made it really easy to add and move around icons, both applications and Web clips, on the iPhone's home screen. They're not so easy to keep organized, however. So, after installing a few hundred or so additional icons, you may discover your having some trouble finding the standard applications that shipped with your iPhone. No problem. It's easy to reset the iPhone so these icons appear exactly where they did when you first turned on your device.

 

What you'll need to do first is find the Settings icon.

 

From there, hit the General

and then Reset.

 

Select Reset Home Screen Layout button.

 

Then, lastly, press the red Reset Home Screen button (see top image).

Go back to your iPhone's Home Screen and you'll the original icons back in their factory settings positions, followed by the ones for the applications and Web clips you added.

                             Before                                                              After

Author: Philip L. Graitcer

As you can tell from my last post, I have downloaded six third-party applications on my iPhone that I like a lot. Most of the time, they work well, but still, they have little problems: Sometimes the New York Times app takes me back to the iPhone's home page or MLB.com At Bat 2008 just doesn't load. Here's how to troubleshoot your applications.

After each step, check to see if the problem still occurs.

Author: Philip L. Graitcer

There are almost 2,000 third-party applications available for the iPhone on the iTunes "App Store." I haven't been able to wade through all of them but I've found six applications that I really enjoy. For the most part, they work well with few crashes.

Author: Amy Mayer

The Internet browsing tool Zumobi has an Olympic offering. Follow athletes' progress, get Olympic news and more from Lenovo's "Voices" and "Olympic Podium" Web sites on this free mobile widget.

 Go to: http://lenovo.zumobi.com

 Click on your operating system

 Download the file

 You'll be prompted to approve the installation destination, then click "install"

 After installation is complete, launch Zumobi (Start'Programs'Zumobi). You should automatically open into the Olympics tiles.

The widget offers you one-click access to four options, "Olympic Photos," "Olympic News," "Olympic Athletes," and "Olympic Blogs." For navigation, from any screen after the home screen, click the large Z icon in the upper middle area of the screen to go back.