maramine blog

Among other things: I just commuted home from Manhattan to Bergen County, NJ. It took about an hour. In that period of time, I streamed Pandora without a single jitter, hiccup or other interruption. I listened to Pandora through a pair of Sony Ericsson HBH-IS800 Bluetooth headphones and I was able to control playback volume on the Pre (the IS800 headphones don’t have on-device volume controls and the iPhone disables volume adjustment when connected via Bluetooth). I browsed the Web, sent a few emails, checked in with Twitter and installed two new apps, all while Pandora was streaming in the background.

It’s the same old story. The iPhone is an amazing device without any equal at this point in time. That said, Apple’s stubbornness in withholding key functionality and AT&T’s travesty of a network in New York City hold back an otherwise unrivaled handset. My solace? The combination of the iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre will certainly help me whether the storm until something better comes along.

Have a Mac? Have an iPhone? You need iStat. And iStat.

iStat Menus for Mac provides real-time diagnotic info and shortcuts in your menu bar. Temperature, RAM consumption, throughput in and out, etc. Once you install and configure it, you can’t live without it.

iStat for the iPhone attempts to do the same but, in my eyes at least, it is just about useless in that regard. The app also lets you remotely monitor diagnostics on your Mac — again, useless as far as I’m concerned.  I love it solely because of the “Free Memory” function that clears out leaks and inactive RAM consumption. I have rebooted my iPhone 3GS a grand total of zero times since installing it a few weeks ago. For whatever reason, it does an infinitely better job at clearing out memory than similar apps I’ve tried — I typically see between 130MB and 150MB of free RAM after running it.

UPDATE: Apple has forced the dev to remove the “Free Memory” function from the app.