Turbulence during iCloud Restoration to Replacement iPhone 4

My firm purchased the Apple "Joint Venture" service, which allows us to register our iDevices, and get priority support from the Geniuses at an Apple Store, as well as training. The home button on my iPhone 4 went wonky on me, and would not react in the normal way when pressed. So I called the JV guys up. They told me it is a typical problem, and offered to replace my iPhone in-store, since it was still covered by AppleCare.

The next day I went to my Genius appointment at the Ginza Tokyo Apple Store, and though I showed up early, they still took me, and got me set up very quickly. There were still crowds from people wanting to get the new iPhone 4S, so the Genius Bar was packed, but the JV status allowed me to get serviced immediately, which was nice. Shinji, the Genius who helped me, also set up the phone with iOS 5, so I could just get to the restoring. I was out of there in less than an hour, and bought an Apple TV on the way out, so I guess Jobs' charm is still working on me!

Restoring an iOS 5 Backup to a new iPhone 4

I took the half-setup phone back to my office, got on WiFi, and started the restore from iCloud. Basically, the settings did indeed come over, but after about an hour, I got an error saying that it could not restore everything and that I should restore from iTunes (I am not sure whether that is normal, or a problem). I also had a few prompts to enter my iCloud credentials (Apple ID and password), for whatever reason. I kept re-entering, and it finally stopped asking.

I had backups in iTunes, so I restored from that, but that did not fully work either. I had to de-attach and re-attach the phone to iTunes, then click Sync in iTunes, to get it to fully install my purchased Apps. Finally it did work, but I am not sure what VooDoo caused that.

Despite the speed bumps along the way, basically, I was able to get my iPhone 4 restored. A couple of points:

• Even if you are backing up to iCloud, it is really too new to trust, so make a manual backup. Connect to iTunes, then ctrl-click on your iPhone or iPad icon in iTunes, and choose backup from the popup menu. This will force a manual backup to iTunes locally, which can be restored from.
• When you are going through the restore process, persevere, even if prompted for your password multiple times.
• After you restore from iCloud if that is the route you are taking, you will need to restore at least Apps directly from iTunes.
• Once you restore everything, you will need to re-enter passwords for things like Mail and so on, so have those handy.

I hope this helps someone facing the same problem. Enjoy!

Softbank iPhone 4 Emoji Keyboard Troubleshooting

My daughter came to me with an interesting problem with her iPhone, so I thought I would share what I learned and how I fixed the problem. The problem was, no matter what she did, the "emoji" (graphical emoticon icons) would not show up in her email app. I rarely use emoji except when emailing or texting my daughters, so I had to jump in and learn about it.

How to Fix the "Emoji Keyboard Does Not Appear in Mail" Problem on iPhone 4

First, I wanted to define the problem:

• When pressing the globe icon, the emoji keyboard does not appear but it should. You can long-press or repeatedly tap the globe to get the choices to appear and indeed, it does not.
• The emoji keyboard appears on "everybody elses" iPhone, meaning the teenage friends of my daughter ( :-> ) but just to be safe, I checked and indeed, it works for the other iPhones in my family as well, but not on hers.
• More specifically, I can get the emoji keyboard to appear on my iPhone in the mail app, when I choose the Softbank IMAP address as the From: address and a cell phone recipient as the To:.
• The emoji keyboard appears on my daughter's iPhone in the SMS/MMS app, as expected.

What I learned as I went along:

• There are a whole lot of apps that purport to allow you to have emoji on your iPhone without jailbreaking, since the codes are apparently built into the IOS. Mostly they seem to have not-so-good reviews on the iTunes app store. However on iPhone 4, it appears that you just need to turn on the keyboard in Settings, General, Keyboard, International Keyboards. There is a keyboard which is specifically called "Emoji", and there are no advanced settings - it is just a toggle. I have no way of testing whether this keyboard is available for users outside Japan, since we are locked into Softbank as a carrier here.
• There's a lot of voodoo out on the Internet about this problem, because a lot of people are having it and blogging about it: restart, uninstall, reinstall, sprinkle some eye-of-newt, shake-the-phone-twice-and-pee-on-your-neighbor's rosebush and so on. I tried the restarting since it is non-invasive but, until I resolved the main issue (later), restarting did not help.
• The official documents say that emoji are compatible only when you send email to other carriers that support it, and, it appears it is also possible to use with Gmail and other IMAP servers, but not POP. I read that you have to choose the right email account, to be able to send from, in your mail app (again, not SMS), and also to a recipient who can accept the emoji. Somehow, Softbank seems to have got code added that limits the behavior of the keyboard selector, based on what you choose in your From: and To: in the mail app.

So as I was thinking about the third point, I thought I had better check the mail account settings, because we had set up a few different email accounts on the phone - the Softbank IMAP account that comes with the phone contract, an IMAP account and a Gmail account. Turns out that switching between all of these as the From: yields the same result - no emoji keyboard.

In the most important email account in this case, the Softbank IMAP account, I noticed that there was no main SMTP server set but that the Softbank SMTP server was indeed selected (and, mail was working fine save for this problem). When I set the Softbank SMTP server as main for the account, and restarted the iPhone, it started working. Now she can switch to the emoji keyboard as expected.

There is something in the code that controls how the emoji keyboard appears or not, based on the SMTP server that is selected, so be sure to enter the Softbank IMAP SMTP server as main, for the Softbank IMAP account you get with your contract.

The Cause of All This Strife

I believe the root cause of this problem is the automatic installer that Softbank recommends you use when setting up. When I logged in and tried setting up with it, it did not install correctly, failing to set SSL to ON, and I had to get in contact with Softbank about that one. I think that the installer also sets the main SMTP incorrectly, and is ultimately the reason so many people have this problem.

Besides being extremely lazy about this, since their auto-installer does not work, Softbank engineers are thinking too much but not enough, and ultimately causing trouble for their customers. They are trying to "make it simple" by providing an automatic scripted solution for people to get set up, but as Apple surely knows, automation like that is one of the hardest things to do because you have to consider so many angles. Better to simply leave it up to the user to learn that: "emoji work only with email accounts that can read them" because they not only did not get the installer right, they ultimately caused a greater problem with emoji not working for many.

I hope this little post helps someone out there with their emoji issues.

iPhone OS 3.0 Tips on Parade

Apple released yesterday an updated iPhone operating system, iPhone OS 3.0, with a number of useful improvements. For me, the update itself was seamless, and took about 15 minutes after clicking the update button in iTunes. I upgraded first thing in the morning, but colleagues who tried later in the day had some delays. I guess it's to be expected when so many people try to download at the same time.

Some Tips for iPhone OS 3.0

I took some screenshots of the obvious and not-so-obvious (by pressing the home and power buttons simultaneously in case you aren't aware how), so I'll introduce those to you now.

If you have MobileMe you can enable Find My iPhone and track where the phone is if it is stolen, via GPS. You can also remote-wipe and send messages and sounds to your iPhone. Maybe you won't get the iPhone back, but you can at least antagonize the thief! The sounds and messages will play even if it's locked, so this will help if the iPhone is in "manner" mode.

I suspect it will be useful for when it's in manner mode but lost somewhere in the nether regions of your sofa.

iPhone OS 3.0 now finally has select, copy and paste, and it works in and across various applications. Even the new TweetDeck for iPhone that was just released supports it already. Press and hold to get the selection "handles" and various commands.

Once something is on the clipboard you can paste. You can see I copied from TweetDeck to Mail. The new clipboard also honors rich text, which means you can copy something like formatted text from a webpage in Safari, to a Mail Message, and it will paste it in just as you saw it on the web. Slick!

You can also select in mail to "quote" part of a message before replying. It works more like Leopard OS X.

iPhone OS 3.0 now has Spotlight. You can swipe the left-most home screen right to get spotlight search, and you'll see that the page icon (the dots at the bottom) is actually a magnifying glass. Spotlight search works across apps, and like big sister OS Leopard OS X, also works to find apps so you can launch them. Check your settings as well - you can link "home button double-press" to Spotlight search if you like.

Lastly, you'll find that many apps with lists, like Address Book and Mail have a search box at the top. This is Spotlight, but as you scroll down through the entries, you can double-tap the very top of the screen (near the clock) to jump back to the top. Try it!

In Address Book you can now send an Address Card as a vCard entry via Email or MMS (which Softbank Japan supports). Scroll down to the bottom of a contact to find the share buttons.

Here's what a shared vCard in .vcf format via Email looks like. Note also another new feature: the Landscape keyboard is available in more apps, negating the need for apps like EasyWriter.

While we're on Mail, you can move messages instead of just deleting them in the Edit screen. Convenient for stuff like spam.

Neat stuff on the podcast front, too. In iPod, you can control podcast playback better, with the "jump back 30 seconds" and the speed changer buttons. There's also a button for emailing the actual link to the podcast so you can share it with friends.

When you click the email icon from the podcast, you get a pre-formatted email with a link to the podcast.

There are plenty of tiny new tweaks, including this almost incomprehensible one, showing you a very small thumbnail of the last photo you snapped. Maybe it's fuzzy because I merely have a 3G and not a shiny new 3GS.

A couple more things:

• MS Exchange integration is much better, but note that the interface in Address books allows you to "view all", so it might look like you have duplicates if you keep your MobileMe and Exchange address books synced.
• iTunes now lets you buy & download whatever's in the iTunes store.
• iPod lets you "shake to shuffle".
• There's a new basic Voice Recorder app that lets you record and share voice memos. Nice.
• They've improved the keyboard "secret" hold-to-see shortcuts. Check it out by going to the numbers and symbols keyboard, then holding down various keys.
• While browsing in Safari, you can press and hold a link to get a popup that lets you open the link in another tab.
• You can shake to undo in the main applications like Mail or Messaging.

If you own an iPhone, you can upgrade for free, and there's a small fee to upgrade if you have an iPod Touch. Try it, I'm sure you'll like it. It really makes the iPhone an even more attractive platform. Enjoy!

Easter Egg in Google Mobile for iPhone

In the official Official Google Mobile Blog post Ring in the New Year with Bells and Whistles, the Google Mobile for iPhone team points out an Easter Egg that you can use to get some additional features in Google Mobile. Just open the app, tap settings, then scroll past About. Eventually, you'll see the additional menu item "Bells and Whistles" appear, so keep trying. Nice!

Great Twitter Client for iPhone - Tweetie

After getting an iPhone, I started looking around for the best Twitter client for the iPhone. There are many, many Twitter clients, attesting to the service's huge popularity. I tried Twitterfon and NatsuLion, both of which are good, but I like the feature-set and general snappiness of Tweetie from AteBits (8 bits in a b[i|y]te, get it?!). Tweetie's full set of features, from their website:

Handle multiple twitter accounts.

View your timeline, replies, direct messages and favorites.

Browse your friends and followers.

Post new tweets, retweet

Reply directly to tweets and send direct messages.

Follow and unfollow people.

Mark tweets as favorites.

Navigate reply chains.

Inline web browser.

Post links with automatic link shrinking via bit.ly.

Upload pictures to twitpic.com.

Update your twitter location.

View twitter trends and perform custom searches.

Save your favorite searches.

Implements the full twitter API.

Uses secure connection (https).

New: Go to User shortcut

New: Nearby search

New: Themes and adjustable font size

New: Bookmarklet support

Twittelator also looks pretty awesome, and I might try that after a while, too.

iPhone Tap Tips

After (finally!) getting a new iPhone and contract from Softbank here in Japan, just like I did with Mac Keyboard Shortcuts, I struggled a bit with the "tap sequences" one needs to learn to be able to input text or navigate efficiently in this superior smartphone.

How to Manipulate the iPhone with Taps and Button Presses

For convenience, I compiled a list of iPhone "Tap Tips", or shortcuts for tapping and pressing the buttons and interface of the iPhone, which I hope will be useful to iPhone users.

For instance, do you know what these sequences do?

• Triple-click the mic clicker.
• Double-press the home button.
• Double-tap space when entering text.

If not, take a peek at my "iPhone tap tips" list for the answers and more, and most of all, Enjoy!