Don’t get me wrong the device is great and it will give you more then double the iPhone’s battery and all that for about $15 bucks is amazing/ Others backups hold half the capacity size and sell for almost 3 times as much.

But the flaws come into play with the design. The item is very large and connects to the phone with no support other then the connector itself, making it only safe to use when laying flat on a surface. Putting it in a pocket or other unstable surface could lead to damaging the device or worse your iPhone or iPod itself.

So I would still recommend the MonoPrice backup solution is you are wanting something that will give you the best bang for the cost, but be warned that you must me very careful with it cause it could end up costing you more then you planned.

Side Note: I am currently in talks with MonoPrice to try and get my battery replaced I will updated this page with my progress when I hear back from them.

Most of you are thinking, yeah, we know this already, but as I was changing some setting in my beloved Google Voice account I noticed that they allow you to change the number that appears when you received a call from someone. You can have either their number display, which is of course the default and what most people would want. But they also allow you to always have the google voice number show up with every call.

So my workaround is why not just add your google voice number to your top 5 list and give everyone that number. Then change it so that all incoming calls come from your google voice number and never waste your minutes on incoming calls again.

But thats not all, google voice allows you to make outgoing as well, by calling your google voice number, then dialing the number you want to call. So no wasting minutes on outgoing calls either.

Okay, now I know for some of you this just wont work. A lot of us love to always know who is calling before we answer the phone, but google helps with this as well. Google Voice give you control of what numbers you want to ring straight through, but it also give you the ability to have callers announce themselves first and/or just announce their number or name (if in contacts) and then gives you the ability to answer or send to voicemail.

Also, keep in mind you can still give out your real number to the other 4 in your list and anyone else who is worth wasting your minutes on. This workaround is meant to be given out to all those that call you constantly and love to talk for hours or perfect as a business line.

If you think this is something you could really use and want to give it a shot, I have 2 Google Voice invites to give out just leave a comment below and I will pick 2 at random and send out the invites later this week. Just be sure to add the tag “I want an Invite” to the beginning or end of your comment.

This time they are offering 5 apps for free and a 6th app free when they reach 500,000 participants. The total value of the nanoBundle is $154 bucks. So you may be thinking wow, free?, I gotta have this, just as I was when I first heard about it. But then I took a look at the apps they are offering.

Here are the apps:

ShoveBox

Catch all the little scraps of information that you can’t immediately act on, but don’t want to forget. ShoveBox sits up in your menu bar, waiting for you to drag in text, images, URLs, and more.

WriteRoom

WriteRoom is a simple, but powerful app that provides you with a distraction-free writing environment. WriteRoom does one main thing and does it incredibly well: It’s all about writing…

Twitterific

Twitterrific is an exquisite app that enables you to make the most out of your Twitter experience. It has a clean user interface that’s designed to take up little of your precious desktop space.

TinyGrab

TinyGrab is a simple, powerful app that enables you to quickly share screenshots of everything on your Mac.

Hordes of Orcs

Hordes of Orcs is a Tower Defense strategy game where you build walls and towers to defend your village from orcs gone rogue.

And if enough people participate

Mariner Write

Mariner Write is a fast, streamlined word processor that’s useful for everyone… professional writers, educators, students, casual computer users, and everyone in-between. It has a simple, elegant user interface so that you can create beautiful documents the very first time you start using it.

If you ask me most of them are pretty worthless. I guess if you don’t already have a better word processor, then Mariner Write would be nice once it is available, but the others really don’t seem worth the process to even download them. I already have a better twitter client and my the other seem pretty pointless.

But hey thats just me. Let me know what you think.

The mouse is pretty amazing, I’ve been using the Mighty Mouse for close to two years now and the transition from one to the other was easy and smooth.

Normal everyday use with the mouse is great I don’t have any issues with the scrolling or multi-touch options. Over all I love the mouse. The only issues I’ve had is when I took it home over last weekend and edited a wedding using Final Cut Pro.

The mouse is worthless for using with FCP, the vertical scrolling cause the playhead and all the other controls to go nuts while trying to edit. You basically have to not touch the mouse while the video is playing. My main issues came when using the multi-cam edits in FCP. I use this feature a lot with weddings and it works great, but not with this mouse. any slight vertical scroll and the play head go 5-10 minutes back or forward and you have to relocate your place. But I forced myself to use it thinking I would eventually just get used to it and I really thought I had, till I was finished with the edit. Thats when I notices that a ton of my clips where off by a signal frame. I have no clue exactly how it happened, but I know it had to be the Magic Mouse and that it took forever to correct.

So I’ve taken the mouse to work with me where I rarely, to never use FCP, so the harmony is back and I am loving the mouse. It’s slim, comfortable, and glides easily on the desk. So i would recommend it to other just as long as their not heavy FCP users.

Side note: I’m really hoping to find a way to disable the vertical scrolling just in FCP I think that alone will solve all my issues. So if you know of a way please let me know.

And now, onto the video:

VirtualBox is a free program that allows you to install virtual machines on your mac. To be honest it is pretty amazing and has all the features that I needed and used in VMWare and its all for free.

It allows you to do the fullscreen and seamless modes just like Fusion and it loads everything fas. I honestly don’t notice a performance hit with the Mac Mini, which to me is a big praise.

But, just so you all know, VMWare did just recently released a new version and I haven’t really looked at the additional feature it adds, but I really doubt that I will give it a look, cause as for work related items I am all about going with VirtualBox.

The Mini is an amazing little device, not the most powerful, but more then enough for coding websites, doing some minor video editing and installing a virtual XP box so I can still troubleshoot all the annoying phone support calls I get.

Most of you know I have been working with the Hackint0sh installer and actually had a decent amount of luck with it, but no matter how much I put into it, my performance always seemed lacking. I am sure if you built your PC with just the right equipment you may actually not even notice.

I have had the Mini for 3 work days now and I just finally got everything I believe I need installed. And the thing is still running like a top. Lets just say I am one happy employee.

Anyways enough about it here is the unboxing if your interested. Sorry for the poor camera work I really need to get one of those tripod things for my iPhone.

The case is very slim and light, but gives me a better grip and feels more comfortable then just the plain iPhone or other cases I have used in the past. I think the best feature is how seamless the two pieces lock into place, it doesn’t give you a awkward bump like other cases.

The case is roughly 35 dollars and offered any many different colors and styles.

The main issues with the case, like many others, is that it does trap dust in the case which can cause some minor scratching of the chrome bezel. I have found this to be a livable side effect of having the phone protected.

I would still love to find a full (all over) seamless case for the iPhone so if you know of one please feel free to let me know. I have tried the naked case by casemate and was left very unhappy.

Well when I got the App on Monday and there was no option for other voices I was pretty upset so today, I decided to look into things and luckily enough I was able to do it myself.

Check out the video. (video quality will increase when YouTube gets done processing the video)

I haven’t had luck with all other voices, some just crashed the app, but personally I only care about the Mr. T voice.

Enjoy!

The app works great you can quickly browse through your iDisk folders to view documents, pictures, and even watch a movie. You can also start or stop sharing a file and add or remove public folders to your iDisk

This App may make me use iDisk a little more often in the future. Hopefully they will add an upload button so I could quickly upload IMages or videos into the folder I prefer instead of publishing it like the Photos app does.

The question is what is the future of the apps that are already doing these feature?

*click on images below to see the full size image

Spotlight Search

What better way to start the review off with a bash. Don’t get me wrong I love the search functionality, but the location and ways to access it drive me insane. There are 2 ways you can enter into the spotlight.

1. flicking left of the home page

2. hitting the home button once (when on the home page)

For me both of these options are terrible. I’ve had the iPhone since the 1st gen so when 2.0 came out and they added the tap the home button to go to the first page I was already set in my way of flicking (or swiping whatever you want to call it) the screen till I couldn’t go further. Well now I end up typing the g or h a few times before I realize what I have done.

Option 2 also drives me crazy, because I am used to the the apps not closing as fast. I am used to hitting the home a few time before it fully closes or just randomly hitting it when I am bored. And now that takes me into spotlight. But the worst part about these 2 features it you cannot turn them off! (rant over)

Stereo Bluetooth

Now on to happier thoughts. No better way to get over your most hated feature, then with talking about your favorite. The ability to listen to your music, video, audio-books, etc without wires is the best thing in the world. I don’t know how many times I get my headphones tangled up or having it tug on me cause the phone has moved in my pocket, but now those days are over. Also hooking the iPhone up to the TV and using the bluetooth headset for audio as you do the treadmill is so much better then blasting the speakers so you can try to hear it over all the noise.

Single SMS Forward and Deleting

Now, this was one of those rare feature finds that just make you jump up and down. I don’t remember hearing anything about this and it wasn’t until day 3 till I actually found it, but the ability to forward a single SMS message is amazing, technically with copy and paste now on the iPhone it is not as essential, but it is still a great feature (which should have been in 1.0).

iTunes Store

You can now purchase or rent TV shows and movies directly from the phone. This is a great addition only issue it that you have to be connected to a wifi signal, but I guess that is better then nothing. (pic below)

App Store

Just wanted to mention that I love the new layout of the App Screen shots. (pic below)

Cut, Copy, & Paste

Nice addition that should also have been added a long time ago, it works pretty well, but I have had some issues when trying to select stuff.

Landscape View

How could one feature be awesome and annoying all at the same time. I love haveing the option and ability to go into landscape mode in my note and email, but I part of me wishes it was a button click that switched it. When I have notes ot an email that has directions or a list that I need to keep track of but not always in front of me and it keeps switching back and forth to landscape, it can get kind of annoying.

So there you have it the greatness and annoyiness of the latest iPhone 3.0 software. Oh there is also a Voice Recorder now too (woohoo) and sadly the video features only work on the 3GS so I guess I will have to wait to enjoy that ability again. Hopefully a jailbreak will fix that one.

So all in all it has some great feature, but I am really missing my themes, stacks and qik. So if you have a jailbroken iPhone I recommend holding off.

But now that anyone can get it I wouldlike to know what you that have it think and if your one of the lucky people that can go out and buy a 3GS let me know what you think about it too.