Apple Peel 520 Slowly Making Its Way to US Shores, Adds GSM Connectivity to Your iPod Touch

We actually first heard about the Apple Peel 520 a couple of months ago, but now it seems like the device is going prime time. If you don't know exactly what the Apple Peel is, it's actually pretty simple. The Apple Peel 520 is a case for your iPod touch that adds GSM connectivity to your iPod Touch. The Apple Peel effectively turns your iPod Touch into an iPhone, except for you're not tied down to AT&T, and it's also pretty cheap. The Apple Peel is a silicone case that includes the GSM radio, a 800 mAh battery that should increase your battery life quite a bit, a vibration motor, and, of course, a microphone. Go Solar USA, the company that is bringing the Apple Peel 520 to the USA, is saying the the battery should give you about 5 hours of talk time and 120 hours of standby time, but we are not sure if this is without the iPod Touch's primary battery or including it. The Apple Peel will give you the ability to make and receive calls and send text messages. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like data transfer will be supported, but we don't actually have all of the details yet so it could happen. To use the Apple Peel you will have to have a jailbroken device, in order to get the phone and messaging applications. Originally the Apple Peel 520 was released in China by the manufacturer Yosion, but now Go Solar USA is planning to bring it to the US. They are saying that it will be priced at around $60, which isn't really that high. Overall the Apple Peel 520 could be a great alternative for those who don't want to be attached to AT&T for two years, but also don't want to dish out a lump of cash for an unlocked iPhone.

iOS 4 Causes Problems With Second Generation iPod Touches

Apple’s iOS 4 has added a lot of great features to iPhones and iPod touches, but it has also caused a lot of issues. Ever since iOS 4 has been installed on my second generation iPod Touch, I have been having a lot of issues with it. There have also been a lot of reports from Real Gadget Reviews’ readers that they have also been having a lot of issues. One of the biggest things is that it causes a lot of crashes. I believe that this is mainly because it uses more RAM than iPhone OS 3, and this causes applications to not have access to enough RAM. This is just my opinion. I have noticed that with iOS 4 a lot of my RAM heavy applications and a few very simple applications have been crashing for no reason at all. The web browser is also unstable. This could be because second generation iPod Touches just don’t have the hardware required to run iOS 4 smoothly, but if that's true, why was it released for them in the first place? If Apple knows that it will cause problems, which they should have known, they should have either found a way to resolve them, or just made second generation iPod Touches unsupported for the update. Another big issue is that battery life has been greatly decreased. Before the iOS 4 update I could use my iPod Touch for days without recharging, but now, if I leave it off the charger at night when it is fully charged, it's dead the next morning. I would have been okay with this if iOS 4 added a lot of features, but it didn’t, at least not for second generation iPod Touches. The biggest feature that we got is probably the ability to have all of your emails unified into one inbox. Other than that, I don’t really see any great improvements. If anyone at Apple is reading this, please take action to fix this, because not all of us have the cash to upgrade to the newest hardware every six months.

Jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod Touch: All You Need to Know

Jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod touch is pretty much hacking it to remove Apple's restrictions. There are a lot of things on the iPhone and iPod Touch that could be improved. Thousands of users have jailbroken their iPhones and iPod Touches in order to change or improve their devices. The iPhone is held back by its lack of multitasking support, the apps in the app store, and more. One of the biggest things is the approval process of apps in the app store. A lot of apps that people want are rejected by Apple. Jailbreaking provides a solution for all of this. Jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod Touch gives you access to Cydia, the main unofficial app store. There are also some other unofficial app stores. Cydia does not have an approval process and does not limit anything. This means that users who have jailbroken their devices have access to a much larger number of applications. Jailbreaking lets you do a huge number of things with your iPhone or iPod Touch that Apple does not want you to do. For example, you can multitask, or run multiple apps at the same time, change the wallpaper on your homescreen, organize things a different way, tether your iPhone to your computer, and much more. Jailbreaking also allows you to unlock your iPhone, or use it on any GSM carrier. Jailbreaking allows you to do almost everything with your device, but there are some cons. First of all, Apple has probably disabled all of the features that jailbreaking enables for a reason. One being, multitasking would probably drain your battery a lot. Apple wants to control your user experience, and by doing this they can insure that your iPhone or iPod Touch works without any problems and that you are satisfied. Also, when you do something with your iPhone or iPod Touch that Apple does not want you to do, it might not work as it is supposed to. Some people say that jailbreaking could brick your device, or render it completely useless, but the chances of this are very slim and I have never heard of it happening. Jailbreaking also voids your warranty. If you take your device to the apple store and it is jailbroken, they will probably refuse to fix it. This is fairly easy to get around though, because you can just restore your software through iTunes and no one would ever know that your iPhone or iPod Touch was jailbroken. Another con is that every time that Apple releases a software update, they find some way to block jailbreaking. This means that if you want your iPhone or iPod Touch to stay jailbroken you would have to leave it on the current version or wait for a jailbreak to be developed for the new software update. A new jailbreak is always developed, but no one knows when the jailbreak will be released. Now that we have listed most of the pros and cons of jailbreaking, we can finally get to actually doing it. Jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod Touch these days if fairly easy, usually the software for jailbreaking does all of the hard work and you just have to sit back and watch. Jailbreaking is as easy as the press of a button these days. In the past it was complicated and took a long time, but now all you have to do is press a button. In this post we will not actually describe how to jailbreak your device, but all you have to do is search for and iPhone or iPod Touch jailbreak on Google and you will get a million great ways to do it.