Eighteen months ago, when the ’sphere was abuzz with posts about Joost, I downloaded it, blogged, played with for a few days, and then it more or less faded from my radar. I’m not as big on TV watching as many, and Joost lacked a lot of the social features that made YouTube and Hulu so effective for me.

But, while the YouTube experience on the iPhone is pretty cool, Joost offers one thing YouTube doesn’t: commercial content. So I installed Joost from the Appstore this morning. My expectation that it wouldn’t work on 3G was confirmed as soon as I fired it up. A quick trip to the Settings panel and my WiFi was re-enabled.

Within moments, I was watching Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in a 4-inch-screen version of Men in Black. It took about 20 seconds for the film to begin streaming. The quality was great and there were no burps during playback.

Tags: iphone, software, voip, wireless

It appears that Telia is the first firm to garner Apple’s blessing in developing a multimedia messaging (MMS) app for the iPhone. That is, one that doesn’t require a jailbroken iPhone. Interestingly, Telia doesn’t service customers in the United States, and it remains to be seen how Apple plans to address what I believe is the biggest Epic Fail of the iPhone–no media messaging.

Tags: apple, iphone, software, wireless

If you’re like many iPhone users, you suck the power out of your battery completely about once every 24 hours. The more useful a thing is, the more you use it–hence, my iPhone’s battery tends to be more empty than full. Here’s what to do to keep that battery alive:

1. Disable 3G. Bar none, this is the single most effective way to increase battery life on the iPhone. If you can tolerate the slowness of Edge and you don’t use any realtime data apps (like VoIP stuff, say), then Edge should be sufficient. You’ll probably have fewer dropped calls with Edge too.

2. Turn off WiFi and Bluetooth. Unless you’re using them, WiFi and Bluetooth are battery killers. Besides, the gimpy-ness of the iPhone’s Bluetooth support makes me question why anybody would leave it on at all.

3. Decrease the frequency of e-mail checks. This will result in fewer data transmissions and preserve the battery.

4. Install the 2.2 firmware update. Apparently, it helps.

Tags: 2.2, 3g, battery, dropped calls, firmware, iphone, voip, wireless