Left = no film, Right = Power Support anti-glare film

If you’ve read my Elago S4 Breathe iPhone 4 case review and my more recent Cool Bananas SmartShell iPad 2 Case Review you should now be getting a feel for the fact that I hate dressing up my Apple devices in anything big and bulky unless absolutely necessary. The same applies when it comes to covering any Apple device screens in a “film” to protect it. Since the very first generation iPhone I’ve been plagued with tiny scratches on the glass, I used to curse every time I saw one, now I just take it in my stride and accept scratches will appear unless I wrap my iPhone and iPad in cotton wool.

I’ve tried all sorts of screen protection for the iPhone in the past and hated the way they all make the screen feel under the finger, Apple spent a long time developing the feel and smoothness of their glass touch-screens and it’s sacriligious to cover them up with a cheap and tacky film. I also used to hate the micro-bubbles that appeared under the films that, no matter how carefully you clean and apply the film, there’s always a few you can’t eliminate. I also found that the films would mark much more easily that the bare/naked glass with a fingernail or similar. Granted the mark is on the now removable film but what’s the point in a film to protect the screen from sightly marks if that film itself marks more easily?

So when I got my original iPad a few years ago I didn’t even entertain the idea of putting an iPad 2 screen protector on the beauty and even after a year’s daily usage the screen remained fairly free from scratches. The same could not, however, be said for greasy finger prints and smudges on the highly reflective iPad screen. I’d go so far as to say the iPad made my OCD demons mad on a daily basis. I bought a special screen cleaning spray (which is very good by the way) and used it regularly to clean my iPad screen.

All was well, I loved my iPad and eagerly awaited the iPad 2, which I upgraded to on launch day. The screen on the iPad 2 was no different to the original although I did find my fancy new smart cover had a tendency to leave 3 vertical lines in the screen smudges so the good old cleaning spray was out in force even more often.

Then came a nice sunny Summer (unusual here in the UK) and I found the iPad’s achilles heel, reflections!! Using the iPad was near impossible outdoors on a bright sunny day, even with the brigtness turned up to the max and the screen free from any greasy finger marks, viewing the iPad 2 outside was not comfortable.

Since I live in the UK and sunny days can be few and far between I dealt with it as best I could, moving into the shade wherever possible to read anything on the iPad. It wasn’t until I booked a long holiday to Florida that I realised I had to find a solution. I subscribe to many digital magazines via Zinio and have several eBooks that I wanted to read whilst sunbathing in Florida. None of this was going to be feasible on the stock iPad screen so I started investigating iPad 2 screen protectors but more specifically, anti-glare screen protectors.

I thought I’d do some thorough research into the best ones around and buy one to try for the holiday and remove it upon returning to the UK. After hours reading on-line reviews and user ratings I decided the best one was probably going to be the Power Support Anti-Glare iPad 2 Screen Protector and sod’s law it had to be one of the most expensive too at £29.95! Wow that’s around the same price as Apple’s Smart Covers for what was essentially going to be a disposable screen anti-glare film for my holiday.

After ordering the £30 film it arrived in the post and when I opened it to have a look I immediately started to get buyer’s remorse. Had I been ripped off? £30 for a thin piece of film? I don’t quite know what I was expecting, maybe I was hoping there would be more than one in the pack in case I messed up the installation first time around. But no, just one single sheet in the big cardboard packet. GULP!

I didn’t rush into fitting the film. I read all the instructions and the extremely helpful fitting video on YouTube

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Then I took the plunge, moved into a dust free environment (i.e. my bathroom with the extraction fan on), cleaned the screen, cleaned the screen again, used a can of compressed air to blow the screen and then peeled back the first film and applied the top edge of the screen protector. Slowly applying the rest of the film as per the video above and finally breathed a sigh of relief when the last edge was down. There were one or two large bubbles which pressed out to the side with ease, it’s strange, the film isn’t like the iPhone films I’ve used before, this film is quite thick and you don’t get small round bubbles, rather large bubble patches that press out easily.

After patting myself on the back for the flawless application of the film I placed my iPad 2 back in the Cool Banana case and immediately noticed a problem. The film is such a snug fit and goes right up to the edge of the glass, the Cool Banana case is also a snug fit on the front and the lip on each corned sligtly covers the edge of the glass, hence touches the anti-glare film. It’s not too big an issue, but it did cause the corners of the film to lift up a little and since I thought this could let dust and other bits of gunk under the film I decided for the purpose of my holiday I’d rather have the anti-glare film and sacrifice the rear protection of the Cool Banana case for now.

Cool Banana case causing film to lift in the corners

Text remains nice and clear/sharp even with the anti-glare matte film fitted

My first surprise was how clear the screen still was with a film on it. My second and biggest surprise was how the film felt under the finger. I’m going to stick my neck out here and say it feels better than Apple’s bare glass. On the bare glass I found that my finger encountered differering levels of resistance when I swiped over a particularly greasy area of the screen. Not apple’s fault, my fault for having greasy fingers I suppose but with the anti-glare film there was no greasy residue just a smooth dry surface for my finger to swipe across.

Now onto the main reason for fitting the film on the iPad 2, the anti-glare properties. Wow! Seriously, wow! This film is amazing, you can honestly sit in full Florida lunch time sun, on a beach and read everything on the iPad screen without straining your eyes, moving into shade or trying to tilt your iPad to an un-natural position to reduce glare.

Two of the guys on holiday also had tablets, one had an iPad 2 and the other a Motorola Xoom and they were impressed with the film too. The Xoom owner is your typical “anti-everything-Apple” geek but even he had to admit the iPad 2 with anti glare film was the only device that could be used out in direct Florida sunshine. He even used it over his Xoom to check some work emails and football scores because it meant he could stay around the pool rather than go inside and use his Xoom.

left = with anti-glare film, right = no anti glare film

I completely forgot to take photos of the iPad 2, Xoom and iPad 2 with anti-glare film side by side in the sunshine whilst in Florida but I did remember when I got to the airport which had some pretty large and harsh fluorescent lights overhead. I loaded the same BBC news article on both iPad 2′s and tried taking some crude side-by-side comparison photos. They’ve not come out as well as expected but you can clearly see a big reduction in reflection of the ceiling lights. Once an iPad enabled friend comes over I’ll do some much better comparison shots with fixed lights, tripods, etc and also a video to help demonstrate just how good the Power Support Anti-Glare iPad 2 Screen Protector really is.

As a testament to how good the film really is, I’ve been back from Florida for 2 months now and the film is still on my iPad 2 for several reasons:

1. The reflection reduction is so good.
2. The lack of greasy fingerprint and smudge marks
3. I prefer the feel of the film to the original glass
4. It’s protecting my glass from any scratches.
5. …it’s expensive and I don’t want to waste it when it’s this good.

I’ve recently been having some kernel panics and rebooting/crashing on my MacPro 1,1 running 10.6.8 and Lion and some suggested it could be my CPUs overheating. There was a suggestion to install SMCfancontrol and run all fans and a higher speed and keep an eye on temperatures whilst stressing the CPUs to 100% for a prolonged period. So below is a little bit on info on how to crank your CPU up to 100% usage and monitor core CPU temperatures.

Getting you CPU to 100%

There are several ways to max out your CPU, some suggest ripping movies using Handbrake or re-encoding your music library but personally I don’t want all the faff with that plus these methods are IO intensive for your hard drive which isn’t good. All I do is open up Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and then once it’s opened type

yes > /dev/null

and hit return.

That should max out 1x core. Then open a new terminal window (CMD+N) and again type

yes > /dev/null

and hit return. Again this will max out another core

Keep on repeating this process until all your cores are maxed out.

To keep an eye on CPU usage open Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor) and look at your CPU history to see if they are all maxed out.

You can then leave this running for as long as necessary in order to run your CPU at full load and monitor temperatures and fan speeds.

Monitor CPU core temperatures

Viewing your CPU A and CPU B temps using iStat Pro widget or similar is not that accurate or useful as it’s reading the temperature from the heatsink not the actual cores of the CPU. if you want the most accurate temperatures you need to use an app that shows individual core temperatures. I use Temperature Monitor for OS X which is free and even has history windows so you can view the core temperatures over a period of hours or days.

NOTE – To cancel the stress tests on your CPU simply close all the open terminal windows (CMD+W) and/or  quit Terminal (CMD+Q).

Some recent projects I’ve been involved in have required some serious processing power to render gigapixel images and the original 2xDual Core XEONs weren’t up to it. I found a matching pair of cheap E5345 QUAD core processors on eBay and fitted them (that’s another post that will be on here soon along with photos of the CPU swap out process). I threw some SSD’s in a RAID array in there for good measure too and the combination of those two things made a phenomenal difference to the rendering times. My Snow Leopard 10.6.7 install was nice and stable, not a single crash/hang/kernel panic or reboot.

Then Apple released a Snow Leopard update 10.6.8 to “ready you for Lion” so I dutifully upgraded the 10.6.7 I had installed on my SSD’s and it all went terribly wrong. The system now erratically rebooted itself and a look at the logs showed Kernel Panics all over the place. I have a second OS X 10.6.7 for emegency situations, booted into that and ran that for a few days and it was all fine. I rolled back my 10.6.8 to 10.6.7 using a TimeMachine backup and everything was stable again.

I thought it might just be a *glitch* with 10.6.8 and patiently waited for Lion. When Lion was released I decided to not take a chance upgrading my stable 10.6.7 and so I wiped 2 of the drives I had in a RAID array and installed a fresh copy of Lion which I downloaded from the App Store (if you want to know how to create a bootable Lion install from Apples Lion download leave a comment and I’ll post that soon). Even the fresh install of Lion was showing a random kernel panic every 5minutes to an hour and rebooting the system.

I thought it might be that 10.6.8 and Lion didn’t like the SSD drives that were still mounted even though they weren’t the boot drives. The MacPro 1,1 came with 4x drive sled bays for SATA hard drives but there were also another 2x hidden SATA ports on the motherboard that I connected the SSD drives to and mounted them in the spare optical bay. So I unplugged the SSD drives from the 2 hidden SATA ports and set about using 10.6.8 and Lion (each OS on a different RAID partition) but still both were rebooting because of a kernel panic.

I’ve opened up a report at http://bugreport.apple.com/ and they’ve requested my kernel crash logs which are in /Library/Logs/Diagnostic….

These from 10.6.8

another

another

another

The following is a crash log from a completely clean and fresh install (not upgrade) of Lion on a new RAID array

and the latest Lion one after upgrading my graphics card to a 5770.

This post will continue to get updated as and when there is a cause or solution found to my crashing.

3rd August 2011 – Have heard from others who have upgraded a MacPro 1,1 like me and running Lion without a problem. They all seem to have upgraded their graphics card to Apple’s ATI 5700 card so I ordered one of these from Apple today for a whopping £203 which should hopefully arrive tomorrow. Once installed I shall boot back into my fresh Lion installation for a few hours and see if there are any more crashes.

4th August 2011 –  I received  the new 5770 Apple upgrade kit and will set about installing this later on this evening and report back……..
…the 5770 was installed without a hitch and the MacPro booted up first time with no errors. I logged into my stable 10.6.7 and tinkered around playing 1080p videos full screen on my 30″ ACD and lots of GPU intensive tasks and it seemed much smoother at HD video playback etc. After a few hours I decided the card was working as it should so crossed my fingers and booted into my Lion installation. Again all seemed ok, nice smooth 1080p playback, I even tried some 4k video playback and it was smooth full screen. After about half an hour I thought maybe it was all stable so I thought I’d do a bit of housekeeping and repair any disk permission errors using Disk Utility. However, Disk Utility still refuses to verify or repair permissions of RAID arrays in Lion. There’s a lot of info on the Apple discussion forums about this so I opted to try verifying permissions from Terminal and it found some errors. So I then tried to repair those errors via terminal and left that running and went to bed. About 2 mins later I heard the tell-tale “boing” of the Apple start-up chime…it had crashed and rebooted whilst trying to repair permissions.

5th August 2011 - I went back to the machine this morning and sure enough I was presented with the log in screen as it had rebooted after a kernel panic. I logged in but there was no prompt to submit a crash report to Apple as there normally is and there is nothing logged in /Library/Logs/Diagnostic/ where the kernel panic reports normally live. So I can rule out my graphics card as the KP (Kernel Panic) happens with both original 7300GT and brand new Apple ATI 5770 cards. Time to start eliminating other items. Next on my hit list is RAM. I only have 7GB installed and it all seems ok when I’m booted in 10.6.7 and the Apple Hardware Test that comes on the OS X install CD returned no errors but for completeness I thought I’d run some extensive memory tests. I downloaded two programs Rember and Memtest, the former is a GUI for the latter. I tried running Rember from within OS X and it returned no errors but as some of the memory is not accessible whilst booted into the OS I installed Memtest and rebooted my computer into single user mode (hold down CMD+S when you reboot). Once in single user mode I typed

to run memtest tests on all memory sectors twice. I’ve left that running and come to work but I’ll report back later if it found any errors. If there are no RAM errors I might take half the modules out anyway, boot Lion and see if it KPs and if it does swap with the other half of the RAM and see if that KPs. If it does it KPs with every single module then I doubt it’s a RAM issue. I’ll then look to install a non-RAID drive and install a fresh copy of Lion on that to see if the KP still happen on a non-RAID drive. I still think this is an Apple induced issue with 10.6.8 and Lion, I’m going to start looking into whether 64bit EFI might be to blame (the MacPro only has a 32bit EFI but 64bit capable processors).

Memtest completed two complete thorough RAM module checks and all passed without a fault so RAM ruled out.

19th August 2011 - Right I’m still getting KPs on my Lion test install and am sticking with 10.6.7 for now so I can keep working but I’ve now pretty much ruled out any hardware faults.

• I bought a new ATI 5770 to replace my 7300GT and still KP.
• I removed my SSD RAID array on the 5th and 6th SATA Ports and still KP.
• I tried booting with only Lion HDDs in and removed the 2nd RAID array and still KP.
• I bought another 8GB RAM and ran with just that in on its own and still get KP so RAM ruled out.
• I ran fans at near full speed and COU core temps stayed below 40°C and still KP.
• I ran fans at default speed and cranked my CPU usage to 100% for about 4 hours and no KP in LION so I doubt the CPUs are bad. Once I stopped the CPU stress test I opened Safari and browsed the web a little and it KP’d.
• I’ve run with WiFi and Bluetooth disabled to see if those were a cause but still got KP. I might try removing them from the motherboard completely though just to check but they are genuine Apple modules.

I also tried tinkering around copying IOPCI kexts and IOPLatformFamily kexts and copying copies of these from a working 10.6.7 installation over the Lion versions but that didn’t work either.

Where does this leave me? Basically nowhere. I’m still buggered if I use 10.6.7 or 10.7.0 or 10.7.1 and get regular KPs. I’ve not managed to go more than 1 hour without a KP, except funnily enough when I was stress testing the CPU and it could happily sit there all day at 800% CPU usage. Having now bought another 8GB of RAM and run with just that in and the original 7GB removed I can rule out having bad RAM, plus the fact it works in 10.6.7 for days without a KP means it definitely software related.

I still haven’t got around to breaking apart one of my RAID arrays and trying to install Lion on just a single non-RAIDed drive. I do still think RAID could be part of the cause, since in Lion I still cannot verify or repair disk permissions on a RAID array using disk utility but I can using diskutil command in terminal but most of the time I get a KP about 90% through….suspicious. But then my hopes are dashed by people like @poo in the comments who has the same issue but doesn’t have any RAID arrays. But then again his problems may be something completely different.

For now I’m sticking with 10.6.7 and every so often trying Lion and some tweaks but having now spent £203 on an ATI 5770 and £180 on another 4GB RAM I’m reluctant to waste much more time or money on this and just hope Apple find a solution/cure soon?

1st September - I’m still running 10.6.7 and had no time to do any more experimenting to resolve my KPs but I have just had a reply from Apple Tech via bugreport.apple.com (some 6 weeks later) and they now need a complete Kernel Core Dump which I’ve never heard of before and they’ve included some complex instructions on how to setup a 2nd Mac running OS X as a Kernel Dump Server which has to be connected via ethernet to my MacPro and then modify the nvram of my MacPro so that all kernel dumps are sent to the IP address of the 2nd computer. That way they grab every single kernel instruction and upload that to them. The file could be up to 1GB in size so they’ve given me ftp details to upload the file. So it seems Apple are investigating this which is promising. I’ll update once I hear any more.

13th September - I eventually found time to copy clone the contents of 2 of my drives that were in a RAID array to my Mac Mini Server and pulled them out. I installed an old 80GB Seagate Barracuda drive in HDD Bay 3, booted into my good 10.6.7 and used Disk Utility to format it as HFS with a GUID partition. I then downloaded the latest Lion installation package (10.7.1) from the App store and installed that on the newly formatted drive. Once booted I ran the terminal commands as instructed by Apple Tech Support so that any crash logs will now be saved across the network to my Mac Mini Server and am currently waiting for a kernel panic. Sod’s law it won’t bloody KP now! I’ve unmounted the other remaining drives in the MacPro so that to all intents and purposes this is now just a MacPro with a single 80GB (non-raid) drive installed. Guess I’ll just have to keep playing in Lion to see if it’s become any more stable. NOTE – Disk Utility now lets me verify and repair permissions on the Lion disk which it didn’t before when I had Lion installed on a RAID array. Watch this space.

14th September - Dammit! After using it for several hours last night it seemed fine, went to bed, woke up and it had kernel panic in the night and rebooted, the crash log for submission to Apple mentioned “spinlock acquisition timed out” or similar I’ve seen that many now I don’t take much notice to them. I checked my MacMini Server which is meant to collect the core kernel dumps and there was nothing. Even though I had changed the nvram settings as per Apple’s request so my MacMini Server would collect all the core kernel dumps, I’d forgotten to restart the computer after making nvram changes. So I restarted again, and then forced a test kernel panic (if you want to read up more on how to setup a 2nd machine to collect your core kernel dumps read this) to check if the core dumps were now going through to my MacMini Server but they still weren’t. I’ve left a message with Apple tech for help on this matter but in the interim I’m going to try and setup a MacBook Pro as a dump server and see if that works. Anyway, we can rule out RAID as being the cause of any KPs. I know one or two commenters below said they get KP and don’t use RAID, not that I didn’t believe them, I just had to run through all my elimination processes. RAM replaced, new HDD (non-RAID), new 5770 Graphics card….erm I’m running out of replaceable hardware items that could be to blame. I really hope it is an Apple bug with 10.6.8 and Lion (10.7 and 10.7.1) and not faulty CPU. I’ve now accepted that I’m going to have to try eliminating the CPU in all this and need to roll back to stock CPUs. I’d like to get the CoreDump working properly first and submit them to Apple so that can hopefully see somthing that I can’t. Sorry to say this again, but watch this space…

NOTE – It is becoming more and more apparent that only people with upgraded CPU are suffering from kernel panics and crashes in Lion. From the comments below you will see people with X5355, X5365, E5345 etc. Did the MacPro 1,1 ever ship with 8-cores and if so what was the factory OEM 8-core CPU that it shipped with?

15th September - Right so I’ve not had a Kernel panic for nearly 2 days. What did I do to accomplish this, I wish I could say for sure. First things first, I tried setting up my MacMini Server to be a core kernel dump so when i did have a KP 1GB+ of crucial logs would be logged on there for me to upload to Apple. I had problems with this, if I tried to force a kernel panic by typing:

sudo dtrace -w -n “BEGIN{ panic();}”

at the command prompt it would begin connecting to my MacMini Server’s IP, correctly find it and retrieve it’s MAC address and then timeout trying to send the logs. After hours and hours trying to figure it out, including setting up a Macbook Air and Pro as a core dump server I finally figured out that by default the kernel dumps go out over ethernet EN0 which is ethernet port 1 and I had my cable plugged into EN1 (ethernet port 2). Once I switched ports and triggered a kp manually the core dumps were sent correctly to my remote machine. OK so all I needed now was to wait for it to kernel panic. Didn’t take long, mouse froze and then poof it rebooted without any kernel core dump going to my remote server. WTF! That didn’t work then. Normally I get a kernel panic screen or the terminal prompt scrolling across the top of my desktop image. Right I’ll just keep using it until I get a proper kernel panic I thought.

So carried on using it for a day with basic core apps, safari, chrome and that’s about it. No crashes. I left it playing full screen streaming HD from the NASA site all night to see if overheating GPU or similar could be the cause, nothing. Now here’s some things I did do

but I’m sure I’d done before.

1. I had to update my flash when I went to NASA website I think so I downloaded latest Flash.
2. I removed my ethernet port 2 from Network pane in System preferences and I mean removed not just turned off.
3. I removed my Airport from Network pane in System preferences and I mean removed not just turned off. There have been others with iMacs reporting Airport cards causing KPs and to roll back kexts, since I’m hardwired to my TimeCapsule I just thought fuck it and removed it from the list.
4. I normally have an Apple iSight camera connected to the Firewire port on my Apple 30″ cinema display, I have unplugged that.
5. I normally have a USB multi-card reader connected to the USB ports on my 30″ ACD, I have disconnected that.

I’ve now been up for 1 day 22 hours. In that time I’ve setup two email accounts in Mail app and downloaded 30,000+ emails and I’ve installed iLife 11 and run software update to bring all the iLife apps up to date.

Initially he thought it was just one of his Safari plugins but even after disabling all Safari plugins the [SP] still appears as shown in the screen shot below.

I suggested it could be to show that it’s a Secure Page hence the SP but it shows even on non-https pages and can clearly be seen on the basic vanilla Google homepage in the screenshot above.

If anybody is able to help shed any light on this please leave a comment below as he seems to be one of only a handful experiencing this strange problem.

UPDATE: Shortly after publishing this post, @benmarsh managed to solve it all on his own…he’d enabled the Debug tools in Safari and unchecked the option to “Use multi-process windows” so the [SP] stood for Single Process.

benmarsh Ben Marsh

Aha! [SP] refers to Single Process – I remembered I unchecked Debug -> User Multi-process Windows yesterday! D’oh!

If you’ve read my review of the Elago S4 Breathe iPhone 4 case you’ll know that I’m not a fan of cases on  aesthetically pleasing Apple products but here I go again with a review of the Cool Bananas SmartShell iPad2 case.

I bought my iPad 2 on launch day along with a basic grey Smart Cover from Apple, there were no 3rd party cases available at the time. I’ve been using the iPad 2 with a naked back for the last 6 months and whilst the aluminium back is fairly scratch resistant I am starting to see some fairly big scratches appearing on it. I’ve established that most of these are from sliding it in and out of my general everyday bag which has some gnarly metal teeth on the zip.

So why did I buy an iPad 2 case? Two reasons, one, I don’t want to get it too scratched because I’ll be selling it as soon as the iPad 2 HD or iPad 3 (whatever it is called) is released and two, because it’s too slippy! If you’ve got fairly clean and dry hands and the iPad can feel a little slippy and difficult to grip. You won’t notice this so much using it on your own, but go to a BBQ with 20 people all sat around the garden and watch your iPad 2 getting passed around and you’ll be amazed the number of people who “nearly” drop it, there have even been some low drops but fortunately onto grass so no harm done.

The Smart Cover is also an issue, the magnets aren’t as strong as people think they are. Non-iPad owners passing an iPad 2 around with the Smart Cover rolled back tend to think it’s a permanent attachment and since the aluminium back is hard to grip you can see them passing it around using the Smart Cover as the main holding point. Whilst the Smart Cover will hold the iPad 2 using the magnets, it’s not a reliable and strong hold so the cover keeps snapping off, again more near falls to the ground.

Solution – I bought an iPad 2 cover from a company called GearZap who sell almost every kind of case,cover and accessory for iPads, iPad 2, Xoom, netbook, Kindle…you get the idea. I’ve used them before to buy a stylus for my Dad to use with his iPad for “sketching” and had an exceptionally fast delivery so thought I’d give them another try.

At the time of writing this they are showing 226 different iPad 2 cases and 219 iPad 2 covers. The distinction between a case and a cover is a little vague, but basically if you want protection for the back go for cases, if you want protection for the front look at the covers. [NOTE - make sure you are looking in the right category, I spent quite a while looking at iPad not iPad 2 cases before I realised they are in separate categories]

After trawling the GearZap for literally hours opening new tabs, finding reviews of products on the web I settled on a fairly cheap Cool Bananas SmarShell iPad2 case in black. My criteria were simple, it has to be thin, allow the smart cover to still be used, allow full access to all the ports and buttons, offer reasonable protection against gentle knocks and bumps and be easy to take on and off in a hurry.

I order the case last Thursday and it arrived the next day but I’ve held off writing this review for a week so I can give some feedback on how it’s been in daily use.

It’s thin and whilst it inevitably adds some bulk to the iPad 2, it’s not as bulky as the original Apple case I used to have on my old first gen iPad.

It’s flexible but in a good way which allows for easy installation and removal in seconds [see video].

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I hate silicon cases that you often find being sold on the cheap for iPhones and iPods, the type where when you stick it in your pocket it’s that soft and “sticky” it pulls your entire pocket lining out when you try to get the phone out your pocket. This is more of a rubberised hard plastic shell that’s flexible. That last sentence was probably a complete contradiction in its self but the case is soft and pliable, you can bend it in half without worrying about it snapping like you would with a hard plastic shell but it’s not silicon stickiness, it’s a textured soft plastic shall we say. Whatever it is, it feels good to the touch and most importantly it gives you some confidence and grip when passing the iPad 2 around and it’s a device made for sharing so mine gets passed around a lot.

There are nice crisp cut outs for all the ports, camera, buttons and mic and the case doesn’t impede on connecting accessories to the dock connector at all. There is also a cut out along the entire edge where the smart cover connects, now if you don’t have a smart cover this is a bit of a problem as it’s leaving that edge exposed to potential damage but since the corners are still covered it should protect against any drops.

The smart cover clips onto the iPad 2 as you’d expect and opens and closes without the hinges catching on the Cool Bananas SmartShell but I have issues I’m afraid. The case has a slightly raised profile on the front which is good because it protects the glass of the iPad 2 if it’s ever placed face down on a table with grit or dirt on it. Unfortunately what this means is the Smart Cover is kept raised about 2mm off the face of the iPad so the magnets in the Smart Cover that normal hold it closed against the iPad aren’t strong enough and if you turn the iPad face down the Smart Cover will drop down. The auto-sleep function of the Smart Cover still works, if you close the Smart Cover when you have the Cool Bananas Smart Shell on the iPad 2 does sleep itself and likewise opening the cover does wake the iPad and unlock it so it’s not all bad. The same is true when you open the Smart Cover and fold it all the way back, it used to magnetise to the back of the iPad 2 and stay folded back and out of the way, now it doesn’t as the Smart Cover weakens the magnetic attraction slightly. Cool Bananas could combat this by embedded magnets into the case at the appropriate places but I doubt that would be cost effective from a manufacturing point of view and might leas to unsightly bulges in the case unless the magnets are super thin.

Verdict? Well after a week of use, it’s still on my iPad 2, I take it off every now and again when I’m at home and want to dock the iPad 2 with my B&W Zeppelin mini speakers (which aren’t made for an iPad 2 anyway) but 90% of the time the case remains on. What I have found now though is that more often than not I’m removing the Smart Cover when I’m using the device because it just gets in the way and I’m only putting it back on when it’s getting thrown in my bag to protect the screen from the metal zips on my bag. Would I recommend it to a friend, erm, yes and no depending on what they were after, if you’re after full drop protection so you can give your iPad2 to your kids, looks at the OtterBox range, but if you want the iPad 2 to feel a little more secure when you’re in a meeting passing it around or in the garden showing photos to friends then yes this is a good one to go for.

I much prefer using VLC (free) to listen to my streaming audio and it’s possible to listen to the Radio 1 stream using VLC but it proved tricky to try and locate the URL of the live stream so for those that are struggling:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/listen/live/r1.asx

Depending on the options you selected when you installed VLC, you might be able to simply click the link above which should load in a new page and then auto-launch VLC and start playing Radio 1 live stream. If clicking the link above doesnt work, in VLC’s top toolbar, click Media and then Open Network Steam and simply paste the URL above into the window and hit play. Alternatively if you like keyboard shortcuts, just hit CTRL+N to open the network stream window and paste in the URL above.

The next time you want to listen to the Radio 1 live stream in VLC, open VLC as normal and then hit CTRL+1 to reload the most recently listened to stream.

It was proving pretty tricky to photograph so I resorted to my trusty Veho USB Microscope
to get a video and some photos at the end of the post.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

You can press along the top and this gap flexes in and out but it’s resting position is with a gap probably just less than 1mm. This might not sound like much and you may not notice it initially, especially on the black iPad 2′s but on the white ones, once this gap starts to gather some dust and dirt it really starts to become noticeable.

I made an appointment at the local Genius Bar and showed them the problem, on the way through the store I stopped and checked all 16 or so iPad 2 they had on display and none of them had this issue. The genius at first wasn’t sure so he sought a second opinion and the 2nd Genius straight away said “that’s not right, I wouldn’t be happy with it if it was my iPad” so they agreed to swap it out for a new one. Even though they were out of stock for sale iPad 2′s, they have a separate stock for exchanges and repairs and luckily for me they had one white 64GB white one.

He brought the new one out, passed it to me in the cellophane wrap to double check the new one whilst he started doing the paper work. Unfortunately the replacement one he handed me to inspect had an even bigger gap just under neath the headphone socket but only about 1 inch long unlike the one I took back which had a 5-6 inch long gap.

The genius seemed a little surprised too and went out the back for quite a while, eventually he came back and said since I rejected that one and they had no others in he’d have to order me one, so I’m waiting for a call to let me know when they’ve got it in.

Some of you may think I’m being a little fussy here, but let’s just remember how proud Apple were of the tight fit and finish and tolerances of the iPhone 4 bezel and metal surround (even if it did have a few holding-it-wrong issues) and let’s also not forget this isn’t some £100 palm-pilot from the 90′s, this is a £700 tablet (including the smart cover which of all the iPad 2 accessories is the only thing I’ve bought so far) and if I’m parting with £700 for something it needs to be 100% right.

UPDATE 26th April 2011: I had a call from Apple to say that the replacement iPad 2 they had ordered was in store. I tried calling to ask them to inspect it before I drove for an hour to the store but their stupid phone system auto-hangs up every time so I had to make the drive. I checked the new unit and whilst there were no gaps around the bezel, the left hand side aluminium was badly scratched (where the smart cover connects). I asked if it was a refurb unit to which they said no, I pointed out the marks and said I’m rejecting this one too and he took it out the back for 5 minutes and came back out with a brand new sealed retail unit. They apologised for messing me around and gave me the brand new retail unit which upon inspection seems perfect. So as far as quality control and build quality go for the new iPad 2, it’s not looking good, I rejected 3 out of 4 units!

1 – REJECTED my original one as seen in the photos and videos with a long gap across the top

2 – REJECTED the first replacement offered to me with a smaller but wider gap under the headphone socket

3 – REJECTED the second replacement offered to me a week later with no gaps but badly damaged down the left hand side

4 – ACCEPTED the new retail unit they opened for me, no marks, scratches or gaps…since getting it home I’ve noticed some light bleed around the edges but can’t be bothered going back to the store again just yet.

Finally, one of the greatest features missing from Aplpe iOS devices ( iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) has now been made available as of iOS4.3…Home Share.

Home Share has been around in some guise for a fear or two now, allowing computers on the same network to see, browse and play music and videos from other iTunes Libraries on the network. What was lacking, however, was the ability for an Apple iOS device to see and stream this content whilst on the same network, it was restricted to OS X and Windows operating systems running the latest iTunes.

Let’s say I’d just purchased the latest XX Album in iTunes on my Mac Pro, if I wanted to listen to that on my iPhone 4 whilst in the garden (still connected to WiFi) I’d have to connect the iPhone up via USB and sync the new album to the iPhone. Not a big hassle but still inconvenient [hopefully one day soon Apple will pull their finger out and enable WiFi syncing of content to an iOS device, USB cables are so 2000].

The idea of Home Share is that now, any iOS device on my WiFi network can see, search and stream/play any content from another computer running iTunes on the same network, just what I’ve been after. Finally I can keep movies on my Mac Pro’s huge RAID hard drives and lie in the garden or in bed and stream a movie to my iPad.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get it working, no matter what I selected in the iTunes preferences pane the “Shared” option wouldn’t appear on my iPhone or iPad.

I double checked on the iOS devices that I had entered the correct Apple ID in the Home Share settings:

Settings–>iPod–>Home Sharing

I made sure the iOS devices were updated to iOS4.3 and iTunes was on the very latest 10.2.1 and rebooted everything.

It still wouldn’t work. I powered on my Macbook Air and enabled Home Sharing on that and that instantly showed up on the iOS devices….so the iOS devices are behaving correctly but for some reason iTunes on my Mac Pro wasn’t playing ball. I checked to see if it was a firewall issue but the firewall on my Mac Pro is off (Firewall is handled by the router and TimeCapsule). Eventually I found out what I had to do….and felt like a right idiot for not spotting it sooner!

In iTunes I’d been check in the Preferences to “Enable Sharing” but what I had failed to spot in the Advanced menu was “Turn Home Sharing On”!! Err that could be the reason it’s not working. By default this option is set to be ON but I do vaugely remember turning it off last year when trying to debug some network latency issues with my Apple TVs.

In iTunes click on Advanced in the tool-bar at the top:

Select the option to Turn On Home Sharing [if it says turn Off Home sharing then your Home Sharing is already on and you have another problem, sorry]

Once you’ve done this, you should see a new Home Share icon in the side bar:

Click on that and then in the right hand pane enter your Apple ID (email address) and password and hit Create Home Share:

You should then be greeted with a screen saying that Home Sharing is now on and confirming the email address used to create the home share.  [NOTE Make sure this matches the email address entered on the iPod settings screen on the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch.]

Now on your iOS device, when you go into the iPod app and click on “more” in the bottom right corner on the iPhone/iPOd touch or Library at the top left of the iPad you should be able to see the new Shared section and select the library you just shared:

So if you’re having difficulty getting your Home Share visible on your iOS device:

1. Make sure your devices are on the same network, this is crucial! If you have multiple WiFi networks all devices that home share MUST BE ON THE SAME NETWORK. If, like me, you have an Apple Airport Extreme or TimeCapsule computers connect via ethernet cables are classed as being on the same network as the WiFi devices.
2. Make sure your iTunes is fully up to date, at the time of writing that is version 10.2.1
3. Make sure your iOS devices are fully up to date, at the time of writing that is version iOS4.3
4. Ensure you have entered the same Apple ID on both iTunes and iOS settings.
5. Finally, and most important, make sure Home Sharing is turned ON in the advanced settings of iTunes, see above screen shots.

Vuze is a powerful bittorrent app for both Windows and Mac. It has a host of nifty features including “meta searches”, ‘integrated, cross codec, high def player” and a handy web remote which lets you securely control your Vuze client from any computer or smartphone with a web browser.

If you have installed Vuze but noticed that there is now a Vuze Toolbar on your Firefox browser there is an easy way to uninstall the toolbar.

Whilst in Firefox go to Tools –>Add ons:

And then highlight the Vuze Remote Toolbar and click Uninstall:

This will bring up a prompt asking if you are sure you want to Uninstall Vuze Remote Toolbar:

Click Uninstall. It will then Uninstall the toolbar for you and prompt you to restart your Firefox:

That’s it, all done. After you have restarted Firefox the Vuze toolbar will be gone forever.

This might be a strange way to start a case review but I hate iPhone cases. I’ve bought every single iPhone (2G, 3G and 3GS) released on launch day and used them all naked, without cases or screen protectors. I’m not a clumsy person, I take exceptionally good care of my iPhones, cameras and gadgets and as such I’ve never needed a case for “protection” reasons. Apple spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on designing some of the best looking hardware available today so it seems a shame to hide such beauty under a horrible, bulky case, if I wanted an ugly chunky phone I’d have bought a Nokia (sorry Nokia, I was a loyal 8-series fan until the iPhone).

So when I picked up my iPhone 4 on launch day I loved how slim it felt compared to the 3GS it was replacing and thought the black glass back with stainless steel sides looked superb. Unfortunately after a few days use I (along with many others) realised just how bad the signal issue (nicknamed antenna-gate) really was. I was gutted, I’m not ashamed to say I’m an Apple fanboy but I couldn’t deny they’d got things wrong with the iPhone 4 antenna design. I patiently waiting for Apple’s press release announcing free bumpers or third party cases for everybody to resolve the issue and at the earliest opportunity I ordered the Apple iPhone bumper. I was loathed  to have to use a case but I was hopeful that the minimal, backless Apple bumper wouldn’t be too intrusive. How wrong I was, the bumper makes the phone feel bulkier than the iPhone 3GS and I had to take it off every time I wanted to cradle it in my B&W Zeppelin Mini speakers, so after a week I couldn’t stand it any longer and went back to using the iPhone 4 without a case. Long story short, my I took my first iPhone 4 back to Apple as the signal issue was so bad without a case on, they gave me another brand new iPhone 4 in case I just had a faulty one but the replacement had the same problem.

There was one benefit of getting a new iPhone 4 though, I could order another free case as they log IMEI numbers to determine if you’ve already have a free case. So this time I opted for the Speck Pixel Skin HD case and when that arrived it was much better than the Apple bumper. It didn’t feel as bulky as the bumper and made the iPhone feel around the same size as an iPhone 3GS without a case but again I had to remove it from the case every night to cradle it on my Zepplin Mini speakers on the bedside table. This was getting ridiculous now, I knew I needed some kind of case in order to keep a strong signal and I’d even tried cutting some scotch magic tape to exactly fit the stainless steel sides and that worked for a while until it stared peeling off.

There had to be a better solution, I spent hours, and I mean hours(!) trawling the internet for a stylish, thin and unobtrusive case for the iPhone 4. Amongst my friends it’s a well know fact that I am completely “anal” when it comes to researching and finding the right product to suit my needs and searching for my 3rd iPhone 4 case was no exception. I went into The Carphone Warehouse and made them open up all the iPhone 4 cases they sold for me to try on the phone, ease of taking off and putting on, whether it would fit on my Zepplin Mini speakers, how it felt in the hand, whether it would damage the iPhone in the long run. After annoying all the Carphone Warehouse staff I still hadn’t found the right case and then by chance I stumbled upon a company called Elago who had just brought out their new case for the iPhone 4, the Elago S4 Breathe. On screen and on paper this seemed to be exactly what I was after in a case, extremely thin, completely open at the bottom to allow it to cradle on my Zepplin’s without having to remove it and most importantly it looked good.

Bad news….I couldn’t find a UK stockist as it was so new, but luckily for me I had a friend living in America who was coming over to visit so I asked him to order me one direct from Elago and it (along with my friend) arrived 3 days later and WOW is all I can say, I really can’t put into words how perfect this case is for the iPhone 4. I thought about how I could show everybody just how thin this case is and how good it feels in the hand but it’s tricky to portray this without you actually getting your hands on the thing.

In the end I tracked down a digital micrometer and took some photos of the iPhone 4 naked, with an Apple bumper, Speck Pixel Skin HD and with the super slim Elago S4 Breathe. I know we’re only talking mm here but in the palm of you hand just a few mm make a HUGE difference. The Elago S4 also retains the square edge feel of the iPhone 4 rather than the smooth rounded feel you get from the bumper and Pixel Skin HD.

• Naked iPhone = 59.21mm
• Elago S4 Breathe = 60.39mm (i.e. just 1.18mm thick)
• Speck Pixel Skin HD = 32.80mm (i.e. 3.59mm thick, 304% thicker than the Elago S4 Breathe)
• Apple Bumper = 63.69mm (i.e. 4.58mm thick, 388% thicker than the  Elago S4 Breathe)

You can easily get to the volume and silence switch with the generous cutout in the side and the top and bottom of the iPhone are completely open so there’s no issues accessing the multi-port connector on the bottom or the headphone, noise cancelling mic and power button on the top.

The sides of the case also protrude around a one mm from the glass to prevent the screen scratching if you place it face down on a table.

The case is available in three colours, silver, white and black. I wasn’t too sure what the silver one would look like and thought white on a black iPhone may look a little too funky so I played it safe with a black one. The tolerances of this case are second to none! It snaps on so snuggly the iPhone has no wiggle room at all, once the case is on the phone cannot slide around inside the case one little bit. I found my bumper wasn’t a snug fit and there was marginal play with the phone sliding around inside the bumper, even after a week of use a small amount of grit got between the case and the stainless steel surround and scratch it as the phone slid around inside the bumper. There is no opportunity for this to happen with the Elago S4 Breathe, I’ve had it on my iPhone for over a month now and there’s no marking to the stainless band on the iPhone at all.

The S4 Breathe has a strange (but good) feel to the touch. It’s like a hard ABS plastic but coated in a scratch proof soft touch paint (or at least I think it’s a paint). It’s similar to the back of the Google Android phones and I’ve also noticed it’s the same as the coating on the centre of my BMW steering wheel and door handles.

If you’ve not got the gist of this yet, I love this case! I’m not being paid to say this, I’m not getting anything free from Elago, I have bought this case with my own hard earned money but that was also one of the best bits, the case retails for $19.99 but Elago were selling it for $9.99 at the time which makes it about £8 here in the UK. I just hope Elago find a decent UK stockist soon! I’ve got a little list on my iPhone PaperLess App (great list making app if you need one btw) of friends that have fallen in love with my case and asked me to get them one and so far I’ve got 8 friends on that list so I’m going to be putting a call into my friend State Side pretty soon to ask him to buy and ship them to me.

There’s a whole gallery of images of the Elago S4 Breathe on and off the phone below.