Whilst writing my blog post on Opera Mini for the iPhone I realised that quite a few people have asked me how to take a screen grab of the screen on the iPhone. Well its quite simple…

Hold down the home button and quickly press the button at the top of the iPhone. The screen will flash and if your sound is on a ‘shutter’ noise will be heard and hey presto you will find your iPhone screen grab in the photos section.

This works with iPhone OS 2.0 and later I believe if I’m wrong please feel free to leave a comment

Opera Mini was finally cleared by Apple yesterday and made it into the App Store overnight (Monday April 12^th 2010). There has been allot of will they won’t they speculation surrounding Opera Mini on iPhone with Apple seemingly digging their heals in over recent months and for a while we all wondered if Opera Mini would be rejected from entering the App store.

Opera Mini Tabbed Browsing

Thankfully not and having downloaded and installed the app there are certainly advantages as well as a few disadvantages of using Opera Mini over Safari on the iPhone or iPod touch.

Speed

Speed, quite rightly bolded, quite simply if you are using the net over the mobile connection you should consider Opera Mini right away. With 3G access here in the UK only really reliable in major cities most of us rely on 2G access most of the time and the major speed advantages that Opera Mini gives you makes Opera the number one choice.

How is Opera Mini so much faster?

Well from the outset Opera Mini was designed with mobile browsers in mind both for usability on mobile devices and speed. Opera Mini uses a proxy server to render the pages before sending the heavily compressed document to the handset, which is noticeable even over a Wi-Fi connection. Added to this is Opera Minis ability to turn images off or downgrade images makes the speed increase even more impressive.

Opera Mini also loads faster than Safari although for those of you with nice shiny 3GS iPhones the load time isn’t so noticeable for older 3G users when multitasking arrives with iPhone OS 4 then this may become an issue.

Opera Mini Features

Opera Mini Settings

One thing which I missed right from the onset with Opera Mini is the ability to ‘pinch’ the screen to zoom in and out although this isn’t required for every page this is a feature that I think needs to be integrated into future releases. Double tap the screen and the browser will zoom in to a set level although the integration isn’t as slick as that of Safari.

Some web pages don’t render quite as well as Safari, some pages will need horizontal scrolling now and again which can be a pain but if this annoys you then there is always Safari to open the page in!

Opera Mini Features

What you do notice are features such as speed dial, which shows all your bookmarks as thumbnails at start up which is a real bonus for me.  Tabbed browsing is far more user friendly under Opera Mini than Safari I have always found that Safari can take an age to display tabs so this should speed about my browsing.

Opera Link

Opera Mini Speed Dial

Opera link allows you to sync your bookmarks, speed dial, saved Searches, Notes and history with your desktop Opera installation basically storing these features in ‘the cloud’. You can also save a web page to view offline, which is a nice touch and email links something which is desperately needed in Safari.

Conclusion – Opera Mini

It’s a nice little app which will certainly be staying on my iPhone there are a few gripes with zooming and some rendering problems but on the whole it is certainly worth installing on your iPhone, iPod Touch even if its for the speed increase that Opera Mini brings.

There are certainly features that I think Apple will implement into Safari at some point and vise versa as I am sure that Opera Mini will incorporate some of the better features on Safari. My advice is to download and use both!

I downloaded the WordPress iPhone app the other day after Robert Mills tweeted about it (@RobertMills on Twitter). I couldn’t wait to fire it up and start blogging away right from my iPhone. The first thing I had to do was to enable XML-RPC services on one of my wordpress blogs to enable the app tos peak to it which was no problem at all. Having done this I quickly connected to the one blog I was experimenting with (http://www.isthiscool.com) I could view edit and add new posts right away ah a snag…. IsThisCool uses custom fields to add a thumbnail to the post which is needed as this is an integral part of this blog so I was scuppered!

Still never mind knowing this was quite a complicated blog I wasn’t to bothered so I decided to connect to this blog instead easy I thought but no how wrong I was! I enabled XML-RPC and no mater what I try I either get a XML-RPC error on the iPhone app or I am told my username and password is wrong which having entered multiple times it isn’t! The only thing I can think of is that this blog is with another hosting provider, HostHi to be precise so perhaps they are not letting me through the firewall? Any help will be very much appreciated!

I have been happily using my iPhone 3G for a number of months now quite happily, well despite its appalling SMS support but apart from that it has been great. My first real problem came the other day when for no apparent reason the phone appeared dead.

The screen was blank and no button worked at all, no matter what I pressed nothing happened the phone appeared to be dead. Out of desperation I tried ringing it to see if that would bring it to life but despite getting a ringing tone from the phone I was phoning from the iPhone itself appeared to be dead.

Panicking I went to google in search of the problem and tank goodness I found one. So here it is in bgger type so those that are panicking can see the solution straight away!

Hold down both the sleep/wake button and the home button for at least ten seconds until you see the apple icon appear. That’s it, panic over!

Why this happens  I have no idea but thank goodness I have found a solution!