AT&T has released a free iPhone app called AT&T Mark the Spot to let you report network trouble directly to the firm. The app uses GPS data to report your location when you tell the company of a failed call, no coverage, data failure, or poor voice quality. This is a superb idea on AT&T's part; let's see if it results in noticeable network improvement.
follow link
Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.
Syslogd Overwhelming Your Computer?
If your Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) system is unexpectedly sluggish, logging might be the culprit. Run Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/ folder), and click the CPU column twice to get it to show most to least activity. If syslogd is at the top of the list, there's a fix. Syslogd tracks informational messages produced by software and writes them to the asl.db, a file in your Unix /var/log/ directory. It's a known problem that syslogd can run amok. There's a fix: deleting the asl.db file.
Launch Terminal (from the same Utilities folder), and enter these commands exactly as written, entering your administrative password when prompted:
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo rm /var/log/asl.db
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd
Your system should settle down to normal. For more information, follow the link.
Written by
Glenn Fleishman
Frustrated by iPhone Cell Trouble? Tap to Tell AT&T
Hope their network can withstand being bombarded by 600 gabillion trouble reports. Did AT&T ever consider that this superb documentation of how crappy their network is might be subject to discovery in court? A dream come true for Verizon and consumer advocates.
Maybe a silly question, but can the app cache the information until you're next in an area with better cell coverage? Or does the reporting fail if you've got no signal?
I haven't tried it yet to see what happens. Likely, it sends an email, since that's the only reliable outbound method if the network isn't available for asynchronous communication. It's possible that the program is designed to assuage us, and simply eats all reports, too, but that would be far too cynical of me.
Or a free SMS message
Oh, that's cleverer than me, but the 160-character limit might be a problem. I joke.
this is going to be the most used application on my iPhone! i live in midtown manhattan & i can't even receive or make calls from my apt. my girlfriend merrily chats away on her rudimentary t-mobile cell while i sit there like a shmuck with "the best phone on the market" getting no signal.
I'm really liking this - already I've gotten to complain twice about the coverage in my house, which varies between perfectly fine to completely non-existent, for reasons I can never figure out.