Limited is the new unlimited

About a month back one of my friends got a call from Airtel customer care. It was to inform him that he has exceeded the download limit on his unlimited Airtel broadband plan and the download speed will be reduced to half the speed of his plan. Now wait a minute, what the hell is going on. That's right limit on unlimited.

The fact is that Airtel has put a download cap on users of unlimited data plans citing "fair use policy". This applies to all existing users since they would have signed Airtel's terms and conditions before taking the connection. After reaching the data cap download speed will be halved. On a 256 Kbps unlimited (oops T&C apply) connection the cap is 15GB(download cap varies with plan) after which speed is reduced to 128 Kbps. This is not new in the US, but Airtel is the first to implement it in India. This may influence other broadband operators in India to implement similar caps on their plans.

iPhone tips and tricks

1. Double clicking the home button opens phone app and displays your favourite tab. When using ipod app double tapping the home button will show ipod controls (to play/pause the track that is playing, skip to next/prev track or go to ipod app). You can customise this behaviour at settings>general>home button.

2. If you want to quickly delete a mail a quick horizontal swipe on the mail shows a delete button. The mail app supports this, it doesn't work on your contacts & calender, some third party apps support this.

3. This is something i found out of neccessity. One thing that was bugging me was "How to pause/skip tracks when the iPhone is in my pocket ?". Now with my iPod nano i can do that by clicking on the pocket by feeling for the right button. With the iphone doing this will be pretty tough because there are no buttons to feel. I have to remove the phone from my pocket and either unlock the phone or duble click the home button (refer Tip 1). So i just googled and found this. This only works with the bundled earbuds or third party earbuds/headphones that are designed with a mic and Accept/reject call button. When listening to a song single click the button on earbuds to Play/Pause the current playing track. Double click the skip to the next track. Looks like there is no way to skip to the prev track. Strange that apple does not market this as a feature (may be i'm missing some thing). I can atleast enjoy this when i am using the bundled earbuds, its pretty useful.

4. When using the calculator app (OS 2.0 and later) hold ur phone in landscape mode to access scientific calculator.

5. Thanks to Tarun for this one. Very Helpful. Tarun's comment lifted,
"In any page or app, touch on the top status bar takes you to the top of that page.
This works in all the native apps and most if the 3rd party apps too."