Cell Ranger, savior or scam?

After reading this review at Gear Diary about the Cell Ranger, I decided to give it a shot and ordered one.  I currently work in an office that finds my iPhone constantly switching between 3G, EDGE and No Service with DBM readings well over -100.  However, I am able to walk 8 paces out my office door and my signal is much better (above -90 DBM).  

 

At this point, I have installed it 16 feet up, above my drop ceiling, attached to a steel beam that is grounded.  It then runs behind my drywall office wall, and a hole has been cut and unit fed through a coverplate and plugged into my laptop.  So far, the results are impressive.  -83 DBM currently, translating to 4 bars of 3G service. 

 

You can read all about the products at www.cellranger.net  I will be testing it out over the next few weeks and will post a more formal review once I feel I can talk about it more effectively.

A few random iPhone items

So, an interesting thing happened to me yesterday with the iPhone.  I had unplugged it from the charger at 5:30am and went about my normal day.  However, I was in a few long meetings that took me away from even looking at my phone for hours.  By the time last night rolled around, I noticed that my battery life was still showing 100% on the screen!  I honestly thought there might be an issue, but didn’t think much of it.  Then around 9pm, I decided there was definitely an issue with the battery gauge, so I did a reset of the phone.  When it came back up, low and behold the phone only showed about 50% battery left.  Looks to me to be a bug with the software, but it may have been an isolated occurrence.  I’ll keep an eye on it to see if it happens again.  The good news is that the 2.01 software appears to be assisting with battery life more, but additional real world testing is needed before this can be considered conclusive. 

I told you that story to tell you this one.  While I was attempting to figure out if the battery gauge was stuck or not, I took a screen shot of the phone before the reset and after.  When the phone came back up, I went back into the photos and the screen shot I took before the reset was gone!  I’m not sure if one is related to the other, but I’ve yet to be able to replicate this behavior on multiple tests.