iPhone – Giovanni F. Mazzeo De Santolo

How to tell if your iPhone 17 has a Samsung screen

Giovanni — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:12:41 +0000

TL;DR: Some iPhone 17 Pros have a slight blue hue tint depending on who made the screen. Samsung panels are the best ones to get (serial numbers starting with G9P, G9N, or G9Q). Apple killed the old sysdiagnose method in iOS 26, but you can now use the free tool 3uTools on Windows or Mac — no jailbreak needed.

With the iPhone 17 Pro, Apple is sourcing OLED panels from different manufacturers. It’s a bit of a lottery — some phones end up with Samsung panels (considered the best), while others come with LG or BOE panels. The catch? A few non-Samsung screens show a noticeable blue tint.

The easiest way to check? Use 3uTools.

Runs on both Windows and Mac
Works perfectly on iOS 26 (as of Sept 25, 2025)
Doesn’t need a jailbreak
Spits out your hardware info in seconds, including the display’s serial prefix

Look for G9P, G9N, or G9Q in the serial number — that means you’ve got a Samsung panel.

Apple used to let us pull this info by digging into sysdiagnose logs, but they shut that down in iOS 26. Thankfully, 3uTools makes it super easy. I haven’t had the time to play with all its extra features yet, but for this one purpose alone it’s worth grabbing.

Big shoutout to the developers for keeping it free!

Apple iPhone 4S Cellular Network comparison AT&T 3G vs Sprint 3G (video)

Giovanni — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 04:46:38 +0000

Last week Apple released the newest iPhone 4S in the United States for all three major wireless carriers: AT&T, Sprint and Verizon.

As an iPhone user I wanted to compare the wireless networks of AT&T, my current carrier since the release of the iPhone 3GS in 2009, and Sprint the defacto Unlimited data wireless carrier since all data plans from the other major carriers carry a data-cap.

This is the first time that Sprint carries Apple’s flagship phone and despite the amaizing features of the phone, as you can see in the video, the wireless network of Sprint falls short of expectations for a proper iPhone experience to support YouTube streaming, data downloading, etc.

Further the video shows AT&T constantly offering amazing speeds (probably thanks to HDSPA+ wireless data technology only available for AT&T iPhones) in comparison to Sprint’s poor network performance during ping, download and web browsing tests.

For the time being AT&T will keep me as a customer, thanks to their superior data speeds and thanks to fact that AT&T is the only carrier to support web-browsing while on a call. If Sprint enhances their network to offer at least 100 KB/s (1MB steady downstream) they may become the defacto winner for new and current iPhone users looking to save some money (I could save $15+ a month by switching to Sprint). However due to their poor network performance I decided to stick with AT&T. I would love to hear about your experiences with the Sprint iPhone 4S on their network.

Every new update for iPhone iOS = Slower phone

Giovanni — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:29:50 +0000

Have you ever noticed that every time that Apple releases a new version of their iOS, the operating system for iPhones and iPads, that older versions/models will have a substantial decrease in performance (ie: slower)?

The decrease in performance is not worth the two or three new useful features that they release, well at least not for me. I have my iPhone 3GS that is almost two years old running 4.1 and have not upgraded to iOS 4.2 or iOS 4.3. There’s no reason to, with Jailbreaking you can do anything you want.

Even if I wanted to upgrade just for the heck of it, I don’t have time to re-install a bunch of apps and move my 30GB music library to the iPhone all over again. Plus jailbreaking the iPhone is time consuming… I don’t know, that’s just my view.