Dear Aunt TUAW,

I’ve been a faithful reader for awhile and purchased a 3G iPhone a couple weeks ago. Everything is great – except for one thing which is extremely unusual (genius words), I wanted to share with you guys. When I am in my home (and only when I am in my home) my phone believes I am in Springfield PA. I live in Minneapolis MN. It doesn’t matter if I am on the 3G network or my personal WiFi network (I’ve isolated each), Google Maps always centers on Springfield PA. If I walk down my street, watching Google Maps- the phone re-orientates itself back to Minneapolis MN. The Genius tried to re-set the time-zone and a couple other things, but it didn’t work.

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of screen caps if you guys want to see them. I just can’t figure out why BOTH 3G and WiFi would both point to the same (incorrect) place…one uses cell towers and one uses IP addresses right? Anyway, I’m not necessarily looking for you guys to fix it or anything – just thought you might want to know. I Googled “iphone Springfield PA” or “google maps iphone Springfield PA” and several iterations, but it seems I am alone in my situation.

A reader in Barbados sent us a message today describing the success he had with a Rebel SIM card and his 3G iPhone. Having purchased a 3G in Cananda, he returned to Barbados and ordered the Rebel, which has been working perfectly with no dropped calls.

Barbados does not have 3G service, but decent GSM. Of course, we can’t confirm the story (though we’ll gladly fly over to sunny Barbados to try it out!), so your experience my vary. In the meantime, you may want to read this article on how to remove your iPhone’s SIM card, or our chat with jailbreaker Pytey.

If you’re going on a cruise vacation, don’t be concerned about being out of touch. Chances are excellent that you can use your cell phone.

Reader Steven Madow reminded TUAW that many cruise lines use a service called Cellular At Sea to provide you with satellite-linked cellular service. Almost 100 ships currently use the service, which is a joint venture between AT&T Mobility and SeaMobile.

Madow said that with his iPhone, configuration was a simple matter of looking at the settings (right) for a carrier called “Cellular at Sea.” The cost of the service varies depending on your home carrier, but for AT&T users it is about $0.79 per minute. While that’s not exactly cheap, it’s priceless if you need to keep in touch in case of an emergency.

Like many not-yet-released videogames, I’m a little worried that Astro Ranch won’t be as good as the game in my head right now. Anytime a developer says they were influenced by great games like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon, as the Tag Games guys do in this interview with the cleverly-named iPwn Games, I get overly excited. A deep simulation game with a casual skin? It sounds just too good to be true.

But who knows — maybe the upcoming Astro Ranch will be worth the excitement. Paul Farley certainly makes it sound good: they say they’ve been pushing the 3D system to new heights, and that they’re aiming to provide a deep enough game to appeal to players with a lot of time on their hands, as well as a fun game that casual players can pick up and then put down after about 10 minutes.

They’re aiming for connectivity as well — the game is based on a ’50s-style space ranch, and players will supposedly be able to visit each others’ ranches, send messages back and forth and even compete and trade with each other. They even claim to be able to connect iPhone players to farmers playing on the DS, but we’ll believe that one when we see it.

AppleInsider says that Apple has yanked the Push notification framework from the latest version of the iPhone 2.1 firmware beta. Push got a lot of play during WWDC — it’s a service that will send information to the apps on your iPhone as needed (tweets, for example, will just come rather than having to refresh Twitterific all the time), but apparently Apple doesn’t think it’s ready for the stage yet. They’ve wiped it from the beta, claiming it needs “further development,” and haven’t given any indication of when it might return.