October 2007: Monthly Archive

Bonjour! My name is Jacques. On behalf of the people of France I would just like to say Merci to you Americans for exporting the Suprême iPhone. We French are quite accustomed to pinching and making gestures with our fingers, so the iPhone will be as second nature to us, oui? However, our country already has too many elitist assholes, so you may keep Steve Jobs. Just give us the iPhone and we can forget the unpaid loans you still owe us from the American Revolution. Did you swine think we had forgotten that our King Louis financed your war of independence, and allowed your con man, Benjamin Franklin, to rob our national treasury! Give us iPhone, and we give your freedom… and I don’t mean fries, mon ami.

Read les press release after les break.

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I’ve said it before, but the iPhone and Leopard were supposed to come out together. That’s why we have functionality orphans like Mail and Notes.

Well, Apple has a page up with 300 of the new features coming with Leopard on October 26. There are a few of note, one of which was noticed at jkOnTheRun:

Write handy notes you can access from anywhere — including graphics, colored text, and attachments. Group notes into folders or create Smart Mailboxes that automatically group them. Your notes folder acts like an email mailbox, so you can retrieve notes from any Mac or PC or access them from your iPhone.

There’s a little blurb about To-Dos as well. They’re getting integrated into the mail client. Hmmm… it would make sense why the Calendar application doesn’t have to-do items, if Apple has been planning to put them into their Mail application. This functionality would make Apple’s Mail.app a lot more like Outlook, which I think most people will welcome.

Create to-do items directly from email messages or notes in Mail. Simply highlight text in an email, then click the To Do button to create a to-do from a message.

I don’t think it’s long before we get a Leopard patch for the iPhone. I’d imagine that an iTunes update will accompany it as well, unless the functionality to sync to-dos and Notes is already hidden within the current version of iTunes. There may be other hidden iPhone updates as well; rest assured that I’ll post as soon as I read about them.

Apple was sued on the basis of information from Greenpeace’s report card for the iPhone from yesterday. Apparently, California’s Proposition 65 requires the disclosure of phthalates on a warning label, and the iPhone doesn’t have that. So, the Center for Environmental Health is suing. There will apparently be a 60 day notice before the lawsuit is actually, while the CEH independently verifies Greenpeace’s findings. And ensuring that this iPhone lawsuit is just as murky as all of the other ones, the findings that phthalates affect reproductive functions is apparently in dispute. And Apple is on the record for a timeline of getting rid of phthalates; they’ve already vowed to get rid of the bad stuff by the end of 2008 so I’m not sure who wins with a lawsuit like this except for the lawyers. It’s just bad press for everyone involved.

Engadget reports that a deep red version of the iPhone is in the works. The report lists a 4GB version available in deep red, but I’ll believe a deep red 4GB iPhone when I see it. The best reason that Apple would make a red iPhone is to be part of the PRODUCT (RED) charity for AIDS in Africa, which Apple has done with iPods for quite a while now.

figure 1: The Orange Treo 680 is what I used before I got an iPhone. This and a featurephone, actually, for when I wanted to take a non-useless picture of something. I used both AT&T and T-Mobile.

Let me put on my Carnac the Magnificent hat and guess that you were on T-Mobile too. There’s an interesting survey report done by the NPD group recently that caught my eye, specifically because it names Treos. I still have love for Treos, but I’m off the wagon in terms of using one regularly at least until their Linux OS ships. But here are the fact nuggets that they report:

• iPhone owners were 10 times more likely to have owned a Treo
• iPhone owners were 3 times more likely to use a T-Mobile phone, such as the Sidekick
• iPhone owners were 3 times more likely to switch from T-Mobile or Alltel
• iPhone owners were no more likely to buy an iPhone if they had a Blackberry

They don’t break down the numbers for you much in the press release, but as always these reports are meant to be bought and sold by industry analysts and stock market guys and stuff. I’d like to believe that they have a breakdown of PalmOS and Windows Mobile in there, but they don’t specify in their press release. The only quote nugget is from NPD’s Director of Industry Analysis Ross Rubin:

“The iPhone’s Internet and media capabilities have resonated with consumers — especially those who previously owned Treos and Sidekicks. Its advanced operating system makes it competitive with smartphones for many tasks, while its sleek design and lack of expandability is reminiscent of fashion phones”

Speaking personally, I had a devil of a time with getting media on the Treo. It’s just not convenient to use it to consume media at all. You need the special headphones, you need to drag your files into which directory on the SD card again, or worse, you use Palm Desktop to do it. My loathing for Palm Desktop and Palm Conduits really knows no bounds. Even with the iSync conduits, it was still a pain. Oh, and my loathing for Blazer — that knows no bounds too. I wrestled with Java to get Opera Mini installed, juggled my 4-5 SD cards, trying to remember what was on which one, etc. I wanted to like Windows Mobile, but missed the screen resolution and couldn’t cope with the interface. Syncing on the iPhone is quick, easy, and seems to take much less time than anything on Palm Desktop would ever do.

The process for jailbreaking an iPhone manually is pretty involved; Apple’s process of securing the iPhone and iPod Touch have made the barrier to entry for installing 3rd party applications on an iPhone much tougher. If you’re looking to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch in the hopes of installing other applications or non-Apple-sanctioned ringtones, however, there are now some easier ways to do it.

First, iNdependence has been updated to perform the jailbreak for iPhones running firmware 1.1.1. So if you’ve got a Mac around, there’s now a GUI tool to run your iPhone through the hoops to get it jailbroken. I’ll post up a tool for Windows as soon as I see one, but for now it seems Windows users are stuck with the tough method; iBrickr hasn’t been updated yet but remains the best hope for you.

Second, if you’ve got an iPod Touch, there’s an automatic jailbreak tool that’s available from iPod Touch Hacks that will do it all for you on both mac and windows. Both use the recent TIFF vulnerability.

Alas, poor Palm. You just can’t seem to get a break these days, can you? First came that whole embarrassing Foleo fiasco (or Foolio as I like to call it), an ordeal not to be repeated. Then your long overdue Palm OS replacement gets pushed back, twice, not to appear for another 18 months. Now comes this latest report, certain to deliver yet another vigorous blow to the nuts.

The bean counters at NPD Group, who watch consumer buying habits like the Chinese Secret Police, have determined that a very large percentage of early iPhone owners migrated from Smartphones, particularly the Palm Treo and T-Mobile Sidekick. In fact, the study shows that consumers were ten times more likely to have abandoned a Treo in favor of iPhone. Which totally has me laughing my ass off at the numbskulls who so adamantly asserted that iPhone will NEVER attract Smartphone users, in a vein effort to write off any threat. Fear the fruit, boys. Fear the fruit.

Four years ago the Treo represented the pinnacle of mobile computing design and innovation. Today, it’s the Amish horse and buggy of Smartphones. Carriers may just as well give them away as Christmas ornaments for subscribers to hang on their trees. Nobody wants one.

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INdependance, the highly popular jailbreak utility for iPhone, has been updated to include support for the firmware release whose name we dare not speak (1.1.1, there I said it).

Note Jailbreaking involves bypassing the iPhone’s locked software, enabling installation of third party software, and should not be confused with the process of SIM unlocking. These are two different animals entirely.

Download it now, if you dare. Be afraid.

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Universal unveils a new music subscription plan that involves a $5 per month subscription fee. Universal has Sony BMG and perhaps Warner on board, so that’s 3 of the big 4. The notable absence is EMI, who has gone DRM-free. iPod Observer calls the plan novel, I don’t think I’ll be as kind. The part of their plan that’s novel is that the device manufacturers pay the $5 fee instead of the customer. What inevitably will happen here is that the customer will get charged that extra $5 per month anyway… and the customers won’t be able to decide for themselves when to end the subscription service. If I thought any company would pay that fee for more than a few months for ‘free,’ I’d be delusional. Delusional like Gartner analyst Mike McGuire:

“If the object is to wrest control of the market from Steve Jobs, this is a credible way to try it.”

Apple has started putting 99¢ DRM-free tracks on sale in iTunes. Usually, DRM free tracks are only available as purchases from iTunes plus and cost $1.29. Assuming this trend continues, I’m glad to see Apple iTunes moving aggressively against Amazon MP3.