November 2007: Monthly Archive

This guy Core of wickedpsyched.net coded a version of AFP, the Apple Filesharing Protocol, for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This means that you could enable filesharing on your iPhone and copy some files over directly from your desktop over wi-fi. If you ask me, this is better than disk mode, where you can plug in your iPhone and it shows up as a removable disk. It apparently doesn’t show up in Installer.app yet, but give it a few days and I’m sure it will be there.

There’s also great news if you’re more of a windows person. Say you just prefer the Samba/SMB/Windows Filesharing so you can share with windows and mac, well he’s got you covered there too.

Can’t bear the thought of missing out on the latest score or match results while away from the telly? MOLISC gives you live up to the nano-second results from every game. Simply point your iPhone’s browser to http://www.mobilelivescore.com and get full on updates as they happen.

GOOOOOAAAAALLLLL!

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There’s a big line at the mothership Regent Street Apple Store in London. The line started forming yesterday, and though there hasn’t been torrents of rain pouring down on the line waiters like there was in Germany, it’s been fairly cold — about 45° F. Still, the mood is chipper, and everyone is looking forward to getting their iPhone, and they’ll only have to wait about 2.5 hours before the official launch at 6:02 London time.

figure 1: Deutschland is the German word for Germany

Well, the iPhone has officially launched in Germany with T-Mobile, and with fanfare at that. Heise.de reports that there was a bunch of hooting and hollering, which reminds me of the Mall of America launch — they did a good job of making people feel like they were part of something big. Even if it was just for waiting for the release of a smartphone in a collapsible chair for 11 hours.

The CEO of T-Mobile is pleased with the demand for the iPhone, and is not sure that supplies will keep up with demand over the holiday season:

We’re not giving out precise forecasts, but registrations on our Web site lead me to believe (the Christmas sales period) will be a strong sales period.

iPhone: Bei mir, bist du schön.

Apple has released the 1.1.2 firmware for the iPhone out into the wild a little early, probably so that folks in Europe can download it directly when they get home. The 1.1.2 update weighs in at about 160MB, and it does update the baseband radio as well, bringing the radio software to 04.02.13G (from 04.01.13G in case you were wondering, and you probably weren’t). You can download the update directly from Apple.

As we’ve reported before, the 1.1.2 update closes the TIFF vulnerability that allows for the easy jailbreak from jailbreakme.com — I just used that site again yesterday to prepare an iPhone with 1.1.2 for Kevin of CrackBerry.com to use on his Rogers SIM card, and it just amazes me how easy it all is.

figure 1: It is with a heavy heart that Pogue informs us that the latest Windows Mobile phone from T-Mobile blows.

David Pogue has an excellent article on how the iPhone really broke down a bunch of barriers in the smartphone world, the best he claims, is “the way Apple took veto power away from the cellphone carriers.”

So yeah, that’s just the first sentence. The unfortunate part of the article is that most of the rest of it is a review for a T-Mobile Windows Mobile device. The good news is this: if you want to think about how awesome your iPhone is compared to a poorly-implemented Windows Mobile device, the second half of his article will really interest you. There’s a silver lining in every cloud, right?

There’s a neat way to enable push email on your iPhone so you can be notified of emails when they arrive, just like a BlackBerry. Push email has long been available with the IMAP idle command, though not many clients seem to support it. Getting the new push program on your iPhone requires that you jailbreak your phone, so if you need push email, you may want to hold of on tomorrow’s firmware update. The software is still in beta but apparently still works as advertised.

Apple has confirmed to pocket-lint.co.uk that the next firmware update, version 1.1.2, will be available tomorrow. The update brings several internationally-themed updates like international keyboards. UK users also get access to free wi-fi via The Cloud.

This update will fix the TIFF vulnerability, meaning that users can browse a bit safer. However, the closing of this security vulnerability means that the extremely easy AppSnapp method of installing 3rd party apps found at jailbreakme.com will cease to work.

Steve Jobs was voted the #2 most important person in technology in the last 25 years by the Computing Technology Industry Association by pulling in 73% of voters. Bill Gates, the #1 most important person, pulled in 84%.

There have been a lot of snarky comments about Apple in the press lately, usually from big media companies or other smartphone competitors. There are so many CEOs fiddling while Apple burns down their little walled cities, there’s enough of them for an orchestra. Or at least a hoedown.

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