For the past few days, I’ve been working with the AT&T Tilt, a Windows Mobile smartphone. I’ve used Windows Mobile before, so this isn’t quite the new experience that the BlackBerry Curve was, but I haven’t used the latest version of Windows Mobile (version 6) either. I used WM5 with a Treo 750 for a while, but I ended up dealing with a bad bug that prevented calls from ringing. That was pretty much a killer for the device, and I stopped using it.
And that would be the end of the story, but for the Smartphone Round Robin. And here we are again.
An employee of Asus — the company that builds many of Apple’s laptops — told CNET that they are making a tablet PC from Apple. It’s apparently a brand new tablet design, not one that Asus has used before. The device could be introduced as early as January, at Mac World Expo 2008. Crave at CNET surmises that the tablet will take many OS cues from the iPhone, incorporating finger flicking, cover flow, and other gesture-based movements.
Apple generally doesn’t enter a market unless nowadays unless they can clean house — there’s no real market leader in tablets, maybe some pent-up demand for them, but no single tablet model that ‘rules the roost.’ If Apple can make that device, and make it compelling, I could be aboard with that. The idea of replacing my laptop with a tablet and maybe a bluetooth keyboard, I could get along with that.
"4320.082" = "The iPhone “^1” contains new voice memos. Would you like to move these voice memos to your iTunes library?";
"4320.073" = "Enabling the iPhone for disk use requires manually ejecting the iPhone before each disconnect, even when automatically syncing music.";
We’ve reported on the kinds of things that one finds inside of “localizable.strings” inside of new versions of iTunes before. To date, they haven’t predicted any new functionality. And yet, rumors of new features coming to the iPhone based on these strings persist. I want to believe too.
Apple has selected a bunch of songs that make for popular ringtones and placed them in an easy-to-find section of the iTunes store. I’m getting tired of my old custom alarm ringtone (I only made one) and I think it’s time to wake up to something new.
Ringtones: the Playlists
Listen up. The iTunes Store has just made it easier to find the perfect ringtones to assign to your favorite callers. After scouring the more than 500,000 currently available ringtones, iTunes editors have assembled a wide assortment of ringtone playlists. The genre-based playlists include such eminently “ringtoneable” tracks as “Answer the Phone” (Sugar Ray), “Pyscho” (Bernard Hermann), “My Funny Valentine” (Chet Baker), “Hung Up” (Madonna), “On the Road Again” (Willie Nelson), “Soul Man” (The Blues Brothers), and many others. Want help creating your new ringtones? [Nov 06, 2007]
Unless you’ve been pinned under a bus for the past 24 hours, you’ve no doubt witnessed the unfolding drama from yesterday’s announcement by Google about its upcoming open mobile platform, dubbed Android. Opinions range from Android’s arrival heralding the end of the wireless world as we know it, to “Oh my God…targeted ads on a mobile phone!” This story isn’t particularly relevant to iPhone enthusiasts, but its impact will affect the handset industry as a whole. And being the smarty pants, know-it-all, Smartphone expert, tech talkin guy that I am, I couldn’t let this topic pass by without weighing in.
Dave Merten from MacOSG informs me that he has created a new web app for iPhone that provides instant access to support guides right from your iPhone. It’s called Mac611 (shouldn’t that be 911?). Check it out for yourself, or better still… break your Mac and try to fix it using this service. I’m going to the tool shed now to get my sledgehammer.
We mentioned the release of iTunes and Quicktime in our podcast yesterday, but haven’t provided any release notes. There’s not a lot in terms of content for anyone deciding to update or not. Ambrosia reports that iToner still works — though the initial update will wipe out iToner ringtones, you can easily sync them over. The iTunes doesn’t touch a user’s library file, so there shouldn’t be any risk of anything. The QuickTime update includes improvements for converting video for the iPhone. Are you excited about this? Yah, me neither.
Today’s podcast is a big one. We cover all of the new news with the upcoming O2 and T-Mobile launches, the Smartphone Round Robin sides of things, Google’s Android and whether it competes with Apple, plenty of iTunes news, and the final words from the community..
Google has announced Android, an open source Linux operating system designed to be very customizable by programmers. This isn’t the GPhone, the long-rumored Google Phone. Google is not making any of the actual phones, just the software. Android joins the ranks of myriad Linux development attempts: the new pro-sumer Palm OS, Access Linux Platform, Trolltech’s QTopia, OpenMoko, and others in Asia that are unknown to me.
I don’t know if this one will be more successful than the others, and they haven’t announced what it looks like, or what it will do. They just announced the software license and that it exists, or that it should in late 2008… but expect a bunch of publicity all over the place anyway. What I do know is that this effort will have a lot of money behind it.
Details of the iPhone’s launch in the UK is spilling out rapidly, and O2 are making some last changes in preparation for iPhone’s arrival. Their CEO granted an interview that gives a peek into Apple’s carrier selection process. O2 has changed the way that they deal with limited “unlimited” plans — they still limit them, but at least they will give users a warning before they punt people away. And lastly, UK gadget magazine tried out the iPhone for a while, and they have information about the 1.1.2, the upcoming firmware update and iTunes 7.5.
The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
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