December 2007: Monthly Archive

The last iPhone review is up from Kevin of CrackBerry.com. It’s a well-written review of the iPhone and he sides with me against Dieter that the iPhone is a smartphone, big ups there. It has some catching up to do, to be sure, but that’s to be expected for a device that hasn’t even been out 6 months yet. It sounds to me like he’s been thinking about purchasing one. Kevin names the iPhone the champ of entertainment, and wonders why they didn’t call it the iGadget — the phone is treated as just another application of the phone. It’s an interesting point, one I’ll be addressing later with my triumphant “return to the iPhone” article.

CNet France reports that a new version of the firmware, version 1.1.3 is due for release at the end of this week. They claim that the update will bring a voice-recording app, as well as the use of disk mode so you can use your iPhone as a portable storage drive. Electronista notes that it’s been about a month since the last update, and the last update happened at the end of the week. I hope that a considerable update is in the works; I’m still waiting for the Leopard-obvious features like notes syncing. Still, this is just a rumor; nothing real to get excited about.

Verizon recently announced a bunch of things — that users would be able to use unlocked cell phones on their service, that they were doing a 180 and would be supporting Google’s Android, and that they were going to start thinking of their network as an open network. Of course, the cynical (meaning John Paczkowski of AllThingsD) figure that Verizon will charge per-byte data charges to prevent their network from turning into “dumb pipe” (video link) just like how Verizon’s parent company Vodafone does it in Europe.

Of course, that creates a new PR blurb for AT&T: their network has always been open and they don’t monitor, notice, or care what phone you use. The cynical make a joke in the headline about being “most open to the U.S. government,” zing, but that it wasn’t a PR point until Verizon did their new open bit. It was just assumed as part of the open nature of GSM.

While those two wireless giants fight it out with themselves, the irony that remains is that the iPhone is actually a pretty closed device as it stands currently.

The BBC reports that of the 30,000 iPhones sold in France over the first 5 days, 20% of them were sold as the more expensive unlocked version. That’s right, upwards of 7000 folks spent €750, or about $1000 US, to get an unlocked iPhone. How many of them were from other EU nations not willing to wait for the iPhone to arrive? It just goes to show that there’s a demand for it; if I could spend the money to officially unlock my main iPhone, I definitely would. While I love visual voicemail, I do wish that Apple would’ve opted for multiple carriers instead of exclusivity.

image credit: Engadget

Google has made their main page and many of their other pages iPhone compatible. The main page gives web, image, local, and news searches, there are easy buttons for GMail, Calendar, Reader, and More — More being Docs, GOOG-411, SMS, News, Photos, Blogger, and Notebook.

In other news, iPhone is the fastest-growing search term of 2007, which isn’t too surprising. If you’re a user of AOL’s Instant Messenger and Google’s GMail, Google has integrated AIM into GMail. W00t!

Download Files on iPhone’s MobileSafari

If you’ve hacked your iPhone, there are a few banner apps that popped up last night. The first app comes from a hacker by the name of Hachu, and it allows you to download files via MobileSafari on the iPhone directly. The initial release appears to support only zip and tar files, but if you’re comfortable adding .plist files, the thread is chock full of different MIME declarations to allow the plugin to download many different files to your iPhone’s /var/root/Downloads folder. One of the key things I’ve been missing about the iPhone! [image credit]

Foundation of Wi-Fi wireless sync for iPhone

The second app that is crazy useful if you’ve hacked your iPhone is iSync for iPhone by Francisios. If you’ve been hoping for wireless syncing with your iPhone, it’s accomplished via rsync, a remote syncing protocol that’s been around for quite a while and is very common and stable. The project is ambitious as evidenced by the project goals:

• Synchronize iTunes library over Wi-Fi
• Synchronize Photos over Wi-Fi
• Synchronize Bookmarks, Contacts etc over Wi-Fi

French mobile carrier Orange reported that they’ve sold about 30,000 iPhones in the first five days of the iPhone launch. Half of the buyers are new customers. Orange’s target for the first month is 50,000 to 100,000 so it looks like they’ll be fine there. For next year, they’re hoping for around 500,000 iPhone customers.

After a week of using the Treo 680, I have to say that it’s pretty much the same as I remember it. I used the 680 as my primary phone for about half a year, and I’ve reviewed it twice already. I won’t claim to be the most knowledgeable 680 user out there; that honor would certainly be bestowed to many, many users in our forum before I would even enter consideration for it. I’ve had a lot to say about Palm OS, generally favorable I suppose, but there are caveats. I’ve said as much in the TreoCentral TreoCast, but I’ve never had an opportunity like this one to really distill thirty podcasts and a few dozen hours of listening into a manifesto of what’s good and what’s bad about Palm OS, and what I really think about their Linux venture, and why Palm is on their current path.

When I say the King is dead, I don’t mean that the 680 is a bad device, or that there’s no reason to use Palm OS, or that anyone that uses it is dumb. Far from it, I think the 680 is pretty high up on my list. It’s still a good phone. If I thought Palm OS was dumb or not relevant, I wouldn’t do the TreoCentral TreoCast. It boils down to two things with Palm OS: the hardware and the software. The hardware will see updates. There will probably be more Palm OS GSM phones to come out. Better cameras, 3G, smaller form factors, the whole shebang. When it comes out, it will probably be a compelling upgrade for Palm OS users. But I don’t think we’ll see a significant software update for Palm OS in the next two years. While some may accuse that it’s unfair to say “the king is dead” alluding to Palm OS, it’s not accurate to say the king is alive, either. But still, there are always these persistent rumors about faked deaths and random sightings…

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Agonizing abdominal pains are being felt across the globe today as the world laughs hysterically at Windows Mobile. According to a report posted by Net Applications, iPhone accounts for .09% of the overall browser market, leaving Windows Mobile choking on Apple’s dust with .06%. Not a bad record for a device that’s only been on the market for less than two consecutive sales quarters, and Windows Mobile is how many years old now? Oh the humiliation.

Cheer up, Windows fanboys. At least you beat out the T-Mobile Sidekick. And that’s something to be proud of, right? Bwahahaha!

ReadVia CrunchGear

Klausner Technologies Inc. has filed a $360 million lawsuit against AT&T and Apple for allegedly violating two of Klausner’s voicemail patents. Klausner has brought other people to task on the two patents in question before — once for AOL, and once for Vonage. Klausner has also sued Apple before for patents pertaining to the long-gone Apple Newton; Apple ended up licensing the patents back then.

Everyone was talking about Burst’s patents too and and the hundred bajillion dollar lawsuits there, but my guess is that Apple will be fighting this one tooth and nail — it seems that Apple would rather pay their lawyers to get patent-holding companies’ patents tossed than pay for patents. Klausner Tech is apparently website-less, leading me to believe that it’s a patent-holdings troll company