So David Bailey of Goldman Sachs, they do a report that says Apple will be making two iPhones next year. One of the iPhones will just be a storage bump, and it will be available in the first half of the year. The other iPhone supposedly will be a newer design, with maybe a new form factor and look and maybe not. He says the new iPhone design…
“have a similar form factor as the current version although it could have a different look and will probably include 3G capability.”
An iPhone with a storage bump, that’s some news. The fact that there’s an iPhone 3G coming next year… not news. Not news at all, really. Both Steve Jobs and Randall Stephenson have confirmed it. Rumors of the 3G iPhone have been around since a few days after it was announced almost a year ago. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. rolls dice. 32.
So yeah, there’s some crud news. I wonder if we’ll ever be able to safely unlock the device. I’d like to be able to give this iPhone to my wife someday, but she’s not with AT&T.
The iPhone + TomTom GPS rumor from yesterday has been quashed. Eagle-eyed MacRumors reader thecreativ1 noted the resemblance to an earlier iPod Video fake that was hoaxed; the extra blurriness, and all.
“Don’t you guys remember the big hoax about the “real” video iPod??? About how weeks later the guys showed a screencast about how he made the fake….
“Well I do, and the barcode sticker on the tomtom dongle looks an awful lot like the barcode sticker on this notorious fake…”
I’ve got some store news real quick — First off, we’ve mentioned it in the podcast before, but it bears mention again. All of the Smartphone Experts stores support gift certificates. In case you’re wondering, that does include the Phone Different Store. Also, we’ve got a coupon for 10% off accessories in effect until midnight on Saturday. To utilize it, just use “iHOLIDAY” as your coupon code.
The Smartphone Round Robin contest is over. Here are our last thoughts and responses about the the iPhone. After the break are the winners of the contest and the bulk of the article.
I’d like to say that the Smartphone Round Robin was an excellent idea. It was a lot of work, too, but hopefully it ends up being something useful for those of you that followed it while it was going on, or to anyone that ends up here long after this moment has passed.
And if you’re not ready to say goodbye to the round robin just yet, we’ll all be chatting about the round robin for the Mobile Computing Authority podcast tomorrow, that podcast should be available next week.
Engadget has a story that shows the iPhone with a TomTom GPS module connected at the bottom, on the route to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Is it real or fake? No one can know for sure, but there’s at least a possibility that it’s real. The picture quality of the “proof” is horrid beyond measure; the JPEG compression artifacts are pretty much out of this world.
If the iPhone does work with TomTom and a GPS dongle, I’ll be a happy, happy camper. TomTom’s map setup is actually pretty excellent; I’ve used it for driving and stuff on the Treo. Their device activation was horrible with all the software keys you have to input, but once you got it working, it was excellent.
If you’ve hacked your iPhone, you may be aware of a positioning app called Navizon which maps your location via tower triangulation and the presence of known wi-fi hotspots. That version costs $25, but there’s a new version of Navizon now available. It’s called Navizon Lite, and it provides location awareness based only on tower triangulation. In short, it can tell where you are (roughly) based on what kind of signal your phone gets, and skips the database of wi-fi hotspots. It’s tough to beat free, but you do have to hack your iPhone to get it to work in the first place.
I’m not sure how I missed this one as I do follow TUAW, but eagle-eyed Chris Davies of MYiTablet spotted this neat little bookmarklet called “Tabulate” to queue pages you want to read. It’s like browsing with faux tabs, and you can select whether you want to open a link in the current window, a new window, or save it for later. It’s a nice little bookmarklet hack. I’ve written some very simple bookmarklet hacks myself and researched some of the better ones (see here), but this one might be one of the best I’ve seen.
It seems like a long time since I affixed my burning gaze towards iTunes, and as luck would have it, there’s a bunch of iTunes news floating around just aching to find their way into a roundup smörgåsbord type of article.
“PepsiCo is planning to place tokens on five billion drink containers. Consumers will have to collect five tokens to qualify for free tracks. In theory, the campaign could flood the market with $1 billion of free music (Apple charges 99 cents per DRM-free track), but redemption rates on these types of offers are usually low, at about 2 per cent.
iPodObserver has a quick story about independent superstar band Radiohead, who made headlines by letting anyone choose the price they wanted to pay for the album. Rumor has it that Radiohead are working through a deal directly with iTunes, the first of its nature. If this happens, it upends the content distribution methods currently in place by bypassing the middleman. In other words, it screws the record companies.
Ars Technica has an interesting article about kids using podcasts to replace lectures and iPod-ready versions of Cliffs Notes for late-night cramming.
Om Malik has a little introductory article about Songbird, an open-source version of iTunes that’s built on the Mozilla platform. The Mozilla platform is the basis of widely beloved internet browser FireFox, so if Songbird ends up like FireFox, it will be bloated and slow we’ll have a nice alternative to iTunes. Songbird isn’t anywhere near ready for release yet, as indicated by the current version available: Songbird 0.3 Developer Pre-release. Amazingly, device syncing is not one of the core functions yet, though they do have add-ons that allow syncing for iPods and other devices. There’s a video interview there that’s worth a look, and there’s an interesting tirade against iTunes starting at about 9:45, calling iTunes a bottleneck in the value chain. Yup, he calls it that even as he compliments it for being the best out there as it stands. See below:
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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