Music by Pete Miser. Video put together by Meritt Duff. Found by TUAW and Merlyn. Desire to write songs and videos about a cell phone by Apple, of course.
Mr. iPhone demo used to creep me out, but now I think I have a crush on him.
January 2008: Monthly Archive
Thanks to this excellent how-to and a surprisingly little time with Photoshop, we now have our very own custom Home Screen Icon for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. If you’re here with your version 1.1.3 iPhone (or iPod Touch with the $20 upgrade), just click that “plus button” at the bottom and add us to your Home Screen. The iPhone’s bookmark tool is even smart enough to grab the first two words from our title - “iPhone News,” which seems like a pretty good indication of what you’ll find when you tappy tappy that little icon.
The only bummer that I can see is the iPhone is a little overly-aggressive in adding the “glass gradient” curve on the top of the icon, but we dealt with it as best we could.
Be a cool kid and add us to your Home Screen!
Two fun little hacks for your iPhone this morning. The first comes from Nate True (aka iPhone genius), it’s a neat little way to get speed dial icons on your Home Screen. The trick? 1.1.3 allows you to add web shortcuts to the home screen and Safari allows web pages to initiate calls (with your permisison). Two great tastes that taste great together. True tells you how:
So the new iPhone 1.1.3 firmware allows you to put icons on your home screen for websites, but I know many of us want to put phone numbers on there for a Speed Dial screen.
I’ve put a little hack together that lets you have a (somewhat) speedy speed dial icon. There’s no jailbreaking required for this one - it can all be done using Apple-approved Web Clip creation. -
The next dialing hack is for those of you with jailbroken iPhones. This is actually one of the better apps I’ve seen for this gray market - real Voice Dialing on your iPhone. It’s done up by Makayama and it’s $27.95. You’ll need to add them as a source yourself:
To get a free tryout, start Installer on your iPhone, press Sources, then Edit, then Add. Next, type http://tinyurl.com/2t8cax
…It might seem a little crazy to be paying for an iPhone app when the SDK is just around the corner, though. Nate True himself makes it clear that 1.1.3 takes more steps toward safely-installed apps by reducing the number of programs that run as “root.” But if you’re jonesing for voice dial and have money to burn, you have that option now.
If you hadn’t heard, Apple was the lone bright point in a sea of bad financial news yesterday1. Their last quarter was stupendous. revenue grew 35% year over year, total profit grew about the same amount. Apple’s profit margin even grew by a couple of ticks. They’re earning more revenue than ever and they’re making more profit off of that revenue than ever:
The Company posted revenue of $9.6 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.58 billion, or $1.76 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $7.1 billion and net quarterly profit of $1 billion, or $1.14 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 34.7 percent, up from 31.2 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 45 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
What spurred this growth? Why, selling more gadetry, of course. Macs were way up, but check out these iPhone sales numbers:
Apple shipped 2,319,000 Macintosh® computers, representing 44 percent unit growth and 47 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 22,121,000 iPods during the quarter, representing five percent unit growth and 17 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone™ sales were 2,315,000. -
…For those of you keeping score, that means Apple sold only 4,000 more Macs than they did iPhones. That will change this quarter, I’m sure.
When I think about it, the most surprising thing about Apple’s turnaround since the return of Steve Jobs is how long it took them to get into making things like the iPod and the iPhone. Apple’s strength has always been making hardware and software seamless work together in a way that creates just a little joy for the user. Limiting that skill to just computers (well, and the Newton) as Apple basically used to do seems just plain crazy now.
Seems like every time I wrestle with a gadget lately - from a Cable Box to a Camcorder, somewhere in the back of my mind I’m thinking “Apple could so this better.” Not “I could do this better,” mind you. Apple could. I’m willing to bet that there are millions like me right now.
…And that’s as good an explanation as any for why they just had their best quarter ever.
1 - No, I’m not a financial analyst, but even that rate cut seems to have been taken as a sign that things are bad — a desperate measure.
I spend a healthy portion of my time at Macworld doing the following:
- Thinking about Google’s fixation on the iPhone and
- Looking for a really good iPhone dock / Alarm clock.
…Keeping the iPhone in a dock by your bed seems like a no-brainer - charges it up, lets you play a song from your library to wake you up, maybe even lets you catch a quick movie before you fall asleep. Right? Apparently it does all of those things except the last part - the falling asleep part:
A study in Sweden and the United States finds that using a cell phone just before bedtime interferes with sleep patterns. - study
The deal is that the radiation from cell phone radios gets into your head and prevents you from getting into a deep sleep pattern. If it ain’t deep sleep, it don’t count. So maybe leaving that dock on the desk, next to your computer, and far from your sensitive squishy brain is the right idea after all.
We already mentioned that Klausner is suing Apple over Visual Voicemail, to the tune of $360 million. Turns out there were plenty of other folks in on that suit - AT&T, Comcast, the list goes on. Well drop one off that list, SimulScribe. SimulScribe is basically the super-voicemail system for the non-iPhone set: offering both transcribed voicemails and something exactly like the iPhone’s Visual Voicemail (SimulSays). Well they’ve dropped out of the case and settled with Klausner.
That basically leaves Apple as the biggest name not to settle - but Apple is also the most litigiously bull-headed corporation around. So expect a fun fight, but don’t expect your Visual Voicemail to go away. Apple may not want to be forced into licensing agreement, but they definitely don’t want to take our features away more. After all, Apple gave in to the very same company over the Newton way back in the day.
SimulScribe, LLC., a co-defendant with Apple, Inc.(APPL:NASDAQ) in the patent infringement lawsuit recently filed by Klausner Technologies, has settled the litigation and has licensed the Klausner Technologies visual voicemail patents. - Press Release
One of the most interesting stories at Macworld hasn’t gotten a lot of attention in the larger press - namely that Google was around at Macworld a lot more than most people realize. It’s not just that they have a medium-sized booth featuring both their Mac products and new iPhone-compatible web offerings. No, the real story about Google at Macworld is that it’s very clear that Google has the iPhone on their collective mind in a big, big way.
Google’s services will continue to be great on the iPhone even after their Android OS hits the market. Read on to find out why!
Here’s some good 1.1.3 news, two pieces of it. Piece one is that 1.1.3 looks to be pretty comprehensive in how much of the firmware is re-written. Which is to say that it seems to overwrite some of the nasty bits that could have been corrupted with a bad AnySIM unlock. If you have an iPhone that’s inoperative, it’s worth a shot to apply the 1.1.3 patch. Sure, you’ll be stuck back on AT&T again, but at least the thing will be functional:
To upgrade, we put the phone in recovery mode, then connected to iTunes and restored/ upgraded. After the phone had finished upgrading, it would not work with our already valid ATT sim, so we had to activate the phone using iTunes. This is where we ran into some trouble, because after activating the iPhone under our existing account, the phone still did not show any signal and would not activate to our account. We restarted the phone and just like magic, were taken directly to the home screen. - Confirmed: Bricked iPhones Rise From the Grave With Firmware 1.1.3
The other news is that 1.1.3 has already been jailbroken (well, it was a hardware jailbreak first, then this software-jailbreak). Either way, people looking to get native apps back on their 1.1.3 iPhones will need to wait a bit longer for public consumption — or just wait for the SDK to finally be official in very short order.
Oh - one last piece of 1.1.3 news, you’re no longer stuck with it if you prefer the older version, but the downgrade isn’t the easiest thing on earth.
Voodoo doll courtesy ^Vanessa^
One of the biggest gripes about the iPhone is that its speaker isn’t nearly loud enough for many people. This problem was exacerbated early on because the iPhone’s alerts were originally too quiet to begin with. Apple themselves have fixed this problem by allowing you to change, say, the SMS alert volume. There’s also rumblings that Apple has quietly introduced louder speaker on iPhones manufactured more recently.
But if you’re one of those crazy early adopters, not only are you stuck with less money in your pocket (because of that unprecedented price drop), you’re also stuck with a quiet iPhone in your pocket as well. What to do? well, according to skorpiond at modmyifone,
I grabbed a needle and sticked it into every single tiny hold on the bottom left corner of the iPhone. I think it was dirty in there or something because now this *** is EXACTLY how I wanted it since day one… LOUD!!! I really hope I didn’t mess up the speaker though.*
…So basically you engage in some warranty-voiding dangerfun with your iPhone — presumably popping the protective cover over the speaker. Anybody brave enough to try this? We at Phone different already absolutely destroyed our first iPhone in the Video takeapart, so we’re a little gunshy about voiding more warranties.
via engadget mobile
Besides Google (much more on that tomorrow, stay tuned!), there weren’t a lot of “iPhone Web Apps” booths. Actually, none that I can remember. What there are a ton of at Macworld are accessories booths. Clearly the accessory market for the iPhone is ramping up quickly and may even near iPod accessory market status sometime soon.
…But it’s not there yet. Case in point, I saw probably a dozen different iPod speaker docks — all of which were “compatible” with the iPhone in flight mode only. Apple is requiring (and rightfully so, I suppose) that accessory makers submit their accessories for their seal of approval, iPhone-wise, so that the dreaded GSM-interference issue is taken care of. I personally wish Apple had managed to handle that on the device rather than forcing companies trying to interact with the Dock connector to re-make their products, but c’est la vie.
Otherwise, the thing to see, iPhone-wise, is cases. There are more skin cases here than you could shake a stick at, but there are some other gems as well. After the break, our three favorite cases at Macworld 2008.
