February 2008: Monthly Archive

We’ve heard it before, Google has an iPhone fixation. Well it’s looking like that fixation works both ways - apparently the earlier numbers we saw that said the iPhone was on the web more than any other mobile web browser were, how shall we say it? ….Ridiculously conservative.

Google sees 50 times more web searches from iPhones than they do from any other mobile browser:

Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset, adding weight to the group’s confidence at being able to generate significant revenues from the mobile internet.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. - Financial Times

If you still doubt that the iPhone was the #2 smartphone in the US, you can stop now.

Just. Wow.

The Smartphone Experts Metal Cover ($14.95) is a slick looking slice of protection for your Apple iPhone. It’s a lightweight metal cover that comes in three bright colors.

Read on for the full review

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Yes, it seems The Boy Genius Report jumped the shark by misinterpreting some cryptically worded internal memo from AT&T as proof positive the company would soon be rolling out a tethering feature (and plan) for iPhone. Sadly, or not, it is not to be. Nope turns out that memo described nothing more the process of tethering iPhone to iTunes. Ironically that document was intended to clear up customer confusion and had precisely opposite effect. AT&T - Raising the bar.

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Two good pieces of good news on this cold Valentine’s Day Morning. First, the SDK is still on track to be released this month despite earlier rumors it could be delayed, according to tuaw. Apparently Apple employees are working triple overtime so we can love our iPhones just a little more. Our advice: take tonight off, kids, and love the one you haven’t been with just a little more since you’ve been putting in so many hours.

If you just can’t wait for the Apple-approved native app solution, ZiPhone 2.0 had been released, which combined with the convenient and simple interface of iJailbreak means Mac users can unlock without the command line at all. Windows user can just go with ZiPhone, of course, because it’s packaged as a .exe file they can click on. [via]

Or you could, you know, put your iPhone down and go buy some flowers.

InfoWorld’s Peter Bruzzese is the kind of IT guy who’s old enough to have lived through every major paradigm shift in technology. When not plodding along at his Windows workstation, surrounded by a sea of blade servers, he’s regaling colleagues and friends with his adventures back in the heady days of DOS computers and UNIX mainframes. The very mention of OS/2 gets him misty eyed, and if you see him hunched over a book about Fortran, well… just leave him be.

So when the old Windows warhorse suddenly took a shine to iPhone, people began wondering… and worrying. Somehow this grizzled old Windows veteran became an iPhone lover, wildly exploring its features like a five year-old in a McDonald’s playland, without the greasy fingerprints and spilled drinks.

But old habbits are hard to break. Peter is still heavily rooted in his Windows world, and continues using a Windows Mobile 6 device for its Exchange DirectPush support. So he wanders through the hallowed halls of InfoWorld wearing a Batman utility belt and pouched vest to carry his iPhone, Windows Mobile phone, Pager, GPS receiver, tape recorder, and PalmPilot. He’s old school, but all class.

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Alright, you Aussies. Drop your didgeridoos and Kangaroos and get down from your gum trees, because iPhone is coming to your bush. What’s that you ask? Is Kent a few Kangaroos loose in the top paddock? Nope, and I haven’t been smoking any strange Aboriginal tobacco either.

T-Mobile says it will begin rolling out iPhones to customers sometime in the first half of this year, give or take. Abso-bloody-lutely they will, so start saving your zacks now. Now stop questioning my sanity unless you want to start a barney. Got it? Ta!

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First let me say that I am not one to laugh at someone else’s misfortune. Wait, who am I kidding? Of course I am. So it comes with certain self indulgence that I take this opportunity to point to a study that ranks Palm dead last in customer satisfaction among handset makers. So sad. But sadder still that a Palm employee posted a rebuttal in the comments of that story and cited a different study, commissioned by Palm no less, to dispute these negative results. Which is the equivalent of saying “No, really I am wonderful, just ask my Mom, she’ll tell you.”

Cheer up, Palm. When it comes to product stagnation and obsolete technology, you’re still number one in my book.

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What feature request has been on the lips of every iPhone user since the idolized gadget first came galloping out the gate? I’ll give you a hint, it starts with the letter “F”, and is the same thing your inebriated Uncle Frank does at family get togethers after knocking back one too many martinis. Of course, I’m talking about Flash.

GearLive claims that Apple will be announcing Adobe Flash for WebKit (aka mobile Safari). There have been rumors to this effect for some time, but with the blessed arrival of the much anticipated SDK now only days away, this seems plausible. Still, I wouldn’t start bookmarking YouTube.com on your iPhone just yet. Let’s wait for Apple make this rumor a reality.

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Apple has released the software update for the Apple TV that was announced at MacWorld 2008. It offers new features like an improved interface, video rentals direct from the iTunes store, podcasting, and the ability to browse photos from Flickr and .Mac.

I just realized, though, that the update that would actually get me to buy the Apple TV is missing: some sort of real use for that USB port on the back of the device. While many would like it to support an external hard drive (and some have had success doing so with some hacking), that’s not the feature that I’d like to see.

What I’d like on the Apple TV is something that I do with my Mac on a daily basis - watch and listen to the media that’s stored on my iPhone. I keep my iTunes library at home and sync my music and movies to my iPhone. When I’m at work I plug my iPhone into my work machine and I’m able (since I manually manage my music) to access that media on my computer. Since the Apple TV is essentially a “Mac lite,” and can already access iTunes files (and iTunes DRM as well), the problem certainly isn’t incompatible media formats or an inability to read the iPod. It seems that the only real limitation here is one of interface. That seems like a fairly small limitation.

There are two other possible limitations, of course. The first is that it’s such a “niche” feature that Apple doesn’t want to waste resources enabling it. This seems unlikely to me, though, as it would be awfully convenient for my buddy to bring over his iPod or iPhone and we could watch a movie stored on it (granted, of course, that it may not be as high a resolution as we’d like) — it seems like the sort of thing that wouldn’t be that difficult to do and that Apple would happily tout as a feature. The second is that Apple is choosing not to develop this feature either to help Mac sales or because of pressure from music and movie industry execs.

You know what would be even nicer? The ability to transfer a rented movie from the AppleTV to an iPhone.

Your iPhone does a better job displaying album and and sorting through all your music than any other device on the planet, past and present. However all that sweet, sweet music on that sweet, sweet interface doesn’t do you much good if you don’t know what exactly it is you’re looking for. We’ve all had it happen: a friend makes us a mix CD and iTunes can’t figure out what’s what. Which “Track 2″ was that again? Hassle.

iTunes can auto-grab album art, but it can’t do it unless it knows which album to grab. Enter in some automated solutions for tagging your music with the proper song, artist, and album names. These little add-ons “listen” to tiny bits of each song and compare them to the MusicBrainz database, then are able to identify the song. Instead of manually punching in everything yourself, you can just have these little programs do all that tiresome work for you.

On the Mac, you’ll want to check out iEatBrainz [via TUAW], which was just re-released today in a Universal form. On the PC side of the world, my favorite app is still Picard.

Get iTunes Cleaning!