March 2008: Monthly Archive

Engadget honcho Ryan Block got his techie mitts on a pre-release version of the iPhone 2.0 firmware, and here are the highlights (and lowlights!):

Exchange over Wi-Fi is not instantaneous (!). No contact search he could find. New button in Calendar don’t do nothing for him yet. App Store error’s out. Cisco branded VPN screen. Parental controls are good-to-go. Wi-Fi order can be specified in prefs. Calc has new widescreen scientific mode and icon. And his favorite new feature — Multi-Select in Mail!

Head on over for a full rundown and gallery o’ pics!

Dual-sided, transparent, flip-capable iPhone Nano?

El Jobso and Co. might just be exploring the possibility according to a recent patent filing unearthed, as usual, by the folks at Apple Insider.

Some of the juicy details include:

“capacitive array element [that] may be a dual-sided panel that is capable of sensing touch from either side and sending signals indicative of the touches to a host device (e.g., a desktop computer, a laptop computer, a digital music player or a mobile telephone unit).”

Of course, many Apple patent filing simply disappear into the dim, dank vaults of 1 Infinite Loop while others show up in ways or products we never could have guessed — but that certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try!

I’ll admit, the idea doesn’t hold much appeal to me, or to those still waiting for their big-apps iTablet Safari Pad, but I’ve learned never to underestimate Johnny Ive and Cupertino’s finest. If anyone could make this little miracle as functional as it is “lick-able”, it’s them.

What do you think? Does this give us any hard insight into a next-gen iPhone? How does the idea of a translucent touch screen grab you? Is a flip phone a great idea or just another point of failure in the waiting?

Maybe you’ve heard, we now have an official section for the Phone different Native App Watch. We are keeping track of all the developers who are talking about creating software for the iPhone with the new SDK. We are going to keep it updated with the latest news as it arrives and adding (we hope never subtracting, but it’s possible) new companies as they pop up.

Know of a software company or piece of software that’s not on our handy-dandy table? Do tell!

This plus the App Wait-a-Thon means that if you want to slake your thirst for native app news in the run up to the June release, Phone different is the place to be. We’ll have another batch of Wait-a-Thon posts coming up this week, of course, giving you more chances to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card. In the meantime, congrats to last week’s winner, AnteL0pe!

Steve Jobs might want to look in his rearview mirror, because there’s a hulking eighteen-wheeler barreling down the highway, belching thick black smoke, and crushing every vehicle in its path.

The software giant is working with long time rival Adobe to bring Flash player Lite (yes, THAT Flash player) to Windows Mobile devices, while simultaneously incorporating support for its own SilverLight technology. The move will give Microsoft a leg up over Apple, making its mobile platform more web 2.0 friendly in supporting these ubiquitous web animation and runtime environments.

Apple has valid reasons for eschewing Flash lite, so it claims, like poor performance and a not-so-much like a desktop experience. Even if valid, it’s never a checkmark in your favor when competing products support features yours does not.

Wake up, Apple. You’re in Micrsoft’s crosshairs now.

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During our last regularly scheduled podcast, we received an dispatch from Hong Kong written by one Janric. We already knew that there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 unlocked iPhones in China alone, and Janric confirmed that you can’t walk down a Hong Kong alley without tripping over somebody that has one:

I just want to comment out on the news about the 400K iPhones that are loose in china. I’m based in Hong Kong and it’s no secret that you can buy the iphone here almost anywhere. The iPhone is such a hit here that I can almost see 1 iPhone per day (excluding mine ofcourse). In my office alone, there are about 5 unlocked iPhones in use.

Don’t believe it? Check out these photos that Janric snapped in an area of Causeway Bay - just a random two block stroll:

We’ve heard firsthand reports that it’s pretty much the same situation on the opposite side of the planet (Sweden) as well. So basically it’s as easy to get an unlocked iPhone in areas Apple hasn’t made official yet as it is to get a locked-up one in the official zones. If Apple wants to get their preferred revenue sharing going in these places, they need to step up the pace of worldwide releases.

Thanks, Janric!

Avi Greengart, Research Director for market research firm Current Analysis, says Adobe’s Flash player performs poorly on iPhone, in its current incarnation, proving more trouble than it’s worth.

“There is no question the iPhone delivers a compelling Web experience and there are good reasons to want Flash in there, but Flash Lite wouldn’t give you the Web experience you’re looking for.”

The jixt of this statement, as we’ve known for some time, is that Adobe’s Flash Lite player comes with a high resource overhead, taxing the processor as well as battery life. Or so Apple claims. Forces are at work behind the scenes to develop a more optimized solution to bring native Flash content to iPhone users.

Much as I sometimes lament the absence of Flash, I don’t see it as a crucial feature. So long as some method exists for scraping content from YouTube, as it does now. That said, having no Flash support is yet one more missing feature that Apple haters will use as fodder for flinging rotten fruit at the device.

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If you have an iPhone on firmware 1.1.4 you’re just dying to jailbreak and/or unlock, or an iPod Touch you want to liberate (and add apps to before June!), and you trust software created by 13-year olds(!), then iJailBreak may just be what you’re looking for.

If you’ve previously used iJailBreak, you can update automatically. If you’re new to the pirate scene and don’t mind violating the ULA and your warranty, then this implementation is about as simple as it can get. Ars Technica reports you just download, install, run, connect, and viola!

A pirate’s life indeed…

Following up on the cryptic “I Hate You - Don’t Leave Me” letters Apple sent out last week to many (all?) would-be iPhone developers who had coughed up the $99 for a certificate all signed and legal, Daring Fireball reports on whether or not anybody has made it in already:

I believe there are a small handful of developers who are sort of “in” already, but they were hand-selected by Apple. Perhaps, as with the ones who came on stage during the event to demo their “two weeks worth of work” apps, they were involved before the SDK was even officially announced.

But everything I’ve heard suggests that last week’s email from Apple was sent to everyone who applied for the program. I.e., there are developers who’ve been let in through the back door, but no one has gotten in through the front door yet.

John Gruber goes on to quote two sources who’ve told him that Apple has received over 10,000 applications alone for the $99 package and couldn’t meet demand for certificates this fast if it wanted to (and no one seems sure whether they do or not, nor how badly).

Massive over-reaction by the Twitterati? Yet another example of Apple’s dwindling communications skills? And will we have to wait until the June (30th at 11:59pm?) release to know for sure?!

I can hardly remember my life before having a PDA. I held a Palm Pilot for the first time in 1996, a Pilot 1000 my father received at work. He was somewhat non-plussed; technology was not his gig and he deferred to me for most things with a power button. For me, the Palm Pilot was something revolutionary and Graffiti input was mind-blowing.

The addiction and PDA-dependence grew from there for me. I was “plugged in” and my vocabulary would now include words and acronyms like “stylus”, “PIM” and “SD Card”. As other platforms emerged, like Pocket PC and Symbian, I remained doggedly loyal to the Palm OS through it’s progression of versions. I watched Palm OS become Garnet and then “FrankenGarnet.” I even got used to seeing “Powered by Access” when I fired up my trusty Palm. I made the leap from PDA to a converged device with the Treo 650, then the 680. Throughout the years I endured the criticisms of Palm’s lack of multitasking, multithreading, no wifi (!?!) and antiquated PIM. I remained a Palm loyalist and apologist, looking toward the horizon for a Cobalt or Palm OS 2 that would never come.

More on my migration to the iPhone after the break!

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The iPhone SDK will not allow 3rd party apps to multitask or run background services. We’ve previously covered both initial developer Twitter-rage at this, and pundit counter-points. We’ve also covered Craig Hockenberry before — the man who (perhaps poetically) develops Twitterrific for the Mac and jailbroken iPhones, and is now bringing it to the SDK.

Hockenberry, via his furbo.org blog, shares his experience on iPhone development and his views on the multitasking (non-?) issue.

To be blunt, I’ve never seen so many experts without a fricken’ clue. If you haven’t written code using the jailbreak tool chain, your opinions on the iPhone SDK, based entirely on what you see in a simulator, just aren’t relevant. You might as well be explaining the nuances of brain surgery.

Wha-wha-wha-what? Please, allow Mr. Hockenberry to continue:

Twitterrific on the iPhone could definitely make use of a background process to gather new tweets. In fact, a prototype version of the software did just that. And it was a huge design failure: after doing XML queries every 5 minutes, the phone’s battery was almost dead after 4 hours. In fact, the first thing I said after giving Gruber this test version was “don’t use auto-refresh.”

Hockenberry goes on to discuss the power demand problem of the radios, both EDGE and Wi-Fi, and the danger of even well-intentioned developers getting individually reasonable but collectively overwhelming access to background services. He does, however, expect that in a future release Apple may include some method of notifying network apps that the radios are being used (for example, by MobileMail Touch), and allowing brief TCP/IP connections during that period. Bottom-line, at the OS’s discretion, not the individual apps’.

Sound reasonable? Sound crazy? Should Apple give unfettered access to everyone immediately an trust users to sort through it themselves? Or should Apple be as strict as possible from the get-go? What do you think?