Your plane’s landing in the middle of nowhere. Scratch that. WAY past the middle of nowhere — that little state on the other coast you’ve never been to, where the people have funny accents and McDonald’s has menu items you’ve never seen before.
The pilot flips off the seatbelt light, you whip out your iPhone to make a quick call, and before the bars come up you’re greeted with a screen that lists off all the local service providers complete with up-to-the-minute rate information. You flick-scroll to the cheapest one, tap to select, the bars pop up, the network springs to life, and you start your call.
What? Your iPhone doesn’t do that? You don’t get to pick your service provider? You don’t get to choose just-in-time data rates? You’re stuck with AT&T 24/7?!
Yeah. That’s because you’re in the real world, not the world of what might-have-been. Not the world Apple could have created had they gone ahead with a little patent just recently brought to public attention…
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Posted on Thursday, Apr 17, 2008 by Rene Ritchie
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NBC done gone lost their rainbow peacock’d minds? Maybe, if Gizmodo is properly quoting their Chief Digital Officer, George Kliavkoff:
“We’d love to be on iTunes. It has a great customer experience. We’d love to figure out a way to distribute our content on iTunes.” [They want more money per show to] “reflect the full value of the product.” [And for iTunes to block you from loading pirated content onto your iPod.] “If you look at studies about MP3 players, especially leading MP3 players and what portion of that content is pirated, and think about how that content gets onto that device, it has to go through a gatekeeping piece of software, which would be a convenient place to put some antipiracy [sic] measures. We are financially harmed every day by piracy. It results in us not being able to invest as much money in the next generation of film and TV products.”
Huhbuwhat?!
NBC is currently turning down $1.99 per 22-44 minutes of The Office or Battlestar Galactica. 2 bucks for content previously aired on FREE television, which can be easily, legally (and much to their chagrin and previously failed efforts to block it) taped or PVR’d. They’re turning down that EXTRA money because they want MORE of it, and they want iTunes to prevent you from, say, shifting that FREE content from your PVR or media center to your iPhone without paying MORE of that EXTRA money?!
Dare I suggest the only reason the pirates exist is because of Big Media’s greed and short sightedness. The minute they charge fair prices for fair use, given the low barrier of entry and elegance of use of iTunes’ interface, the piracy disappears for everyone but zealots. (Never mind the marketing value of downloads alone — The Office being a prime example.)
Apple really can’t pull the trigger on their DVR patent fast enough.
What do you think?
Amidst all of the 3G Rumor Bonanza, an interesting nugget of thought popped up over at Macenstein. No, they didn’t jump on the blogwagon and predict the release date of the 3G iPhone. Instead, they predicted that an iPhone Shuffle would be released.
According to their tipster, the “engineering and development is basically done” and that it comes in a slimmer and thinner form factor, but get this, no video playback. I’m not so sure of an iPhone without video, it kind of steps away from what Steve Jobs envisioned the iPhone to be–a multi-tool for the future. No video? That’s too 2004 for my taste.
But it does raise an interesting point: there may be a market for a tier-ed iPhone lineup and Apple should capitalize on it. Much like how Apple introduced the iPod first than came along with the mini, nano, shuffle, and touch. Could Apple effectively tier their latest toy? What do you guys think? iPhone nano fatty perhaps?
Every week, we’ll be bringing you a tip, trick, or quick how-to on how to keep your iPhone ship-shape. You’ll be able to see them all in our tip archive.
The young lady that cuts my hair told me a horror story today. I just about broke into a sweat listening to her tale of terror. A recent iPhone convert, she was at home in her bathroom (hostile environment for all things electronic), putting her make-up on, and with a careless sweep of her arm, her iPhone scored a perfect “10″ from the high dive straight into the commode.
Panicked (as you can imagine), she fished out her iPhone, immediately turned it off, and dried it as best she could. Waiting a day, she tried turning it on, but no dice — it seemed to have given up the ghost in the machine. Still filled with hope, she carried her iPhone in her pocket the rest of the day and, amazingly, it came to life.
All was not well, though. Having made it through a drowning and near-death experience, her iPhone’s “Home” button no longer worked — her iPhone was useless; a mere night-light.
If your iPhone encounters water (or falls in your mug of ale), retrieve it immediately, power it off, dry it as best you can with a cloth, and click the bookmark you just made for this article. You did that, right?
Read on for the deets on how to save your precious iPhone!
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Posted on Wednesday, Apr 16, 2008 by Rene Ritchie
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Following on a veritable flood of previous “OMG 3G!!11″ news and rumors, it now looks confirmed that O2 in the UK has knocked 100 quid off the price of an 8G current generation (2.5G) iPhone 8GB.
The discount is being referred to as a special promotion that will run through June 1, but following the T-Mobile discount promotion, and the apparent urgency for 3G in data-spoiled Europe, the rumor mill is running full bore again.
WWDC? What do you think?
Mega-blog Engadget handed — er… posted — out their 2007 Readers and Editors Choice Awards this week, and Steve Jobs’ revolutionary little mobile phone was the big winner with a grand total of 6 Engadget’ies, including the 4 biggest!
- Readers’ Gadget of the Year
- Editors’ Gadget of the Year
- Readers’ Most Anticipated Gadget for 2008 (iPhone 3G)
- Editors’ Most Anticipated Gadget for 2008 (iPhone 3G)
- Readers’ Smartphone of the Year
- Editors’ Smartphone of the Year
Apple also took home honors for desktop (iMac), laptop (MacBook Pro), MP3 player (iPod Touch), and peripheral (keyboard).
Congrats!
Although Editor Emeritus (and Phone different podcaster) Mike Overbo lost his mind when over the Spore demo during the iPhone SDK Keynote, but yours-truly was much more excited over Super Monkey Ball. Why, well, for many of the same reason that developer Ethan Einhorn gave to GameCyte: you can pick it up and play it without having to think about the interface. I’ve whiled away many an hour directing little crystal balls down checkered ramps towards that little flag. Also: monkeys.
In any case, the above video is a bit of a recap of what we we saw during the keynote. However, there’s one bit that bears repeating:
When we started on that two-week trek to get Super Monkey Ball up and running on the iPhone in demo form, it was incredibly easy to work with the SDK. We were working with the development team that had not worked with Cocoa and OpenGL, and it’s pretty astonishing that they were able to make that level of performance happen that quickly. That bodes really well for what we can do in the future on a device like that.
Developing apps for the iPhone is easy and therefore we can and should expect all sorts of great games popping out. So we won’t be limited to Quake on the iPhone, because porting fun games like Super Monkey Ball is easy enough that a developer would be crazy not to do it.
What casual games are you hoping for on the iPhone? Answer here and be entered for a chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card!
Posted on Tuesday, Apr 15, 2008 by Dieter Bohn
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Man, the wait for the iPhone 2.0 software update is getting rough for those of us who aren’t keen to jailbreak our iPhones. The latest: Voice over IP from IM-maker Fring. Go on and check out their instructions page. Fring is actually a way to use all sorts of different Instant Messenger clients like Yahoo, AIM, etc. Another client it’s compatible with: Skype. It will also work with a standard SIP for VOIP as well.
Anybody given this a shot yet? Reports around the web seem to indicate that it’s better than expected — as long as your WiFi connection is decent.
Avast ye scurvy 2.0 firmware — prepare to be pwned! Erica Sadun of TUAW tells us the cartoon Jobs’ing, Russian slang’ing, custom firmware making, iTunes loading unlock solution has hit version 1.1:
The new tool allows you to add custom packages, logos and fixes EDGE settings under 1.1.4. Either pop over to iPhone-dev.org or choose PwnageTool > Check for Updates (Command-U) directly from the app.
But don’t raise the Jolly Roger too soon, rumors are also circulating that Cap’n Jobs is coming about hard, cannon’s loaded, and may just be upping the ante soon in the great unloack cat’n'mouse game.
Will Apple be able to hang the rascally pirates from the highest yard arm? Are the pirates too far ahead at this point? And how ironic is it that Jobs and co. once styled themselves as the pirates? What do you think?
Not to be confused with a news or RSS reader, Reader is meant for reading text documents, either an ebook or document. Sound interesting? Look no further than dBelement’s Reader web app for iPhone. This is a great idea for a web app and I really see innovation here that could lead to the way that we handle document creation tools on the iPhone. Let’s take a closer look…
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