May 2008: Monthly Archive

A strange thing happens around the corporate office when I whip out my iPhone and check email, place a call, or browse Safari. There is first silence, then Also Sprach Zarathustra (theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey) slowly builds to a crescendo and my office colleagues gather like early man around the mysterious black monolith.

You see, like most offices across the land, we use mostly Blackberries. Now, I’m not sayin’ that these BB toters are Neanderthal, pre-man or apes; I mean, they have to have opposable thumbs to work the keyboard, right? I’m merely pointing out that my iPhone is the ONLY iPhone on the premises and somehow I get my work done and keep track of my schedule, contacts and email, just like everyone else. Read on to see if your iPhone can survive in a hostile work environment!

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Here at Smartphone Experts we use gmail for our main email and also use Google Apps Premier for our documents. Looks like we can add to the list of things that the iPhone excels at, business-wise: Google Apps. That list, by the way, is coming up shortly as a Wait-a-Thon post.

Meanwhile, if you, like us, use Google for business, your iPhone is now a great tool for that business:

Google has produced a new, generalized iPhone interface for its Google Apps suite of web applications. [...] To access the new interface, people should visit “http://www.google.com/m/a/your-domain.com” in Safari, where “your-domain.com” is replaced with a user’s actual account domain. The new interface is currently only available for the English-language version of the Apps website. - [ipodnn]

Google’s iPhone fixation continues apace. With any luck at at all, the release of the iPhone 2.0 software will mean that iPhone users will be able to catch up with Windows Mobile users and be able to install and use Google Gears, Google’s offline app platform.

Update: Oh yeah, per the Google Blog, their stuff is now available in 33 countries and Google News’ iPhone interface is now sweetness too.

Like a moth to a flame or a Blackberry addict to email, I am drawn once again into the train wreck that is Flash on the iPhone. This time it’s courtesy one Robert X. Cringely, and it’s a brain bender!

Cringely says:

It seems obvious to me, however, that there is only one real reason why [rumors circulating the National Association of Broadcasters show suggested] Apple would sell off its professional applications [like Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Shake, and Aperture] and that’s to avoid antitrust problems when/if Apple buys Adobe Systems as I predicted at the beginning of the year.

Gruber responds:

I Think Cringely Is Off His Meds Again

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber goes on to say that while Apple may (or may not) sell off its Pro Apps, it would only do so to downsize and maintain focus, something buying Adobe would pretty much be the opposite of.

Personally, I think Apple stands to benefit immensely one day from controlling the media pipe end-to-end, and part of that control is the high end content creation tools, the Pro Apps. That’s Apple end game, the media hub and all its satellites. And if you want that, you don’t go selling off your launch vehicles.

What do you think?

According to reports submitted to MacRumors, users are no longer able to access free Wi-Fi at Starbucks and Barnes & Nobles Locations.

I am sure this is due to a “beta” phase for AT&T to test connectivity. Once wind got out that people are accessing it, they stopped. The fact that AT&T is even doing this is really cool; it adds value to the AT&T proposition for their mobile service.

Will AT&T Extend the Wi-Fi “courtesy” officially? Perhaps AT&T will offer customers Wi-Fi for use on laptops? Who knows, we are still waiting for an official AT&T press release describing their future Wi-Fi plans.

I think anyone will agree that whatever AT&T is doing, it will be better than T-Mobile’s offerings.

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

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Real? Fake? Really fake? We don’t know yet, but Gizmodo is joining the growing crowd of logo distorted, cheesy-photoshop artifact’ed, no way this thing got within 100 miles (how far is Redmond again?) of Jonathan Ive, doubters.

While the accessory makers may have struck them some gold on the specs-side, it’s looking increasingly like our French compatriots were either duped, or helped consipire up some duping. Merde indeed:

Some frogsters* with no track record are claiming that this piece of scratched plastic—which in the photo looks like a cheapo LG cellphone clone wannabe—is the new iPhone 3G. Although it matches the rumored all-black and specs, we don’t believe it’s the real thing. The reason: these photos have been up since 12:04AM Central European Time and it’s now 4:04PM. That’s 16 hours up with no Cease and Desist order—and Apple Europe is as aggressive with leaks as Cupertino. In any case, check its back and tell us what you think after the jump.

What do you think?

Confession: I’m suffering from extreme PFSD (Posting about Flash Stress Disorder). All this “will it” “won’t it” “please don’t let it” blog-pong has me cowering beneath my laptop. But I believe in facing my fears, real and absurd, so let’s see what Ars Technica has to report:

Adobe has announced a new initiative called Open Screen, which aims to make the company’s Flash multimedia technology ubiquitous on mobile and embedded devices. Adobe plans to eliminate the licensing fees required to distribute its own Flash player and AIR runtime implementations on mobile devices and will also remove licensing restrictions on the specifications for the FLV and SWF formats so that developers can create fully-compatible independent Flash player implementations.

FLV is big. Previously, 3rd parties had fairly open access to the rendered SWF format, but not the source FLV (in Flash, you build in FLV and export “movies” in SWF). Now, while Adobe won’t be opening up the source to their own Flash kit, they will be removing restrictions against competitive (video player, plugin, etc.) implementations. In other words, Adobe isn’t giving away the keys to the Flash kingdom, but they’re letting developers build a little village just outside the gates.

“Open as in Microsoft” more than “open as in GNU/Linux” to be sure, but this does take steps to remove one of the greatest criticism levied against Flash on the web: proprietary technology lock-in. (Which is unlike HTML, CSS, and AJaX — open, standards based technologies, that no one company could suddenly demand huge payments for, roll-in unwanted “features” like DRM, or simply choose to shut down one day, leaving developers stranded).

This is no doubt Adobe’s motivation for their increasing openness. They want to drive even more developer adoption towards their Flex and Air platforms, stave off competition from Microsoft’s Silverlight technology (which, ironically, has been trying to compete with Flash by offering up unprecedented openness — from Microsoft!), and keep pace with HTML5’s video tag and CSS-based animation.

But what does this all mean for Flash on the iPhone?

A more open, accessible license may let Apple build their own implementation, one they’re more comfortable with, and one that fills that missing middle slot between Flash Lite and Flash (desktop) that Steve Jobs feigned interest in.

Or it may just let Adobe or some 3rd party unleash another Flashenstein Monster a la Sony Ericsson.

Personally, I’ll be stockpiling torches and pitchforks (soon as I can stop cowering, that is). What do you think?

Phone Different Week in Review May 2, 2008

Every week I will be bringing you what I think are the week’s biggest stories and articles. Here we go!

It feels so good…

Is Apple adding some sort of haptic feedback to the iPhone? How would they do it. What is haptic feedback anyway?

You Control, iControl…

Could Apple be working on an app for the iPhone that would enable it to control an Apple TV and iTunes? It sounds to good to be true!

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While the interwebs stroke themselves into a furor over rumors that AT&T might just subsidize the iPhone 3G down to $200, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber once again asks that he be allowed to retort:

So says one report, using one anonymous source, from Scott Moritz, a “reporter” with an appalling track record regarding Apple and the iPhone. The same Scott Moritz who reported in July last year that Apple had cut back its production order on iPhones based on a “trading note” from Miller Tabak, a note which, it ends up, didn’t actually exist. And, as we know now, Apple went on to sell more iPhones than expected in 2007, not fewer.

Speculation ensues as to whether or not the AT&T exclusivity extends only to the current iPhone, and not the so-called iPhone 3G, and whether or not AT&T may want to take a price hit to keep Apple close. Gruber, however, quickly points out:

This comes so close to uncovering the obvious and glaring problem with a $200 AT&T iPhone subsidy, but, alas, Hesseldahl and his keen economic mind walk right past it. The problem is this: why would Apple allow AT&T to sell iPhones for half the price of what iPhones cost in Apple’s own stores (including this one)?

What do you think?

Engadget Mobile, still magenta and proud, just sat down for a chat with Sun Microsystems CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, and naturally, primarily, the topic turned the baby leopard in the room, the iPhone:

So I’m curious, what kind of phone do you carry?

As of yesterday, an iPhone.

Butofcourse. Any guess as to the first thing Schwartz wants to do with it? No, not watch a day-and-date movie. No, not browse the real internet. No, not Google locate Scott McNealy spirit (what, to obscure?). He wants:

…the Java platform

Sigh. While Java does run on almost every other phone but Apple’s Cocoa powered platform, enabling everything from the Blackberry OS, to the carrier crapplets everyone loves to hate, does the iPhone really need double-layered SDK? And doesn’t Apple’s iPhone SDK user license agreement specifically forbid the old code-within-a-code play?

Quoth the Schwartz:

Well I think the only difficulty will be what Apple presents through its EULA. But I think that I think EULA is a bit of an oxymoron to me. They’re end users, they have the freedom to choose what they’d like to do, so I think we are going to leave it up to users to decide how they want to use the technology

Apple, of course, does use the Java-based WebObjects for it’s Apple and iTunes stores, so my guess isn’t that they’re adverse to it in theory, they just want to use it where it makes sense — web and server based applications that benefit from code portability more than performance. They’re just not keen to have it on their phone, where it may only make the kind of sense that doesn’t.

Personally, I love it whenever needlessly Java-based apps spin up for interpretation, downgrading both performance and my sanity. Any programmer who cares about the device, performance, and power will almost certainly WANT to write as close to the metal as possible, at that will mean porting to Cocoa Touch.

What do you think?