October 2008: Monthly Archive

Confession: I have yet to find any impetus to change from the default iPhone ringtone, no special need to switch to “I like big butts” or any other sitcom-worthy wrong-tone, wrong-time humiliator. I rock Marimba.

But for those of you who want something different, something with that “premium” sound to match your — tastefully — gold plated MacBook Air and exotic monkey-picked tea, iRingPro has got your back, with more civilized intervals and stately sound.

If ringtones are your thang, check them out.

(Thanks to Joel Hladecek for sending this in!)

US tax dollars at work dept.: TUAW is reporting (via TheHill.com) that the Chief Administrative Office of the U.S Congress is testing iPhones due to “people requesting them as an option”:

Adoption of the iPhone by the U.S. Congress could be another blow to RIM, which is now behind Apple in terms of sales and revenues. Apple CEO Steve Jobs gleefully reported that “Apple beat RIM” during yesterday’s Q4 Earnings Call.

7 Million iPhone sold last quarter alone, and we’ve already heard rumors of HSBC ditching the Blackberry for the iPhone. Is this the beginning of Something Big, or just a simple case of new technology getting the tires kicked?

What say you, Americans?

Looks like Apple wasn’t the only one to release record-breaking iPhone revenue numbers this week!

Now I have a theory with this one… the iPhone is still doing big business for AT&T, who do you think has helped Apple’s cause? RIM! The BlackBerry Bold is finally about to be released on November 4th, should Apple be worried? Not at all. As far as I’m concerned the Bold is old news already and not a threat what so ever. Think the BlackBerry Storm will take customers away from AT&T like the iPhone did from all of the other carriers? No chance… [end rant]

So with that all out of the way, AT&T released it’s 3Q earnings today. Since July 11, there have been 2.4 million iPhone activations. And a astonishing 40% of those activations were new AT&T customers. (Let’s see the Storm do those numbers with Verizon!.)

AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson said:

“I am particularly pleased with the customer response to the iPhone 3G, the new customers we’re winning are high-value, with attractive revenue and churn profiles.”

iPhone 3G sales are currently flowing at a higher-than-expected rate, showing zero signs of slowdown. AT&T is now expecting the iPhone 3G will run higher than its previous estimates. Apple and AT&T are laughing all the way to the bank and will continue to do so.

Love it or hate it – there is no way to dispute which device is king of the cellular hill.

[Via macrumors]

[This is a TiPb AT WORK App vs. App Review! Last week, it was the To Do/Task App Showdown, with Things squeaking out the victory. But which blog commenter won a copy of the winning To Do/Task App? Alex! Congratulations!

This week, the TiPb iPhone Forums voted on their favorite Remote Desktop/VNC Apps, we took the top two, and now they're going head-to-head. But wait -- there's more! One of the forum voters has already won a copy of the winning App... Congrats avt! Want another chance to win? COMMENT BELOW! and make sure you leave a valid email address in the comment form -- it won't be made public, but it will be used to contact you if you win! Check out the full contest details, then grab your iPhone and get ready to get things done -- the TiPb AT WORK Remote Desktop/VNC Showdown is on!]

Like Brian, I use my iPhone for just about everything. So wouldn’t it be nice to use your iPhone to access your computer(s) when you are not at your desk? At work (no pun intended) I rotate with team members to “take” call, meaning, if something needs resolved on a weekend or evening, it is up to me to fix it. My work does not currently supply a broadband card, so it is up to my own devices to have Internet access wherever I go to remote into my PC. The VNC applications Jaadu and Mocha allow me to do just that! For those of you that don’t know what VNC is, it allows you to remotely control another computer. Now, this ability is available on your iPhone (side rant, why doesn’t Apple give us this ability as part of our MobileMe subscriptions? Ah, I digress…)

I can now leave my laptop behind and just use my iPhone to connect to my work laptop at home or my iMac desktop and save the day! Let’s take a look at these two VNC apps!

Read the rest of this entry »

Any of you looking to add some life to your iPhone’s camera with some new options? It is no secret that the camera lacks any type of features besides point and click. So once again, where Apple let us down, a 3rd party developer comes to our rescue.

Now let me introduce you to Pano. Pano was created by Debacle Software, and enables you to take panoramic photos using the iPhone’s camera app. Here’s how it works:

For Pano, stitching photos together is a three-step process. First, it uses pattern-matching techniques to find out exactly how each pair of adjacent photos overlaps, and then it finds the best way to align them. Second, Pano applies a colour-correction gradient across each pair of photos to correct for the iPhone camera’s autoexposure and white balancing. Finally, all the photos are blended together and the image cropped to a neat rectangle. Voila! All in a matter of seconds.

Pano is now available in the App Store with a price tag of $2.99. It really is a worthy application for what it does. If you use your iPhone for taking photos I definitely recommend checking this one out.

(Via TUAW)

Some Intel Execs must be still quite jealous that Apple went with the ARM architecture for the iPhone and left Intel waiting at the altar. At a Intel Developer Forum in Taipei, Taiwan, two Intel Execs claimed that the iPhone struggles with “any sort of application that requires any horse power” and that Apple fell short in delivering a full internet browsing experience.

Huh. Color us confused. We’ve been using the iPhone as our daily driver since it came out and we thought that this was the most–or at least one of the more– powerful phones on the market. We’ve been using apps and playing games that show off the pure power of the iPhone that no other phone can run. And that Internet we browse on Mobile Safari? I guess that’s not best-in-class either. Though we still can’t seem to find a comparable experience, well, anywhere.

The ARM architecture may have its faults but to say the iPhone is slow, underpowered, and fails to deliver the Internet? Did these guys even use the thing? I think good ‘ol Intel should give the TiPb headquarters a visit and we’ll show them how the iPhone, of this world, works.

What do you guys think? Does the iPhone really suck that much? Or has Intel gone crazy?

Photo Credit: Suzanne Tindal/ZDNet

Read

(“Unique” by Hamed Masoumi, licensed under Creative Commons)

On Monday, TiPb Senior Editor Dieter Bohn debuted his new bi-weekly feature, TiPb of the Avalanche, by asking about the iPhone App Store and the “Long Tail” business model.

Looks like he’s not alone. PCalc developer James Thomson (via Daring Fireball) recounted his struggles with Apple’s new policy of listing Apps by original release dates, ignoring update dates, and forcing older Apps to the frozen hinterlands of the last few pages in a list growing well past 5500. Under the old model:

Sales started to slow down over time, but with each of the 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 updates they went back up into the stratosphere as PCalc moved to the front page of the Utilities section again.

And now?

As it stands, the App Store is too crowded to find anything if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for by name.

So while, according to Apple Insider, the App Store may still be climbing faster than iTunes Music did, GigaOm is pishing the posh on the iPhone bump in general.

During Apple’s Q4 conference call, Steve Jobs said that the App Store would reach 200 million downloads today spanning over 5500 Apps in 62 countries. How will Apple’s (continuing?) tweaks on App Store organization help or hinder developers moving forward? And will they, as Dieter is suggesting, have to start putting as much time, money, and effort into marketing as they do coding? Or are there no easy answers?

Apple is reporting their Q4, 2008 financial results, and while things look good for the Mac, they look great for the iPhone, with 6,892,000 units sold during the 3 month period, up from 1,119,000 in the same quarter last year. And YES! Apple has already made their 10 million iPhone in 2008 goal, with the holiday season still to come. This makes Apple, dollar-for-dollar, the third largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world (after Nokia and Samsung), and Apple has only been in the space since June 2007!

Says Apple CEO, Steve Jobs:

“Apple just reported one of the best quarters in its history, with a spectacular performance by the iPhone—we sold more phones than RIM.”

Boom!

Mac’s hit 2.6 million, iPod’s at 11 million (not breakout for iPod Touch, as usual).

Conference call is currently underway (and Steve’s on the call!).

Here are some highlights:

When asked why Apple only had 1 iPhone SKU, Steve replied (paraphrased), Babe Ruth only had 1 home run… he just kept hitting it.

On the same topic, Steve said that while other companies made dozens of different voice units, he believes software was becoming the differentiating factor, and that presenting developers with multiple device versions wasn’t compelling. He also said Apple’s competition didn’t come from software backgrounds like Apple did.

When asked if RIM having around 50% upgrades vs. new users, if the iPhone had a greater number of new users, did that make Apple’s true success against RIM higher, Steve maintained he was happy just to beat RIM on the direct numbers.

No direct US vs. International split for iPhone sales were given.

No, it’s not Deja Vu. No one has reset the Matrix (we think…) It’s just another Apple follow-along. To paraphrase Bertrand Serlet: Waterloo, start your photocopiers!

Not content with merely iCloning the iPhone look with the Bold or touchscreen with the Storm, during the Blackberry Developer Conference today, RIM basically repeated Apple’s iPhone SDK Roadmap Event announcements from back in March, note for note.

App Store? Check. Push Notification Service? Gotcha. Integrated Development Environment? Why not! iFund? App-solutely!

Scott Forstall, was that just the sound of you flinging your iPhone 4G through the screen of your 30″ DisplayPort Cinema Display? I think it was.

Check out the live blog now at Crackberry.com, and if you miss it, they’re sure to have all the news and roundups shortly thereafter.

Have you ever traveled out of the country just to come back home and get smacked upside the head by your AT&T cellular bill? Well one of our faithful readers, Mike, has a very unusual situation… he asked us to share his story with you in hopes of preventing this happening to any other readers.

Mike recently added a International Data Roaming Plan before a trip out of the country. It seemed like all was covered… until he got home and received his latest bill. Here is Mike’s story, in his own words:

I was informed by an AT&T service rep that AT&T had charged me the exorbitant per KB rate for international data useage because I had cancelled my International Data Roaming plan after I returned to the United States. The plan is available on a month-to-month basis, so cancelling it when I got home seemed like an obvious thing for me to have done, since I have no plans to go overseas again in the foreseeable future. But the service rep said that AT&T’s policy (unwritten, so far as I can tell) is that one needs to leave the roaming plan in place for 90 extra days, so that it is still in place when the foreign carrier finally reports the subscriber’s roaming back to AT&T. If the plan is not in place when the foreign data useage gets reported to AT&T, then AT&T’s billing system is incapable of recognizing that I had an international data roaming plan in place on the dates that the foreign carrier says I used its data connection.

Ouch, I could imagine this bill would have really hurt. Luckily for Mike, he spoke with a “very nice” AT&T rep and she credited his account for the appropriate amount. Mike is not alone either, for similar stories be sure to check out this thread in AT&T’s official forums.

And for more information regarding International plans be sure to check out the plans available here. Mike and all of us here at TiPb really want you to be aware of AT&T’s policy. So before you leave the country, if you have any questions be sure to call and ask a service rep! It may just save you a pretty penny… or two…

Thanks for the tip Mike!