Toby Vincent of SmudgeApps wrote in to let us know that along with general App Store distribution and the 100-device Ad Hoc method universities and beta testers have been using, Apple has just opened the door to a new system:
Apple has finally started allowing us to issue free promotional copies of their iPhone applications. Devs can issue 50 promotional codes for their application. The codes allow the recipient to download a full copy of the application for free. Codes can only be presently used in the U.S. iTunes Stores by using the “Redeem” link in the App Store.
This would allow developers to, among other things, get their apps more easily into the hands of reviewers, or give them away as part of a promotional/marketing initiative.
Vincent was kind enough to send along a promo code for their flagship App, Jam! Unfortunately, as a — I guess undeserving? — Canadian, I was barred from downloading it. Ah well, my loss will be the gain of one of our US based writers for now…
So, while this still keeps apps for the most part still locked into the App Store, does it give developers a little more wiggle room in their iTunes straight jackets? What else does Apple need to do to really help expose the now 10,000 strong catalog to end users?
Back before my iPhone was torn from me (sniffle) for the Round Robin, Twitteriffic was (and will be again) my mobile Twitter client of choice. Since TiPb has also been looking into App development and iPhone UI lately, this all added up to make Craig Hockenberry’s post today on furbo.org especially interesting. Hockenberry talks about the importance of making choices in development, about what features to add and what to leave out, and perhaps most importantly to us, in variety of different approaches:
There will always be more than one way to solve a problem: a developer’s personal preferences will inevitably seep into the implementation. Having many choices for a Twitter client means that developers don’t need to create a “one size fits all” solution. In essence, users get to choose a developer whose preferences match their own.
If you’re at all interested in a behind-the-curtains peak into what makes a good app great, be sure to read the whole article.
Also, let us know if you’re currently using Twitterrific, if what he mentions was already obvious to you, or if you’re using another Twitter client, what you’re using and why you prefer it?
For those of you waiting for Apple’s new headphones, the patience you have displayed for the past 3 months has paid off. The day is finally here and you can now place your order.
Hear every detail of your music every time you tune in with the Apple In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic. They offer pro audio performance and impressive sound isolation, and convenient buttons let you adjust the volume and control music and video playback.
The Apple store is claiming the Apple In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic will begin shipping within 7-10 business days and will run you $79. The earphones with remote and mic carry a 3-4 week wait and have a price tag of $29. And with that 3-4 week wait, don’t expect these before the holidays.
The forums continue to grow and today we have a few interesting threads that you should not miss.
Sturamsden started a thread that asks the question I’m sure a lot of people who do not currently own an iPhone may be asking: should I wait until the next generation iPhone comes out before I make my purchase? To see what type of advice he is getting please head on over to his thread, how close is the next gen iPhone?
The next thread will help a lot of you out there looking to add ring tones to your iPhones. It was started a while back by cjvitek: Want to make your own ringtones but you don’t want to have to pay for them? Well if the answer is yes, then please check out that thread. All the information you need is contained in the link.
Finally we have a whole sub forum dedicated to jailbreaking and we’d like to point it out to all of you interested. It seems jailbreaking has gone to the next level with the 2.2 firmware and I urge anyone interested to check this sub forum out now! It can easily be found right here in Jailbreak Central. I see a lot of you are asking questions on the front page, if you have not found your answer there you will sure to get the help you need in our forums. For those of you who are jailbroken, we want some feedback from you. What are your top 10 favorite jailbroken apps? Even if it’s your top 5, that will do. Thanks!
To get in on the action all you need to do is register. It won’t cost you anything and it’s a painless process. So what are you waiting for?!
Join us for the first of two special Smartphone Round Robin Roundtables! This week, Casey, Kevin, Rene, Jennifer, and Dieter all come together to discuss three of the Smartphone Round Robin devices: The iPhone 3G, the Treo Pro, and the BlackBerry Bold!
Quite some time back I reviewed Maximo’s iMetal Earbud headset and thought they were a quality product. True to it’s name, I liked the metal earbud housings vs. plastic, the sound was good, and the performance for phone calls was more than acceptable. I’ve had a chance to try out another Maximo product, the iMetal Isolation Headset, available here in the TiPb Store for $69.95. So how do they measure up? How do they compare to the earbud headset that I also like from Maximo? Read on for the full review!
MacRumors is passing on… well… rumors from MacBlogz of a 32GB iPhone! Says MacRumors:
The reason the largest iPhone (16GB) currently has 1/2 the memory of the largest iPod touch (32GB) is that the iPhone can only house a single NAND Flash chip while the iPod touch can accommodate two. The additional space in the iPhone is taken up by its communication hardware. In August, Toshiba announced that they would begin mass production of higher density 32GB chips in the 4th quarter of 2008.
Intel, they go on to say, may well bump the capacity even further — to a startling 64GB — by early next year. Sound crazy? Heh. With Macworld coming in just over a month, we ain’t seen nothing yet on the rumor front.
Still, 32GB is drool worthy, and something we here at TiPb are predicting for next year as part of a third generation iPhone HD, so you know we wants it.
How about you? Is 16GB enough, or is it always going to be a case of the more, the better?
Is this enough to up Nokia’s game in a post-iPhone world? Probably not, though it looks solid enough and will no doubt have the pundits punting “iPhone Killer” all over again (really, didn’t the Storm teach them anything?) Engadget has the video (above) and the stats, which are admittedly drool worthy:
3.5-inch, 640 x 360 pixel … resistive touchscreen display with tactile feedback … QWERTY keyboard [slider] … HSDPA, WiFi, and Bluetooth radios, A-GPS, a 3.5-mm headjack, 32GB of onboard memory with microSD expansion (for up to 48GB total capacity), and a battery capable of up to 1.5 days of continuous audio playback or 4.5-hours video. 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss glass and “DVD quality” video capture at 30fps, too.
The hardware certainly reads — and looks — impressive but the UI isn’t exactly bowling us over. While Nokia is calling it the “world’s most advanced mobile computer”, we’re not sure its Symbian guts are quite up to Mobile OS X level computing yet (though InfoSyncWorld thinks HTC may have a lot to worry about).
What do you think? iPhone Killer, or just another wannabe? And by June 2009 (likely shipping date for the n97), could Steve Jobs already be on the WWDC stage dropping the iPhone HD bomb?!
Google has dropped the iCal bomb. That’s right. Buh-bye third party intermediaries, hello built-in Google Calendar support for Apple’s open source CalDAV standard:
The Google Calendar team is proud to announce the public release of our support for the CalDAV protocol. You can now use Apple iCal with your Google Calendar, so you can work even when you’re offline, sync almost instantly, respond to invitations from others and see the free/busy data of your friends and coworkers.
You can get both the setup program and the download from Google code source. (Now if we could only get some similar Google love for CardDAV as part of a Google Contacts revamp…)
If anyone has a chance to try it out, let us know how it works for getting your gCal into MobileMe or onto your iPhone (I’m — right now very sadly — transitioning to the HTC FUZE for the Round Robin, so let me live vicariously through you!)
Joost, from the P2P masters who brought us Skype and Kasaa, went from hyper-anticipated start-up to barely whispered almost-forgotten in what seemed like the blink of an eye.
Well, according to Gizmodo, they’re back baby, and with free WiFi streaming movies and media to sweeten the deal — if only slightly:
It’s kind of crashy, could use a better navigation UI and takes too long for movie streams to get going (and then when they do it’s kind of finicky) but we definitely appreciate being to stream The Fifth Element over Wi-Fi in decent quality, when it actually gets going. More than anything though, it just makes us soak our pillow with even more drool dreaming of a Hulu app.
So, is the free-ness worth the — what might just be growing — pain? Think Joost has something here? If you try it out, let us know!
